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How many ports on usb3 pci-e card would be better?
- Thread starter harly
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How many ports do you actually require? I mean my PC has about 6 USB 3.0 ports and I've used 2 at once maximum. Maybe a 4 port PCI-E card would be the sweet spot for future expansion? I don't know what you intend to use these extra ports for. Do you plug in a lot of external data? If it's just peripherals/charging, then an expansion card is pointless.
Aquinus
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Any amount that floats your boat. Just remember that you're sharing bandwidth on the PCI-E slot which probably isn't an issue in most cases. I would say find the best deal with the best reviews.
After buying several different make of USB3 PCI-Express cards, I finally settled on the Inateck 4-Port version as opposed to the 2-Port one. Yes the 4-Port is dearer, but look at this way - the 2-Port card takes up the same space as the 4-Port and you lose out on two extra USB3 ports...
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wouldn't 4 ports hit a wall using only PCI-Express x1 interface?
just curious here, ino that Asus went PCI-Express x4 on their U3S6 card i got one of those, and it ran sweet no issues at all with both usb 3.0 busy with drives together with the 2 sata connectors at the same time.
just curious here, ino that Asus went PCI-Express x4 on their U3S6 card i got one of those, and it ran sweet no issues at all with both usb 3.0 busy with drives together with the 2 sata connectors at the same time.
Aquinus
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It will only bottleneck it if you saturate the bus. So even writing to 4 external/flash drives at 100MB/s wouldn't saturate the bus @ 1x assume it's running at PCI-E 2.0, 1.1 might be pushing it since it only offers 250MB/s on one lane @ 1.1 where 2.0 is twice that at 500MB/s.
All in all, for most use cases I see it being fine. The internal USB 3.0 on my board goes through 3 of the 8 PCI-E lanes off the PCH. One lane per hub and each hub has 2 ports on the back panel and a header for an additional two elsewhere per hub.