Drive and Audio Performance Results

Our drive and audio testing differs a bit from the rest of our testing for several reasons. First of all, when it comes to drive performance comparisons, nearly every platform on the market is very close to one another, as most do provide external drive-controllers which make the numbers offered very platform agnostic. And finally, with audio, we do not list any numbers except for those reported by the product we are testing in order to provide the most information possible, as each audio CODEC will behave quite differently, and each board does not employ the same CODEC. As such, there is no standard we can use other than the numbers themselves. You can always check our other motherboard reviews in order to make direct comparisons in audio performance.

We tested each drive interface separately in order to provide the most complete numbers possible. Employing HDTune Pro for all of the testing, we tested each drive outside of the OS environment using a separate OS on a separate drive. However, we do use drives with a fair amount of data on the Corsair ForceGT (60% full) to simulate performance in real-world situations, and I also use the same drive to test all interfaces.

HDTune Pro (SATA2)

HDTune Pro (SATA 6Gb/s)

HDTune Pro (USB3.0)

Drive performance is good. It's not anything exceptional, but nothing stands out as problematic either.

RightMark Audio Analyzer

Audio testing with RightMark Audio Analyzer provided pretty good numbers for the Biostar Hi-Fi Z77X, rating the audio given by the onboard Realtek CODEC as "Good". Only noise was listed as "poor", which I did expect considering this board does use a 4-layer PCB. Volume and total tonal capabilities were pretty good. These are actually excellent results for an onboard solution and were, to my ears, actually far better than this test reports.