New Motherboards From Asus And Gigabyte
Always trying to stay on the leading edge of hardware development, the first challenge motherboard manufacturers faced in adopting any high-bandwidth controller for Intel’s latest platform is that the chipset doesn’t have a suitable high-bandwidth interface. The 16 lanes of PCIe 2.0 provided by LGA 1156 processors are normally tied to graphics card slots, and any additional PCIe connections must be made through the P55 PCH at a half-rate 2.5 GT/s. A single 5.0 Gb/s PCIe 2.0 lane would have been adequate for USB 3.0, but P55 has none.
Asus’ solution is to add a PLX PCIe bridge, which can be seen in the photo above as the large IC with a silver logo to the left of the power and reset buttons. The PLX bridge converts the P55 Express chipset’s four 2.5 GT/s lanes into two 5.0 GT/s lanes, making it possible for Asus to host its USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 GT/s controllers at full PCIe 2.0 bandwidth. While today’s article is limited to USB 3.0 implementation, we’ll communicate more details about this P7P55D-E Premium motherboard in a future roundup.
At two-thirds of the price of its Asus rival, Gigabyte’s P55A-UD4P cuts costs by using the processor’s PCIe 2.0 connections to host its high-bandwidth controllers. Two of the primary graphics card’s 16 PCIe lanes supply its USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s controllers, and Gigabyte disables six more lanes to make the upper slot an effective x8 interface. The USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s controllers revert to the chipset’s 2.5 GT/s lanes whenever two graphics cards are installed, to preserve the x8 transfers each graphics card needs for optimal CrossFire or SLI performance.
Thus, users with a single graphics card must sacrifice half of its peak bandwidth to enable 5.0 Gb transfers to the USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s controllers, while those with two cards must live with 2.5 Gb/s bandwidth limits on USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gb/s controllers. Neither of these sacrifices is huge or even noticeable on most of today’s hardware, yet anyone trying to future-proof their system could be left cold.
Knowing that some users would rather pay more than sacrifice performance credentials, Gigabyte has been showing off its upcoming P55A-UD7 motherboard with PLX and nForce 200 PCIe bridges. The company has yet to announce the new product’s launch date or price.
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Great review. This waiting game sucks.
Wow, transferring your por..... programs should be a lot faster now.
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...
Can't wait for it all to be standard.
Pitty they'll only be available at the back for now....but good news nevertheless
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....
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....
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
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
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.
Thanks for explaining how USB 3.0 fits into the grand scheme of things.
Looks like I'll stick to using esata for a while longer. Not too thrilled with the early implimentations.
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?
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?
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
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.
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?
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!
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?
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...
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?
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?
SSD's could probably do that now if they applied 24-way parallelism to the internal controller and the fastest available chips.
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."