Review-Z68 Chipset (ASUS P8Z68-V Pro): The Best Match for Your Sandy Bridge!

Intel Smart Response Technology

Another new feature that is implemented to the Z68 chipset is the Intel Smart Response Technology. It’s a feature commonly found on servers that’s apparently making its way to consumer markets. With this feature you can speed up your system by adding an SSD that will serve as a caching device for the main storage. It improves performance by providing a speedy temporary storage (that is, the SSD) for frequently used data. With this feature, you can have both the capacity of a mechanical hard disk and the speed of a solid state drive. We’ll see if it really delivers some performance improvements in our tests.
One notable drawback of SSD Caching is that you will have to reserve some amount of space inside your SSD to be used for the caching purposes. This reserved space cannot be used to store any file, so, basically, you sacrifice some space to allow the SSD to be used as a caching drive. This is how you do it:

To enable this feature, you will need to install the Intel Rapid Storage Technology (IRST) software. Select “Enable Acceleration”.

Specify the amount of space you that you want to allocate for the caching. Then, select the desired acceleration mode.

Restart your system, and the Intel Smart Response Technology will be ready for use.

It’s worth remembering that you need to configure the storage mode in your motherboard’s BIOS to “RAID” before the SSD can be used as a caching device.
Our first Z68 sample came in the form of Asus P8Z68-V Pro motherboard. Let’s take a look at this motherboard before moving on to the benchmark! On to the next page please…