USB 3.0 and SATA 3
One aspect of motherboards that a lot of people don’t even consider is their data transfer performance on the SATA and USB interfaces. This can change the way your PC performs day to day in booting, file transfers, and load times of games and programs. To put the UD4H to the test I ran it though a benchmark on CrystalDiscMark. To keep things fair every board is tested using the same 60Gb Corsair SSD both on the USB 3.0 and SATA testing. For USB 3.0 testing I use a Thermaltake BlackX dock to hook the drive up to the PC. As you can see on the SATA testing we had no surprises, the UD4H uses the same Intel SATA controller as the other boards. On the USB 3.0 side the UD4H again uses the Intel controller but it had a hard time competing against the numbers the Asus boards put up due to their USB3 turbo mode. The UD4H still performed up to regular USB 3.0 specifications and that is really all you can expect. Anything beyond that is just a bonus.
SATA3 |
Read Speed |
MSI Z87-G45 Gaming |
473.4 |
Asus Z87 Pro |
471.2 |
Asus Z87 Plus |
467.1 |
MSI Z87 MPower |
468.7 |
Asus Z87 Gryphon |
472.0 |
Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H |
470.2 |
USB 3 |
Read Speed |
MSI Z87-G45 Gaming |
278.2 |
Asus Z87 Pro |
429.8 |
Asus Z87 Plus |
431.1 |
MSI Z87 MPower |
268.5 |
Asus Z87 Gryphon |
430.1 |
Gigabyte Z87X-UD4H |
276.4 |