SATA and M.2 Performance

Website: ATTO Disk Benchmark

We tested the SATA and performance with an OCZ Vector 150 240GB, as this is one of the fastest SSDs we've ever tested, and it can saturate the bandwidth of SATA 6Gbps ports. We usually test the M.2 port using a Plextor PX-G256M6e SSD, but the Maximus VII Formula is only compatible with 2260 (60mm) and smaller M.2 SSDs.

We use ATTO Disk Benchmark, and take the read and write speeds for 1,024KB data chunks.

Power Consumption

Website: Prime95

To see how much power the motherboard consumes at idle and load and while at stock speeds and when overlcocked, we use Prime95 to stress the CPU to its limits, putting all eight cores of our Core i7-4770K test CPU under load and allowing the power readout to level off.