Integrated Device Testing

Audio Subsystem Testing

Audio Playback Testing

Using a selection of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal music tracks and Windows Media Player, the audio subsystem playback performance was tested for playback accuracy and fidelity.

Playback using the audio test tracks was distortion free using a 7.1 speaker setup through the on-board analogue audio ports.

Testing was also performed using the rear panel headphone port (lower right port in rear panel audio port block) using a Razer Carcharias audio headset as well as a 5.1 speaker setup to test the audio subsystem's Direct Audio Power technology. Using the selected audio tracks, there was no difference observed with the Direct Audio Power functionality enabled or disabled. In either case, audio reproduction was clean and distortion free.

Microphone Port Testing

For testing the board's Microphone input port, the microphone from a Razer Carcharias audio headset was used to capture a 30 second spoken phrase with the assistance of the Microsoft Sound Recorder application. The resulting audio file was saved to the desktop and played back using Windows Media Player.

The recorded audio test was distortion-free and without any detected aberrant noise effects as long as the recording volume was not set above 50. With recording volume set to > 50 through the volume control, background static became evident during playback of the record audio. Pickup was found to be best with Microphone Boost set to +20dB and recording volume set to 50.

ATTO Disk Benchmark

To validate that the board’s device ports were functioning correctly, we connected an OCZ Vertex 3 90GB SATA III SSD to the system and ran the ATTO Disk Benchmark against the drive. The SSD was directly connected to the native SATA 3 ports. NGFF port testing was performed using an M.2 to SATA III device adapter mPCIe card. ATTO was configured to test against transfer sizes from 0.5 to 8192 KB with Total Length set to 512 MB and Queue Depth set to 10. The SSD selected for testing has a maximum read throughput of 550 MB/s and a write throughput of 500 MB/s on a SATA III controller. The drive tests were repeated three times with the highest repeatable read and write speeds recorded.

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SATA SSD performance on both types of ports through the Intel Z97 controller was equivalent with performance on both ports pushing the rated performance limits of the drive. Even though the M.2 port is capable of 10Gbps transfer speeds, the SSD read and write speeds remained consistent with the 6Gbps SATA port speeds. The ASMedia controlled port performance was another story. Its write performance with the same SSD drive was just below 400 MB/s while its read performance barely broke 400 MB/s.

SoftPerfect Research NetWorx Speed Test

In conjunction with Windows Performance Monitor, SoftPerfect Research NetWorx Speed Meter application was used to measure the upload and download performance of the motherboards integrated network controllers. Speed Meter was used to measure average network throughput in MB/s with Windows Performance Monitor used to measure average CPU utilization during the tests.

The LanBench network benchmarking software was used to generate send and receive traffic between the local and remote systems over a five minute period with packet size set to 4096 and connection count set to 20. A LanBench server was set up on the remote system to generate or receive traffic for the tests performed. The upload and download tests were repeated three times with the highest repeatable average throughput and the lowest repeatable average CPU utilization percentage recorded.

Note that that theoretical maximum throughput for a Gigabit Ethernet adapter is 125 MB/s (1.0 Gbps).

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The Killer NIC performed well with its download average speed besting that of upload by 7 MB/s. Both download and upload performed close to the rated throughput limits of the port as well. The CPU utilization during upload averaged well under 10% while remaining between 10 and 20% during download testing.

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