It looks as if a good handful of manufacturers is ignoring Intel's hesitancy and is jumping on the USB 3.0 / SATA 6 Gb/s bandwagon. ECS is the latest to produce new hardware, sporting two tasty PCI-Express expansion cards: one providing USB SuperSpeed and one providing the new SATA. These PCI-E cards provide access to the new technology without the need for replacing the entire motherboard.
The news originally appeared on XFastest, however TechPowerUp translated the post, reporting that the cards use the NEC µPD720200 controller for the USB 3.0 version and the Marvell 88SE9123-NAA2 controller for the SATA 6 Gb/s version. According to the post, the USB 3.0 card provides both ports on the rear-panel; the SATA 6 Gb/s card provides one internal SATA port, and one eSATA 6 Gb/s connection.
Currently ECS has not released pricing or ship dates for either version, but we're expecting them to hit the market during Asus's and ASRock's launch window of similar products. There may be a drawback to using these cards however: both supposedly remain in 1x PCI-E format. If that is indeed the case (for who knows why in a 16x world), the narrow pipeline may limit the overall Mb/s speed.