asrock usb 3.1 card/ A+C bandwith

You can see the ASRock USB 3.1/A+C AIC product page here:

http://www.asrock.com/mb/spec/card.asp?Model=USB%203.1/A%2bC

This card is physically a PCIe x4 interface connection as you know. Electrically, this card is x2, so uses two PCIe lanes, and is compatible with PCI Express 1.1, 2.0 and 3.0 specifications.

Regarding compatibility with a non-ASRock board, I am not 100% sure that this card will be compatible. Since this card must comply with USB standards, which should be used by any mother board manufacture, IMO it should work in any modern mother board.

Availability of this card depends upon where you live in the world. This card is being sold by an online retailer in the USA now, as you can see here:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813998030

A review of this card on the page above said it worked fine in a non-ASRock board.

So far as I can tell, nothing yet but

Gunslinger wrote: I actually considered adding one of these to the build i've just done, in the end i didn't bother, simply for that reason above - there are no devices available right now that i would have to get, and there will be a number of cards hitting the market soon, form the likes of Startech, and the price will come down, whilst the choices go up :) Also the uses my machine was planned for i saw no need to get on. It did surprised me that there was no supplementary power connector on it, i was expecting it to need one, rather than trying to draw everything through the PCIe socket, and that might have assisted in powered sockets when thePC was off as well. Another thing to consider, as with all these cards, is the throughput bandwidth wise, i've seen a number of these types of things, such as USB 3.0 and Firewire cards that give additional internal as well as external sockets, but when you add up the combined abilities of said sockets, you find the interface they are connected to can't sustein them at full speed when used together !

You made some good points here in general, although they all don't apply to this USB 3.1 AIC.

PCIe x4 cards are limited to 25W of power by the PCIe standard. This card is rated at a charge current of three Amps or 15W at 5V. Assuming the card will use 25W, only one device can be charged at 15W. That is, if the device being charged will even draw that much current.

Bandwidth issues can appear as you described, but as we have seen over and over in the specs of any type of storage or storage related devices, the magic words "Up to...". Which does not mean, as this is read by many people as "It will provide...".

The 5Gb/s or 10Gb/s of one PCIe 2.0 or 3.0 lane is the raw throughput of bits under the best circumstances. In actual use, data transfer has protocol overhead that reduces the amount of data transmitted. Plus these specs are in bits, not bytes.

Add in cards like these are limited by the PCIe lanes provided by the board's chipset and CPU, as well as how many of those lanes are in use by other interfaces. If AIC cards like this were built as x8, users would complain they use PCIe lanes they rather allocate to their GPU.

The two USB 3.1 ports on this card will still be limited by the two PCIe lanes that they use. But usually the main limitation is the bandwidth of the storage devices connected to these ports. Most USB 3.0 flash drives have relatively poor write speeds. What we don't remember is USB flash drives are basically TLC NAND flash devices similar to SSDs but using the USB interface (no AHCI or NCQ as in SATA) and no TRIM, unlike SSDs. The poor write speeds of USB flash drives are inherent to the limitations of the USB interface and realities of NAND flash memory.

Gunslinger wrote: as for the Lane allocation... i'm not a gamer, so i see things from the other side of the fence so to speak, too much emphasis on games, and allocating too many resources to GPU's  (i better run away and hide after saying that before i get stoned to death lol) EDIT: on an entertaining note, while trying to edit this for typos, i make a load of those, i hit the wrong button..... it seems you can not thank yourself for your post