USB 3.0 PCIe x1 card for Windows 10

gaurav71189

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I was planning to get the Transcend add-on card
Link to Transcend card

My motherboard is Gigabyte GA-EP45C-DS3R
Link to motherboard

1. Will it work on Windows 10 x64?
2. Could I boot off of a USB storage device with these ports?
3. If I use it on the x1 slot (black) or the x8 (orange), will it affect the performance of my graphics card? (GTX 760 running at x16 on the blue slot)
4. What are the expected max read/write speeds that are possible on this card?
5. Could I use both the ports simultaneously at full USB 3.0 speeds possible on this card?

I would also love to hear suggestions for add-on cards which work on Windows 10.

If you need any additional details, I will provide them as best I can.
 
Solution
USB 3.0 is natively supported by Windows 10, no driver will be necessary for that card.

Unless the card has hooks to integrate into your BIOS as a pcie bootable device chances are you can't boot from it.

You should use the black slot which is only PCIe 1.1. The card is only a PCIe x1 card so putting it in a wider slot won't get you anymore bandwidth. FYI, the card itself supports PCIe 2.0, it will fall back to 1.1 when plugged into your board.

Your board is limited to PCIe 1.1 so you'll be limited by your PCIe bus. The best x1 PCIe 1.1 can do is 250MB/s (2.5GT/s). Short of attaching insanely fast mediums (SSDs) to USB, the device is usually the bottleneck anyways. Most USB HDDs are only 100-150MB/s tops so this limitations shouldn't...

weilin

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USB 3.0 is natively supported by Windows 10, no driver will be necessary for that card.

Unless the card has hooks to integrate into your BIOS as a pcie bootable device chances are you can't boot from it.

You should use the black slot which is only PCIe 1.1. The card is only a PCIe x1 card so putting it in a wider slot won't get you anymore bandwidth. FYI, the card itself supports PCIe 2.0, it will fall back to 1.1 when plugged into your board.

Your board is limited to PCIe 1.1 so you'll be limited by your PCIe bus. The best x1 PCIe 1.1 can do is 250MB/s (2.5GT/s). Short of attaching insanely fast mediums (SSDs) to USB, the device is usually the bottleneck anyways. Most USB HDDs are only 100-150MB/s tops so this limitations shouldn't be a big deal.

You can use both ports, but combined they can only do 250MB/s (minus overhead). That 250MB/s limit applies to 1 port, or both ports regardless of which one(s) you use.

At this point, your platform is the limiting factor when paired with the expansion card. All that said, 250MB/s >>>> 20MB/s of USB 2.0 so you'll definitely get a huge improvement.
 
Solution

gaurav71189

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That's great to hear that it'll work out-of-the-box on Windows 10. Do you have any insights regarding the other points I've mentioned? (points 2 - 5)

I'm more concerned on points 2 and 3 than the others, now that Windows 10 issue is out of the way.
 

gaurav71189

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Thanks for the detailed answer :)

I did a small research on PCIe speeds, I thought that the PCIe x1 slots were v2.0. As the ICH10R supports 500 MB/s.
Link to Intel P45 chipset block diagram

Also, 4 Gb/s you mentioned in parentheses would correspond to 500 MB/s and not 250 MB/s. (Rather, 250 MB/s would correspond to 8 Gb/s). Could there be a confusion here?
 

weilin

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Sorry about that, PCIe 1.1 is 2.5GT/s (gigatransfers/s not to be confused with gigabits/s) not 5GT/s (that's PCIe 2.0).

Also, that's good of you to notice that 2500/8=312 and not 250. However, my second number is right, That's because GT/s takes into account overhead. PCIe uses 8b/10b encoding (8 bits of data encoded using 10 bits). Thus, once you remove the overhead it's only good for 250MB/s (MegaByte/s).

I will edit my initial post to make this more clear.

As for the intel block diagram, be careful marketing wrote that slide... PCIe is full duplex which means you can send and receive at the same time thus 250MB/s down + 250MB/s up = 500MB/s link. Those slots are PCIe 1.1 and not 2.0 (if they were 2.0 they would have been labeled 2.0 like the PCIe ports coming off the NB for graphics) if you want more info, look at the PCIe article on Wikipedia.
 

gaurav71189

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Thanks a lot for the clarification. I now understand better, a little about marketing and a little about PCIe (full duplex speeds combined).

Looks like I won't be getting anywhere close to the full USB 3.0 speeds of 5 Gb/s. But then again, as you've mentioned, not many storage devices reach such speeds. My primary use would be for USB 3.0 pen drives and HDDs. I don't think I'll be looking at SSDs any time soon.

Another point I noticed. You've mentioned that the PCIe for graphics (the blue x16 slot) is v1.1. But as per the specifications of the motherboard, the blue and orange slots are very much v2.0. So this brings me to another doubt, how much of a difference in graphics performance would be there between the v2.0 slot using x16 and x8 lanes for the GTX 760?
 

weilin

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My second post addressed that error as well, "Those slots are PCIe 1.1 and not 2.0 (if they were 2.0 they would have been labeled 2.0 like the PCIe ports coming off the NB for graphics)". The Blue and Orange slots on your board comes off the NB (northbridge AKA the P45 chip) so they are indeed 2.0.

As for how much of an impact it is to the GTX 760, probably not much.. I don't think the GTX 760 is bandwidth starved in any way... I don't own the card though so won't be able to comment for sure. You can always limit the graphics to 8x and run a benchmarks and see if you lose any framerate doing so compared to the 16x link...
 

gaurav71189

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Thanks again for the info. :) I'll run benchmarks when I find the time for it.

FYI, I'm using an Intel Q9300 2.5GHz, running at 3GHz. Dunno if that'll make a difference.