Asus has World's First Motherboard with USB 3.0

Asus rolled out the worlds first Motherboard incorporating SuperSpeed USB 3.0 this week. The Asus Xtreme Design P7DP55DE-E Premium is based on an Intel P55 Express chipset. Yes, even tough Intel recently indicated that it would not be incorporating USB 3.0 technology into its chipsets until 2011, Asus uses a third-party USB 3.0 controller as a work-around. USB 3.0 transfer speed is 5000 Mbps, compared to 480 Mbps for USB 2.0. Making your computer forward compatible with future technology is all well and good, but you have to ask yourself if it is worth the extra money, as there are no USB 3 compatible devices to plug in to it yet.

The motherboard also features two 6Gb per second SATA III ports, and guess what, there are no hard drives yet available supporting that standard, either. Solid State Drives that will benefit the most from SATA III wont be coming until 2010 Q1, and they are sure to be priced at a premium. In any case, the new board features 2 usb 3.0 pors, ten USB 2.0 ports, two PCIe x16 graphic card slots, PLX Technology PEX8613-BA50BC PCI-E bridge chip, six 3Gb per second SATA ports, two 6Gb per second SATA ports, 2 Gigabit Ethernet ports and will ship with Windows 7 drivers. The 6GB per second SATA interface leads ASUS to boast of super rapid transfer speeds, a 20GB High Definition movie file is claimed to be transferred in less than seventy seconds.

Price and Availability: available November 2009 for $299.