Gigabyte launches motherboards with USB 3, SATA 3 and extra USB power

 

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Posted on 27 Oct 2009 at 11:11

Following the recent announcement of USB 3 hard disks, Gigabyte has now introduced a range of motherboards with native USB 3 support.

USB 3 has a theoretical maximum throughput of 5Gb/s, which is roughly 10 times faster than USB 2, which tops out at 480Mb/s. Most hard disks are limited by the USB 2 interface, as they can now top 100MB/s (or 800Mb/s). It means they tend to be restricted to under 30MB/s, despite USB 2's theoretical maximum of 60MB/s. Even if you halve USB 3's maximum speed of 625MB/s, this still provides plenty of headroom for the fastest hard disks, and Gigabytes new motherboards mean it will be easier than ever to add fast storage to your PC without opening the case.

USB 3 is fully backwards compatible with USB 2, so existing devices like keyboards, mice, hard disks, printers and scanners will all continue to work.

The latest internal hard disks, such as Seagate's Barracuda XT, support the new SATA/600 (or SATA 3.0) standard which runs at 6Gb/s. All seven of the new motherboards also support this standard. Plus, all their USB ports are able to provide three times the power of USB 2 ports for power-hungry USB devices.

All the new motherboards have Intel's P55A chipset, and support the latest Core i7 and i5 processors for the LGA 1156 socket. Here's a list of the seven models.

GA-P55A-UD6 - Flagship model with six DDR3 slots and 24-phase power
GA-P55A-UD5 - Four DDR3 slots, 12-phase power
GA-P55A-UD4P - CrossFireX, Dolby Home Theater support
GA-P55A-UD4 - No TPM
GA-P55A-UD3P - No FireWire, but with TPM
GA-P55A-UD3R - No FireWire, no TPM
GA-P55A-UD3 - No FireWire, no TPM, no Dolby Home Theater

For more details on the boards, visit Gigabyte's microsite.

Author: Jim Martin