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.
- Hardware,
- usb ,
- 3.0 ,
- performance
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How about USB3 on the X58? How long before we can see these motherboards? You can steal all of my additional PCIe lanes then! (albeit through the NB)
But why are they giving us only 2 ports 3.0 and the rest of them 2.0? it should be the other way about...
im hoping it wont be too long until we hear about USB 3.0->PCIe adapters/enclosures.
if a laptop could have a full sized graphic card plugged into an adapter while at home, we could see a huge leap in useablity of laptops as primary gaming devices.
asus already got one out:http://asus.com/product.aspx?P_ID=lGYmelQ8mJvPtYTv&templete=2
and it's got 2 Sata3 ports...SWEET!
I wouldn't game on a laptop!!how confortable could it be :-S
the idea is mroem that you can hook your laptop up to a full sized monitor, with a keybaord and mouse and use it like a desktop. but disconnect it when oyu need to move around.
the link isnt what i had in mind. im thinking of an enclosure oyu could put a PCIe video card into, which would then hook up to your laptop via USB 3.0.
Help a novice understand!
So basically the usb 3 is 5gig/sec while when they update (drivers?) the esata will up to 6gig/sec right?
If it's only for extra storage than esata is better, but if it's also for audio device (lets say new ipod that will take on usb 3.0 or new cellphone) then usb 3.0 would be better than esata since it can be used for other things, rather than just extra storage. This newb got it right?
@woozy
yeah pretty much. esata also needs an additional power cable though, so i personally dislike it. with USB youve got similarly awesome speeds, but power and data all come from the same cable.
I got a question about this. My friend, who is a techie (I most definitely am not) but doesn't speak great english disputes how I understand the reviews conclusion.
My understanding is, that the gigabyte board uses a PCIe 16 slot, thus it's impossible to crossfire and use SATA3 . However, according to the author:
"Asus’ solution appears to be the most elegant option because it doesn’t steal pathways from the x16 graphics card slot, but instead relies on a PLX bridge to convert four of the chipset’s 2.5 Gb/s pathways to two 5.0 Gb/s pathways."
I would interpret this to mean that crossfiring on the Asus board is possible (at 8x 8x) while a SATA 3 setup is working. My friend tells me I'm wrong because the PLX bridge has to take bandwidth from someplace..and it comes from the PCI e 16 slot.
I bow to his greater knowledge - but could anyone confirm or deny this.