I’m no authority when it comes to computer innards like motherboards, but the introduction of technologies such as USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 have got me rather excited. I was recently in attendance when Gigabyte, one of Taiwan’s leading motherboard manufacturers, unveiled their new series of P55A motherboards and was duly impressed with the numbers that were thrown around. However, since there aren’t any (or rather many, I could be wrong) USB 3.0 devices on the market, these numbers might sound like a whole lot of marketing cheese.
Story continues after the jump.
Marketed with the tagline of “333 Onboard Acceleration”, the P55A-series of motherboards come with a trio of “3”-inspired technologies. Gigabyte uses USB 3.0 controllers from NEC, which are reportedly the world’s first USB 3.0 logo certified solutions, and are capable of transfer speeds that are up to 10x faster than “legacy” USB 2.0 technology.
The Gigabyte boards also come with USB 3x power boost, which is a unique tweak to the board’s USB ports that enable them to produce 3x the power of a traditional USB 3.0 / 2.0 port. Extra power output means that devices which usually require you to use up 2 USB ports to function (I.e. external hard drives, optical drives) can work with just one USB connection.
The final 3 of 333 comes in the form of a SATA 3.0 controller from Marvell. Gracing all the P55A motherboards, SATA 3.0 offers a 6Gbps data transfer speed - double of the 3Gbps from SATA 2.0 - and can go up to 4x (12Gbps) when configured in RAID 0.
Unfortunately, I can’t say much more about these boards till we get our hands on ‘em (and some USB 3.0 compatible devices), so remember to check back for the latest updates.
