Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD7 LGA1366 Motherboard Review

Feature Test: USB 3.0

Without a doubt one of the most popular technologies of 2010 is going to be USB 3.0. Not only is this new interface almost ten times faster than then ancient USB 2.0 standard, but it is backwards compatible too. Regrettably, Intel haven't committed to releasing a chipset with native USB 3.0 support until sometime in 2011. Nevertheless, motherboard manufacturers have recognized the importance of this new standard and have turned to third-party manufacturers like NEC and VIA. Gigabyte have added USB 3.0 support to all their new "A" models, like the X58A-UD7, with an onboard NEC D720200 host controller, which can supply up to two USB 3.0 ports.


In order to test out this new interface, Gigabyte kindly loaned us a Buffalo 1TB USB3.0 hard drive enclosure, the HD-H1.0TU3. This unit has just hit North American shores (as the HD-HX1.0TU3) and is retailing for roughly $190-200 CDN.


As you can see, this unit is a mighty fingerprint magnet but it is otherwise a very sleek product. This enclosure houses a standard hard drive (unknow brand/model), so it obviously will not be able to utilize all of USB 3.0's available bandwidth, but the results should obviously be a quite a bit higher than USB 2.0's ~35MB/s bandwidth limit. Let's check out the results:



As you can see, USB 3.0 lives up to its billing. Whereas the hard drive in this enclosure is severely bottlenecked by the USB 2.0 interface, its true capabilities are finally unleashed with USB 3.0. This level of performance from an external device was previously only achievable with eSATA interface, which although excellent still hasn't gained much popularity.

Synthetic numbers are all fine & dandy, but let's see what this speed means in a real-life scenario:



Now you may be less than impressed while looking at these figures. While USB 3.0 reduced transfer times by 76%, that's still not as much as one would expect looking at the synthetic numbers. Well the reason for this is that the hard drive is the weak link in this equation. Although the transfer rates start off strong at ~125MB/sec, and remain above 100MB/sec for approximately 30 seconds, there is inevitably a slow and steady decline down to to 22MB/sec. A faster hard drive or preferably an solid state drive (SSD) would better demonstrate the potential performance benefits of USB 3.0.