On the last card from Gigabyte, management of USB is much more advanced than what is usually found, and the company thought to correct a few defects of this technology has become in recent years, indispensable our PCs.

Power over eSATA and USB 3.0

First point, the GA-P55-X58 Extreme UD6 and 2 have the good sense to provide the USB 3.0. As all cards incorporating this standard is a NEC chip is used and two connectors are available. The controller is wired to a PCI-Express 1x to 500 Mb / s, which is sufficient in practice, nothing is yet capable of saturating the USB 3.0.Second point, the cards offer the Power over eSATA: Gigabyte has built the famous combo connector, already present on many laptops that can offer cable pulling their power of USB 2.0 and eSATA for using the " data. Of course, combo connectors can also connect USB 2.0 devices and conventional hard drives using the eSATA connector usual.

More power, more protection

More interesting, Gigabyte corrects a problem of USB power. Indeed, the standard USB 2.0 required to provide 500 mA at 5 V (2.5 W) and version 3.0 will increase a little power (900 mA at 5 V or 4.5 W). With the cards in question, Gigabyte triple power: 1.5 A (7.5 W) with USB 2.0 and 2.7 A (13.5 W) with USB 3.0. Specifically, Gigabyte uses the same technique as in USB hub to provide more energy, which will mainly provide input for external hard drives, sometimes limited by the 500 mA of USB 2.0. Finally, anecdotal, Gigabyte has changed the security management: while motherboards usually have a fuse of 100 milliohms, Gigabyte has lowered the limit to 25 milliohms, which helps limit the damage. Explain. By decreasing the resistance of fuse grid much faster and thus protects the rest of the motherboard of a surge on the USB. And as USB grilled represent much of the returns, the idea of Gigabyte is not bad.

In fact, there has to wait that USB 3.0 is becoming more democratic, with integration in the chipset.