USB 3.0 To The Front Panel: ASRock Leads The Way

By Thomas Soderstrom
published

ASRock was the first company to respond to our impassioned pleas for a front-panel USB 3.0 connector. As other companies attempt to catch up, we examine the boards that started it all to see if the implementation maintains full USB 3.0-class performance.

Socket AM3: 890FX Deluxe4

AMD’s current chipset advantage for both mainstream and upper-mainstream products is its added PCI Express 2.0 connectivity, which Intel currently limits in a fairly debilitating way. Those extra lanes mean that the 890FX Deluxe4 can support two graphics cards and two USB 3.0 controllers at full bandwidth.

The 890FX Deluxe4 supports a third card in x4 transfer mode, but PCIe 2.0 technology gives the extra slot twice as much performance as the x4 slots often found on Intel motherboards based on P55 Express. ASRock doesn’t even need to use up any PCIe 2.0 pathways for internal SATA 6Gb/s, since the AMD SB850 southbridge supports six of these ports natively.

Front-panel and rear-panel USB 3.0 are provided by separate NEC D720200F1 controllers, each on its own PCIe 2.0 x1 interface. Individual devices on each controller can be fed with the controller's total bandwidth, but any two devices on the same controller must share bandwidth.

Because USB 3.0 and USB 2.0 use completely different data pathways, the new connector uses 19 pins, rather than the former 9-pins, to provide two ports with the two separate technologies.

Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom
Thomas Soderstrom is a Senior Staff Editor at Tom's Hardware US. He tests and reviews cases, cooling, memory and motherboards.
49 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Thank you ASRock for bringing USB3.0 front header on your motherboards! Now i can expect a much nicer set-up in my case in an upcoming build...
    Reply
  • takeapieandrun
    New standards = competition = win for us
    Reply
  • razor512
    Now all they need to do is lead the way with a standardized case connector.
    Reply
  • darthvidor
    I sure hope the standard connector comes out before this gets out of hand.
    Reply
  • 117killer117
    Hopefully some other motherboard manufacturers catch on.
    Reply
  • Crashman
    razor512Now all they need to do is lead the way with a standardized case connector.darthvidorI sure hope the standard connector comes out before this gets out of hand.You're looking at it, Page 1 photo. Other motherboard manufacturers are already using this same connector as mentioned in the article, so it should only be a matter of a few months before case manufacturers follow suit.
    Reply
  • ASRock responds to pleas? Maybe someone could plead for dual-gigabit-ethernet equipped SOC-chipped (atom? i3?) 6x sata2 motherboards, too. It's impossible to build your one-machine-to-rule them all firewall-server-htpc in a small form factor currently!
    Reply
  • liquidsnake718
    Yeah i remember reading reports that Intel dithed USB 3.0 about 6 months ago in favor of the mb and new CPU research (P66, 67). Surprisingly they sold this tech or the design to ASROCK. Im sure they will eventually come around to implimenting this for ALL future motherboards.

    So would old cases be able to use this since it is just a connector?
    Reply
  • Crashman
    liquidsnake718Yeah i remember reading reports that Intel dithed USB 3.0 about 6 months ago in favor of the mb and new CPU research (P66, 67). Surprisingly they sold this tech or the design to ASROCK. Im sure they will eventually come around to implimenting this for ALL future motherboards. So would old cases be able to use this since it is just a connector?Revised cases could use it, if they had the new cable and connector. Remember that USB 2.0 and USB 3.0 are not cross-compatible, they use separate signal pins and share only power and ground with each other.
    Reply
  • mauller07
    They should have kept the board like the 890gx extreme 3 without all the legacy rubbish like floppy or pata, when looking at the boar layouts in comparison this extreme 4 just looks messy
    Reply