Gigabyte Z68X UD5 B3 Motherboard Review

Intel Smart Response Technology
Intel Smart Response Technology may be known to some as SSD caching and is a feature that bonds the technology of a SSD and HDD together.

By using ISRT, a user can enable acceleration of a typical HDD by using a fairly small capacity SSD to boost performance through a few easy steps. Intel claim that this will be around 4 times faster than a Hybrid drive such as the ones we see on the market today.

As this all sounds very exciting, we were keen to try it out first hand, but we required a basis to work from. We installed PCMark Vantage to see how the performance was affected before we enabled the technology and after.

Before the technology was enabled, we ran the HDD suite aspect of PCMark Vantage to get a result to work from. The drive we were using was a fairly old Hitachi Deskstar 80GB 7200rpm drive. It had seen better days but was still sufficient for our testing.

The results given are shown below:

After enabling the technology, we were hopeful that the results we were going to see would be a massive increase to what we were given whilst acceleration was disabled.

We do have to bare in mind that PCMark is only one piece of software, and the SSD caching would really benefit from real-world usage, but for the benefit of this review, we thought it would be easier to show an increase in a benchmarking utility.

The results given once acceleration was enabled are shown below:

Sadly, we were expecting a lot more, but as said, real-world usage and the movement of files and folders is where this technology should excel and we hope that it’s something we can re-visit at a later date. The main difference will also be seen in the booting and shutting down of Windows, but even then we are only talking about 5 seconds or so.