There are presets for many games, which is nice, but still some games are omitted – Valve’s popular Team Fortress 2, for example, has no profile set for it.Īgain, not the easiest to use, and kind of intrusive – you can’t minimize the software when it’s active, for example. Unless you are experienced with networking, it is unlikely you’ll be changing anything in these settings. #Xfast lan review skinWhen using the software, you can expand the skin to enable or disable features with a single click.Ĭlicking the Settings button brings you to a large configuration pane, with a huge wealth of options, yet very little explanation of what changing the settings will do. #Xfast lan review windowsTyping “XFast LAN” into Windows 7’s search bar will not yield any results – because the executable is named cfosspeed.exe, and aside from ASRock’s skin, has no further “XFast” association. If you choose to remove it from your startup, and want to run it “when you need it”, you won’t find it installed in your Taskbar or Desktop. I’d like to think that it’s common courtesy for a software company to include the option to NOT use the software at any given time, or, to not add it to your startup when installed. You have to kill the process from task manager. There isn’t, however, an option to simply exit the utility and return to your normal configuration. Once installed, XFast LAN is added to your system startup, and runs as soon as you load into Windows. XFast LAN is another rebranded utility, this time originally written by cFos Software. It promises improved ping time for gaming and other applications. XFast LAN is the second of ASRock’s flagship XFast 555 suite. Is the software annoyance worth the performance boost? That part is up to you, but when data transfer speeds are crucial to your productivity and you have vast amounts of external storage, this little piece of software could be a very valuable asset. The benefits to USB 2.0 aren’t as substantial, but you can see from the benchmark results that using Turbo mode on USB 2.0 will increase ramp-up speeds. Obviously USB 3.0 isn’t going to achieve that speed, and seeing a boost of up to 70MB/s Read on Turbo mode is really quite impressive. I used a Plextor M3 128GB SSD, which is capable of 500+MB/s on the SATA3 interface. The answer the the above question is “Yes” – if you have hardware capable of such speeds, and are using USB 3.0. Stock tests are on the left and the turbo tests are on the right. does it work? Below are USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 benchmarks using ATTO to test the read/write speeds of the drives, tested at different data block sizes. No one likes tons of UAC prompts in any case, and having one when your machine boots to enable this software then AGAIN to use it is very frustrating. As most people will have User Account Control active, this whole process can be extremely annoying. Once you allow it, it tells you to disconnect the drive and reconnect it in order to benefit from the performance boost. Then, every time you connect a storage-based drive to any USB port connected to the internal motherboard headers you will get another prompt from Windows’ User Account Control authorizing the process to run. If you have XFast USB installed (and enabled in your StartUp), when you boot your machine you will get a User Account Control prompt enabling the program to start. Clicking the “Help” button redirects you to an advertisement masquerading as a help page online. Clicking the “About” button brings up your typical software information, including version number and copyright information. Clicking the “Options” button brings up the ability to change the software language. You can of course disable it in msconfig if you’re comfortable changing those Windows settings. It runs at system start, and there is no in-software option to disable that. This means it will not work with your rear i/o on the motherboard, so you’ll need to use your front panel USB ports, or a USB expansion card or bay. The idea behind XFast USB is to boost the performance of any storage drive plugged into any USB port that is connected to the motherboard headers. We’re going to take a look at ASRock’s XFast USB and XFast LAN, and also AXTU – the tuning utility that also includes XFast RAM.ĪSRock’s XFast USB utility is actually made by FNet, and is then rebranded as part of ASRock’s XFast suite. It is designed to set ASRock apart from its competitors with similar hardware specifications. As mentioned previously, ASRock’s “XFast 555” feature set is used as one of the defining features of their enthusiast-oriented motherboard series. The Z77 Extreme6 comes with an array of software designed to improve your systems performance.
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