so today I'll be having a quick look at a product from ASUS this is the u3 S6
and u3 S6 stands for none other than
usb3 SATA 6 so this is a PCI Express 4X
with bridge card and basically they're saying it is the only right choice now
ASUS has talked quite a bit about how their implementation of usb3.0 and SATA
6 gbit pers second is better than what anyone else on the market has so they've
worked the same technology into their
addin card as they have into their motherboards that feature those Fe well
feature have those features by default
so first thing reason number one only with the plx bridge can they get full
speed yeah for your your USB at 3.0 and
SATA 6 so you fully unleash the True Performance okay and reason number two
is only with PCI e4x will you have enough bandwidth okay so what they're
saying is that they're using a plx chip and and they're also using a PCIe forx
interface which is what they're saying no one else on the market is doing so
here on the back they've got some graphs that have little Starbursts about
exclaiming stuff so USB 3.0 performance test they're saying it's 34% better than
a card using a 1x PCI Express slot and
then over here they're saying that for SATA 6 gbit per second it's actually 50%
faster than a card that uses a 1x slot
now over here we've got the general specs and so it's got okay you've got
two internal connectors and those are the SATA 6 gbit pers second ports then
you have two external connectors those are the usb3 ports now you should note
that both of these are backwards compatible with SATA 2 and SATA 1 and
with USB 2 and USB 1 respectively very
cool the interfac is PCI E4 as they've talked about quite a bit on the
packaging the configuration supported is ahci mode all right and then for
compatible models you've got a list here of compatible ASUS motherboard models so
you might want to check that out before you go and buy one of these and other
than that I guess there's not really too much to show on the box so why don't we
have a look at the card
itself okay there's not a whole lot includ oh okay there's more included
than I thought so the first thing we find is a couple of right angle SATA
connector or SATA cables so I'm going to go ahead and assume that those are SATA
6 gabit per second ready mind you there's no actual difference as far as I
know you'd have to have a pretty shoddy SATA cable for it to not work with the
new standard uh next inside we find the
users's guide show that to the camera okay and also included inside you have a
driver CD so don't use that download the latest drivers off the ASUS website and
in here there's a couple couple different things they've got the same
summary that they had on the back of the box and thank you for buying and that's
pretty much it I mean I guess there's not a whole lot to it you install the
card you install the driver and then you plug stuff into it seems straightforward
enough well why don't we have a look at the card itself uses a black PCB which I always
like to see I mean the last thing you want to have is like a high performance
schmexy looking motherboard and then you have to throw like some ancient forest
green uh PCI card in it okay let me just make sure that my zoom is actually
working there okay so it's a pretty busy looking piece CB they've actually got a
lot of capacitors they've got their plx chip right here in the middle of it
that's probably a lot of the cost of this particular unit and as well as all
of the components that they're building on you know I can't actually figure out
why this is such a busy PCB you can see they're using the same NEC USB 3.0
chipset that almost everyone out there is using right now and then for the SATA
6 chipset they're using a Marvel chipset so here are your SATA 6 GB per second
connectors okay so one at the back one on the top and then on the back of the
card you've got your two USB 3.0 connectors and at the bottom you've got
the PCI Express 4X connection I guess there's not really much more to say
about it than that so thank you for checking out my unboxing of the
US u3 S6