USB 3.1 Heaven For Everyone?

The current Asus list for officially supported USB 3.1 motherboards is decidedly miniscule and can be easily surmarised to just the latest Intel chipsets released in the past year or so... viz. strictly X99 and Z97 only (plus 2 token B85 models).

Official Support List From Asus

 "The USB 3.1 add-on card is only compatible with selected ASUS motherboards"

Another proviso, Asus also wants you to flash to the latest BIOS release for these models as well to be officially supported. So what happens to the countless earlier "unsupported" models on older BIOS then, seriously out of luck or what? Let's see.

Asus Z87-A Motherboard

Being a Z87 based model which is neither the latest nor greatest chipset from Asus, this is definitely NOT on the officially sanctioned list nor having any updated USB3.1 recent BIOS. In fact, the test set is running an old BIOS from way back August 2014.

OK, here goes the Asus USB3.1 Type A card into the Z87-A test rig...

Hey, it's properly detected with auto-installed Asmedia XHCI 1.1 drivers! (then updated to the latest).

Hmm, doesn't seem to be different in any way from the officially supported Asus X99-A mobo I had tested on earlier.

Next, the Asus USB3.1 enclosure is attached... seems OK so far!

Now, Q & D benched it and then let's try boosting with Asus Turbo UASP drivers, it's looking good still...

Benching it! 

As a quick and dirty bench, the AS SSD Benchmark comes in very useful here cos it reports both the driver used as well as condensing all results into a single benchmark score (for what it is worth) for a  comparison.

USB 3.1 Stock

USB 3.1 Boosted

Woah hitting 750+ MB/s, definitely looking good!

Initial Impressions

Everything's coming up roses, very nice! Now, just where are the cost effective USB 3.1 peripherals for everyone? lol