USB 3.0 PCIE card

Thank you very much Lady Fitzgerald!

Just kind of piggy backing here.. Is PCIe fast enough to get the full throughput of usb 3.0?

mhansen1 said:

Just kind of piggy backing here.. Is PCIe fast enough to get the full throughput of usb 3.0?

Depends how many devices one tries to run at the same time. One or two, probably. Three or more, I don't know for sure. Just guesstimating, the time to move data onto two USB 3.0 sticks in the ports on my card reader is definitely faster. I have seen cards with as many as seven ports total but all run on PCI-e x1. I would think that if those seven couldn't run significantly faster than USB 2.0 at x1, someone would make one that could run on x4 or more.

It's highly unlikely one would run every USB port simultaneously. I have seven USB 2.0 devices connected to the back of my computer. One is a two port hub on my monitor and another is a keyboard with an additional USB port for the wireless mouse receiver. I rarely use the hub anymore if I have large amounts of data to move. So, normally, all I have working at any one time is either the keyboard or mouse (I'm not coordinated enough to use both simultaneously) and the Wi-Fi adapter. The UPS connection kicks in only if there is a power outage. I also have two scanners but I almost never run both at the same time. So I rarely run more than three devices at the same time. Most people probably won't be using very many ports at the same time, either.

Keep in mind these cards are mostly used to bring legacy MOBOs up to date with USB 3.0. In those situations, as long as the speed is significantly better than USB 2.0, these cards are definitely fast enough even if they can't run at full USB 3.0 speed. Also keep in mind not all USB 3.0 devices run at full USB 3.0 speeds.

I would avoid those evil bay usb cards. Zero support if you ever need it.

You do not have usb 3 connector on your mobo so you need a pci card. I would use a SilverStone USB PCI adapter.

Amazon.com: Silverstone Tek EC01-P PCI Express Card with USB 3.0 Internal 19-pin Dual Port Connector: Computers & Accessories

Great customer support, this card well give you two USB 3.0 ports at the rear and it has a 19 pin header so you can add a front panel USB. SilverStone makes those also. SilverStone has good drivers and support.

bobafetthotmail said:

...There should be x2 or x4 cards too if I'm not mistaken (respectively 2 and 4 lanes)...

I totally agree but I haven't found any yet. I like the card I have for three reasons:

1. It has three USB 3.0 ports (wanted two) and a card reader that supported SD and microSD.

2. It didn't have a lot of other stuff I didn't need (audio ports, USB 2.0 ports, eSATA ports, etc.)

3. It worked (the first reader's USB ports worked but the card reader portion just sat there and laughed at me).

madcratebuilder said:

I would avoid those evil bay usb cards. Zero support if you ever need it.

You do not have usb 3 connector on your mobo so you need a pci card. I would use a SilverStone USB PCI adapter.

Amazon.com: Silverstone Tek EC01-P PCI Express Card with USB 3.0 Internal 19-pin Dual Port Connector: Computers & Accessories

Great customer support, this card well give you two USB 3.0 ports at the rear and it has a 19 pin header so you can add a front panel USB. SilverStone makes those also. SilverStone has good drivers and support.

Sorry but that card only has an internal USB 3.0 header and no rear USB 3.0 ports. This one, however, will give both two rear ports and an internal header for front ports and is also made by Silverstone.

I agree about FleaBay. It's possible to get incredible deals there but there are a lot of dodgy vendors on that site. Amazon is much better although you have to watch out for their Marketplace vendors. Some of them are pretty dodgy and it takes extraordinary measures to get Amazon to back them up, unlike Amazon's service for their own products.

bobafetthotmail said:

PCI-e 1.0 has 250 mb/s bandwidth UP and 250 mb/s DOWN per lane (no, won't mix to get 500 MB/s) .
PCI-e 2.0 is twice that and PCI-e 3.0 is four times that.
a x1 card/slot has only one lane. There should be x2 or x4 cards too if I'm not mistaken (respectively 2 and 4 lanes).

USB 3.0 real speed is around 150-200 mb/s. Yeah, lots of overhead in the protocol.
USB 2.0 had a theoretical max speed of 480 Mb/s and look at how crappy it is.

If you can do simple math you can guesstimate how well stuff will perform in any given slot/card.

Thanks for the details (I couldn't remember the figures off the top of my head; old age stinks). That more or less supports what I said about x1 supporting two ports.

Sadly, I haven't seen any cards that could take advantage of PCI-e 3.0 speeds (yet). Additionally, I haven't seen any MOBOs with PCI-e slots running at 4x or less that were PCI-e 3.0 (yet) nor have I seen any USB 3.0 adapter cards that ran on X2 or X4 (again, yet).