USB 3.0 Performance: Two Solutions From Asus And Gigabyte

[Crashman]

Intel might have postponed USB 3.0 support for chipsets, but that hasn’t stopped motherboard manufacturers from offering it. We look at solutions from Asus and Gigabyte at two distinct budget levels.

USB 3.0 Performance: Two Solutions From Asus And Gigabyte : Read more

 

[Lessqqmorepewpew]

Great review. This waiting game sucks.

 

[amnotanoobie]

Wow, transferring your por..... programs should be a lot faster now.

 

[playerone]

This seems a bit dated, my two week old ASUS P6X58D Premium has Sata 6.0 and USB 3.0!
Obviously waiting for a bit more mature drivers and more hardware...

 

[Onyx2291]

Can't wait for it all to be standard.

 

[staalkoppie]

Pitty they'll only be available at the back for now....but good news nevertheless

 

[liquidsnake718]

BAH.... Im waiting for an X58 with USB.3.0 AND 16x 16x SLI. I would not want to sacrifice the other slot for a 8x config....

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]liquidsnake718[/nom]BAH.... Im waiting for an X58 with USB.3.0 AND 16x 16x SLI. I would not want to sacrifice the other slot for a 8x config....[/citation]

Uh, d00d, 1366 CPU has 36 2.0 lanes, don't those X58 boards use the leftover four for USB3 and SATA6? I mean, c'mon, 16+16+4=36

 

[bujuki]

I've been waiting to see how USB 3 performs. However, if you may it's better to test the CPU utilization comparison between all connectors as well. Still, thanks for the great review. b^^d

 

[anamaniac]

Honestly, with USB 3.0, I don't see any reason at all for eSATA anymore.
I just want a 80GB Intel x18-m with a USB 3.0 port. Who the hell wants a slow 64GB flash drive?

I wish we could agree on a stanard already. I like USB, so let's just scrap IDE, SATA, eSATA, PCI (not PCIe), analog audio cables completely already. Well, that or miniDisplayPort.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Thanks for explaining how USB 3.0 fits into the grand scheme of things.

 

[coolkev99]

Looks like I'll stick to using esata for a while longer. Not too thrilled with the early implimentations.

 

[thackstonns]

Cant you build 2 computers with the same motherboards, and then run a network through usb 3.0. Run raid in both with ssd, and then fully test bandwidth? That way you are maxing out the spec?

 

[cah027]

I'm With Thackstonns on this one. Would have been nice to have done a more in depth look and used raided SSD's. See if you can max out the interface with enough of them. Is that possible?

 

[playerone]

BAH.... Im waiting for an X58 with USB.3.0 AND 16x 16x SLI. I would not want to sacrifice the other slot for a 8x config....

? ? ?

ASUS P6X58D-Premium has 16x16x8x with USB.3.0 & SATA.6G/s, I have had mine for two weeks and loving it.
It does tripple LSI or Crossfire.

Running it with I7-920 and 6gb of Patriot 2000 mhz cl8

On the Back Panel there is 4 USB2.0 2 USB3.0 (backward compatable) Inside 2 USB2.0 hdr, 6 SATA-3.0 and 2-SATA-6.0 as well as a E-SATA hdr

 

[tecmo34]

With having an e-SATA external hard drive, I see no quick need to upgrade to USB3.0, as their is little performance difference. I'm waiting more for the performance increase overall with the SATA-3.0 hard drives, at which point I'll upgrade my motherboard.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]thackstonns[/nom]Cant you build 2 computers with the same motherboards, and then run a network through usb 3.0. Run raid in both with ssd, and then fully test bandwidth? That way you are maxing out the spec?[/citation]

That would be great if the hardware to connect the two had been available. It's certainly something to look for, now that you've suggested it!

[citation][nom]cah027[/nom]Would have been nice to have done a more in depth look and used raided SSD's. See if you can max out the interface with enough of them. Is that possible?[/citation]

It's possible if you send two SSD's in a 3.5" internal bay adapter that has a built-in RAID controller. Of course, this could be problematic still since the USB 3.0 adapter provides only SATA 3.0 Gb/s (we've also been told that it's limitted to 180MB/s on current firmware). But other than the lack of hardware...

 

[scryer_360]

Although its good to see the hardware in the wild, I don't yet see any reason to buy something for USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s.

Yes there is some future proofing, but as I think it was mentioned at the beginning of the article, it will be years before we see a significant number of USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s devices on the market, and maybe even longer before we see storage with the ability to use all that bandwidth.

Certainly it will take aeons for traditional hdds to utilize all that speed, but ssd's might be able to do that in a few years, right?

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]scryer_360[/nom]Although its good to see the hardware in the wild, I don't yet see any reason to buy something for USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s.Yes there is some future proofing, but as I think it was mentioned at the beginning of the article, it will be years before we see a significant number of USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s devices on the market, and maybe even longer before we see storage with the ability to use all that bandwidth.Certainly it will take aeons for traditional hdds to utilize all that speed, but ssd's might be able to do that in a few years, right?[/citation]

SSD's could probably do that now if they applied 24-way parallelism to the internal controller and the fastest available chips.

 

[sylvia648]

Sounds good, but on the "Throughput, Streaming, And Interface Performance" page you have a mix up of letters "Regarding write speeds, Gigabyte’s eSATA controller looks a little better while Asus’ USB 3.0 implementation looks a little worse in IOMeter. USB 2.0 performance remains relatively pathetic, so eSATA and UBS 3.0 will both give you a substantial performance boost."

 

[sylvia648]

Crap posted before I was done, but anyway the mistake is that you stated it as "UBS 3.0" and not USB 3.0. Tiny error.

 

[Crashman]

[citation][nom]sylvia648[/nom]Crap posted before I was done, but anyway the mistake is that you stated it as "UBS 3.0" and not USB 3.0. Tiny error.[/citation]

UBS operates in two locations, Everywhere, and right next to you.

 

[aladinn]

Lets see if I understand correctly: I you have a P55A gigabyte mb with usb 3.0 support and a single graphics cards it is limited to 8x? or is that only with a dual gpu setup?Seems to me it could be a big problmem if you want to upgrade to a single faster gpu in the future.

 

[Guest]

full usb spec testing?

okay two usb3 motherboards connected by the usb3 spec cable and some data sync software(the one that had a usb2 cable included or some other shareware version) running against two ram drives should give you the throughput info

 

[MU_Engineer]

[citation][nom]scryer_360[/nom]Although its good to see the hardware in the wild, I don't yet see any reason to buy something for USB 3.0 and SATA 6GB/s.[/citation]

I can think of one major reason for each of them. USB 3.0 is needed for mass storage devices as current USB 2.0 connections are the bottleneck for external HDDs and halfway-decent USB thumb drives. 6 Gbps SATA is needed for SSDs as quite a few current SSDs are limited by the current 3 Gbps SATA implementation.