Asus U3S6 USB3/Sata3 (a.k.a Sata 6GBps) add-in card, approx £20 :)!

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Asus U3S6 USB3/Sata3 (a.k.a Sata 6GBps) PCI-E 4x card, approx £25 :)!

The ASUS U3S6 Add-in card - USB3 and SATA3 for everyone

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The ASUS U3S6 (get it, USB 3.0 and SATA 6G?) card will be sold individually with a modest MSRP of $29.

The USB 3.0 and SATA 6G implementation on this card is a PLX8613 chip, which is the bridge between the computer's PCIe bus and the NEC 720200 and Marvell 9123 controllers.

Price is pretty decent, 2 usb3 ports and 2 sata3 (aka sata 6gbps) ports.

The NEC usb3 chip costs $15 itself so asus aren't exact ripping us off. The NEC can only power 2 usb3 ports so nearly all motherboards will only have 2 usb3 ports for a while until other controller makers release their usb3 controllers. Intel hasn't commented on when their boards will have usb3 or sata3 YET.

This will work in a PCI-E 4x, 8x, 16x slot and won't be bottlenecked. I believe if you run it in a PCI-E 1x slot your speeds will be bottlenecked.

If you are wondering if there are any boards that have been announced with sata3 and usb3 built in there are 2 asus boards and lots of gigabyte boards:

intel p55: ASUS P7P55D-E Premium
intel x58: ASUS P6X58D Premium
intel p55: Gigabyte P55A series, all their p55 boards will have new versions with usb3 and sata3.

Nice video of 2 of the new Gigabyte P55A boards here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uv0TM8rMuME

Source: http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=809
 
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Depends, if they release usb3 pen drives soon there will be a need to buy 1. Usb2 tops out @ 33mb/s transfer speed, esata pen drives that are out get around 90mb/s read and 35mb/s write so usb3 pens should be able to hit those speeds at least for the expensive models. As for sata3 its useless for the time being until sata3 ssd's come out that are faster than the bottle necked 250mb/s read that the a-data and intel drives encounter but its only £20 ish afterall could have been a lot worse.

Hope ocuk sell these once they ship.

I'm holding out for a usb3/sata3 x58 board and a core i7 930, will get those in Q1 2010. I wish intel would announce when their p55 and x58 boards will come with all usb3 and sata3 onboard, we could then get G45 boards with usb3/sata3 and the technologies would really be mainstream.
 
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I'd be holding out for prices to settle again, stuff is silly at the moment. I don't think I'd ever wait out for faster usb / sata connections tbh.

Unless 930 offers either a die shrink (no chance) or a 22/23x multiplier it's not worth waiting for either.
 
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the core i7 930 might have a 0.5x higher multi, possibly overclock further, possibly less power and most likely a price cut. I'm still on a Core2Quad, been waiting for prices to lower and usb3/sata3 before i upgrade to core i7 as i dont want to upgrade for a while after upgrading. You already have a core i7 920 so not much point you changing your cpu.
 
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