To be blunt, this difference is minor enough to be considered negligible. Once again, there is a bit of a performance hit by using the SIIG’s PCI Express x1 lane instead of the best of the best out there (the Asus U3S6 USB 3.0 card). By themselves, these issues are not deal-breakers and some may not even apply to your situation but all three are issues you need to be aware of before purchasing this $100 kit. I am not a fond lover of plastic bay adapters, and to be blunt, for the asking price SIIG really should have gone with a much more durable metal one. The last issue, the asking price, is eyebrow-raising especially when you consider the fact that the front 5.25″ bay adapter is made from plastic. I dislike x1 adapter cards as they do limit the speed of what you can get out of the two ports, but in all likelihood, this is a non-issue as the four front ports are what you will be using most of the time and they all share one USB 3.0 port bandwidth. To be honest, the only three issues I have with the combination kit are the x1 PCI-E interface, only one internal port, and the plastic 5.25″ bay adapter.
Pci usb 3 card and front panel free#
I like this added flexibility as sometimes a MOLEX cable is easier to free up than SATA and in other builds the opposite is true. Unlike the external one though this one can either be powered by a MOLEX or SATA port cable so no power brick is needed, just don’t plug in both the SATA and MOLEX or bad things will happen. Also nice to see, is much like the SIIG external hub I looked at a while back, this bad boy is a powered hub. This makes this hub VERY flexible and very easy to install. What this means is you can use it in either a free “floppy drive” bay on your case OR a 5.25″ bay. The other nice thing about this hub is that it is in fact a 3.5″ bay hub that comes with a 5.25″ bay adapter. Since the PCI Express card which makes up the other half of this combination kit has an internal USB 3.0 port, this means you do not have to snake a cable outside your case to get four front-mounted SuperSpeed USB ports. Much like the SIIG external 4 port USB 3.0 hub, I recently looked at, the 4 port 3.5″/5.25″ bay hub uses a single USB 3.0 port and turns it into FOUR via its use of a single VIL810 controller chip. Though without the other half of this combination 2-in-1 kit, the USB 3.0 PCI-E adapter card by itself, is not all that useful and this is where the other half comes into play. In the meantime, this small card is one special USB 3.0 adapter card that makes it very impressive. Of course, as time goes by motherboard and cases will start coming with “proper” internal USB 3.0 headers and front panel connectivity options so this niche will disappear. This means that you can use any USB 3.0 cable you own to connect to the front USB 3.0 port(s), but as time goes by its usefulness will diminish. While the power interface is different, what really makes this card special is the addition of an internal USB 3.0 header port albeit it still is an “external” style port and not a true internal port. The first is a fairly typical looking, NEC / Renesas-based PCI-E x1 interface SuperSpeed USB adapter card, just one which uses a fairly non-standard SATA power port for additional power input rather than a MOLEX connector. As you can see, this combination kit consists of two separate but equally important components.