okay so today i'm going to be having a quick look at a product that i think is probably the neatest most useful thing
that nobody has ever thought of for a computer under like 25 bucks so this is
the nzxt iu01
and you can have a look at it here you can see that this has a bunch of usb
looking ports on it so let's get this out of the box and i'll tell you exactly
what this thing does so first of all we have a power adapter so that's a molex
connector right there you gotta pass through and everything and then there's a little power connector that plugs into
the custom pcb that goes with this so i got that okay
the next thing i have is a usb extension cable
so this is uh well not an extension cable pardon me but a usb cable so this
plugs into the header on your motherboard you can see it is usb 2.0
okay yeah you can't see that that's okay usb 2.0 and then the other end is
exactly the same thing okay and then you
have an instruction manual which seems to be in a bunch of different languages
and i'm just gonna get it open here and see if i can
okay it's really simple actually each one of these photos is exactly the same
photo just with a different language under it connect the usb connector to a spare
internet spare internet usb connector on the motherboard wow those are terrible
instructions well it shouldn't take you long to figure out how to use this thing
it's really straightforward so then the last thing we find inside is the little
module the little pcb itself so get this out of here
all right so i'll explain what this does first of all you can see on the back you've got a double-sided velcro
attacher thingamajiggy so you just use that to attach it somewhere
inconspicuous in your case okay so you need to provide power to this little pcb
right there okay and then you need to plug in
this cable right here like this so
ah there you go once you got it hooked up you plug this into your motherboard to
an available usb header and it expands that usb header to three
headers and two internal usb ports so
what you can use this for is for hooking up anything that is not
bare bones for functionality for your computer so for example my case has four
front usb ports now most motherboards only have two on-board headers so that
means if i wanted to have say for example a card reader or an m-cubed
t-balancer fan controller which i do have i would need an additional usb
header somewhere and so many of those of those header devices don't seem to be
able to use an adapter to plug into one of these and even then i mean what do
you want to do run it around to the back of your case run a wire in through the case like it like it's nasty it's not
it's not it's not elegant okay so basically what you can do is you can
take one port you turn it into two you don't have to worry about any additional
power consumption of those devices because the pcb is powered so these are
powered ports now i wouldn't go using a bunch of bandwidth sensitive devices and
then trying to use them all at once because you are still going to be limited by that one header worth of
bandwidth but that's not a huge concern the biggest problem that you usually run
into is hey you want to plug in your bluetooth usb adapter your wi-fi adapter
which you can just hide internally now you don't even have to use an expansion
slot and you can just mount one internally very easily and then you want
to have like your fan controller with the you know the readout on it or
whatever it has and then you want to have like a card reader and then you use
your two ports for your forefront usb ports then you win this is a very cool
product anyway i thought it was definitely worth an unboxing and a quick
first look