Cheap and Affordable Asus U3S6 PCI-E Card with USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Solution

We have been hearing that Intel may potentially delay USB 3.0 feature in its chipset development till 2011, and in case you can’t wait to enjoy the Superspeed USB port with extremely high transfer rate, the new solution from Asus may able to fill up the gap with condition that you have the USB 3.0 compliant devices ready for use.

Named as U3S6, it is a PCI Express X 4 lane based card that can be plugged your commonly available PCI Express slot on your existing platform and transform the interface into high bandwidth USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 ports. This can be achieved thanks to its on board NEC D720200F1 USB 3.0 compliance controller and at the same time, a Marvell 88SE9123 chip has able to extend the capability to support 2 SATA 6.0 ports depending the usage and devices that are going to be connected. Typically, USB 3.0 can offer an extremely high 5Gbps bandwidth, which is more than ten times of what can be achieved by USB 2.0 gated at 480Mbps. And good thing about this new protocol is it will be fully backward compatible with existing USB 2.0 host port for practical usage.

At a price of $30 only, it is definitely a good deal to upgrade your PC system without throwing away the whole platform and without spending too much to invest on P6X58 or other premium motherboards. Hopefully this will encourage more USB 3.0 compatible peripherals on top of limited devices such as Dane-Elec to make full use of such high data rate as a benefit to all.