Hardware USB 3.1 Preview Testing with MSI

Maybe I am a little confused but is this example a USB 3.1 using the old Type A socket? Why have they not used the previously mentioned reversible Type-C socket? I certainly would not be investing any money in new USB 3.1 devices when I know that a new socket type is supposed to be around the corner.

 

Type-C will be coming very soon to some of our motherboards. As Combatus mentioned, it's an early prototype / ES board.

You will see that we have Type-C on our upcoming Z97A GAMING 6 motherboard here - https://www.facebook.com/MSI.Europe...11729.111253142247639/895980693774876/?type=1

 

Depends on the flash implementation. Use a USB3->SATA adaptor with an SSD to test the performance of the interface. If the flash drive is crap, sure it can do "20MB/s" even if it is USB3 - but that has nothing to do with USB3 itself.

 

Thanks for the feedback and I totally understand... Once devices go Type-C, with the socket be backwards compatible with older devices via an adapter?

 

What motherboard though? Not all USB3 chipsets are created equal, some of them are god awful when it comes to speed.

 

I have a 256GB M4 in a USB3 caddy. When transferring my ~200GB Steam folder from the caddy to another M4 inside the PC, it was consistently running at over 230MB/sec and only seemed to be limited by the write speed of the M4.

 

Great performance, but I still don't quite fully understand the point of USB 3.1. If I really wanted that much performance for external drives, I'd either use Thunderbolt or eSATA. You could argue "well it's still backward compatible with older USB ports" but that isn't a good argument: with USB 3.0, you can get at least 2 ports on a single PCIe 2.0 lane, making it readily available to any PC worth using these days. I highly doubt you can get a USB 3.1 port on a single PCIe 2.0 lane; this makes it harder to popularize this bus, so you might as well save yourself the CPU overhead and go for eSATA.

Out of curiosity, does anybody know of any interesting devices that can take advantage of USB 3.0? I'm aware there's external gigabit ethernet and ASIC miners but is there anything else?

 

Yada yada yada.... where's the ****in reversible socket?

Anything else is moot.

 

Thunderbolt is dead. eSATA double so, unfortunately.

 

Power. 5 amps at 20 volts = 100 watts. Over USB…

 

Not sure how they're supposed to achieve 20v, but regardless.... why? In what situation would it ever be a useful or good idea to run 100W though a USB port? The power supplied by USB 3.0 is more than enough for most external 2.5" hard drives while also not a potential threat to destroy the batteries of phones you plug into it. I'm sure there's some logic behind the USB controller that prevents too much power to phones, but if it can so easily switch between 5W to 100W, what if it makes a mistake? I think another 1A would've been nice on USB 3.0, but it doesn't NEED that.

Even the pictures of this article show that one of those connectors to that external RAID controller was used strictly for power, meaning the potential power of USB 3.1 is uselessly inconsistent. That means all devices will HAVE to be designed for setups because the port won't guarantee enough power, so what was the point of complicating the electronics of this so much? Why not just have it operate at a maximum of 10W and call it a day?

EDIT:
To me, USB 3.1 is just a way of Intel engineers saying "why? Because we can" because the more I hear about 3.1 the more it seems like a stupid idea that should have just separated into a different port that should have broke backward compatibility.

 

Definitely sounds like a driver/board thing to me. There's no reason that drive shouldn't be at least 100MB/s.

Have you install the drivers specific to the motherboard (not relying on the built in windows ones)? I recall laptop showed it had a USB 3.0 port after a fresh install, but it basically ran at USB 2.0 speeds until I installed the USB 3.0 driver specific to the motherboard.

 

Off the top of my head: External 3.5" drives without a wall adaptor, proper full sized/brightness USB powered monitors, decent USB powered speakers.

 

Hard drives don't need it no, but what about a monitor? In theory - and I haven't checked the HDMI bitrates prior to 2.0 - the same cable could carry both video and power to a monitor.

 

In this day and age, people aren't going to be using external 3.5" drives much longer. And like I said, as this article has shown, you're still probably going to need an aux power source anyway.

USB powered monitors would definitely be nice and is a very valid use for a 100W port, but I have yet to see affordable USB 3.0 monitor adapters. I'm guessing this is because the CPU bandwidth of it is horrendous.

A USB 3.1 port for speakers seems like a real waste of bandwidth, but otherwise I guess it is a valid use.

 

The board on test had the standard Type A port, not the Type C port. As far as I'm aware, Type C is the one that's compatible with the 20V/5A power standard - not Type A. Hence the twin connectors...

Type C has hasn't made its way to mass production yet - the spec was only finalised late last year. You're not seeing devices because they haven't been released yet. I'm not quite sure how you'd route the display signal from a GPU to an on-board USB3.1 Type C port though - perhaps the GPU itself would have to have the port...

Yep, I'll give you that one - I'd rather just use a mains cable! Nevertheless, you did ask what possible use 100W on a USB port would be...

 

I'd quite like to see USB become a standard power connector for relatively low powered (but higher than USB 3.0 is capable of) devices, irrespective of data speed.

Standard mains plugs for stuff that needs it, but USB replacing bulky AC/DC converters for stuff that doesn't. It would be so much neater, not to mention standard world wide.

I'd love to see something like this become pretty normal:


To some extent it's happening naturally already. Lots of devices just come with a USB cable these days for charging, but the higher specs of 3.1 could really push things along when it comes to other devices.

100watts/20v should mean you could charge your laptop properly with USB 3.1.