Gadgetory

hey Ron this is Steve from gamers Nexus tonight and today we're reviewing the initech 4005 USB 3.0 PCIe expansion card that is a mouthful you may have heard me say the word initech which for those of you who know office space will be wondering if their building has burned down I assure you this is a different in attack in fact it uses an A instead of an ISO perhaps it was not burned down by Milton was that his name I think his name was Milton anyway sweet hide staplers aside the initech PCIe device that was sent to me is a four port USB 3.0 device it's just an expansion card it plugs into your motherboard on a PCIe x1 and can be accessed through the expansion slots in the back it adds four USB 3.0 ports to your setup so if you're using an AM 3 board and three plus board whatever and you don't have USB 3.0 onboard for your front panel header on the case then this is the sort of thing you would want to have or if you just need more ports now the concern with any device that is similar to this is that you will lose performance because the controller it is assumed if it is using a non card controller and not the board might be actually subpar compared to what you get on the board it depends how it's it's communicating with the USB 3 controller and what it has on its own device so I tested this with three different configurations technically four but we're only talking about three here and two of those are single stick tests meaning one stick I used a Corsair Voyager 32 gigabyte USB 3 from O stick and test that with crystal disk and HD tune plus and then I also used a single stick of Kingston's data traveler ultimate which is of course actually not the best one they have one more that's predator but it's basically the best because it's called ultimate that is a 32 gigabyte very fast USB 3.0 expansion device and then I did a third test which is dual stick testing meaning two sticks in the device at the same time both saturated Foley so it should saturate the bus a bit more and test if the controller still performs well under full load from multiple devices doing multiple transfers so that's what we tested I did a fourth test that is not shown here because the results are similar of four devices connected at the same time all USB 3.0 all saturating the bus let's start with the single stick test on Corsairs voyager 32 by USB 3.0 card oh ho that is a lot of words so in this test I ran crystal disk mark for this particular one and we can see the random right for kqd 32 and then read and I also did tune-up one test which if you're a gamer random write and read and 4kq depth one is what you're gonna see more but we're talking about transfers for USB devices here not for SSDs so it's a bit different random writes 512 K which are pretty really not too common and then we have sequential write and sequential read which are going to be for your larger files like transferring movies stuff like that if you transfer big files through your USB devices and this is the one you care about most in these tests I'm not even going to read through them all because as you can see they are all basically the same every difference is within margin of error here there is no groundbreaking report that I have for you in fact in a single device scenario in a text expansion card performs basically flawlessly I technically had to send me a second card their first one was malfunctioning when I used sticks in any type of synthetic or real-world tests because they would disconnect but they sent me a second card same exact model and this one works perfectly so looking at the Kingston device which performs better than Corsairs voyager so should theoretically push limits more it's the same story all the differences are within margin of error and really the initech and onboard devices kind of go back and forth which with each other which tells you that the difference is really more in how the test software is handling its testing and how the device is receiving the testing as opposed to the actual controller on each device so once again within margin of error and it performs basically perfectly so good on in attack therefore that looking at the dual stick test we finally get some more interesting numbers and this one the random reads and writes are pretty uninteresting but looking down to the higher speed transfer options like random read 512k you see that there's actually a big difference there's almost a 40 megabytes per second difference in transfer rate between the initech device and the on-board USB 3.0 ports and what this means is that however in attack is communicating with USB 3.0 controller it is not handling saturation as well as the onboard controller which is probably much higher end because it's a high onboard so that is the story of that and you can see that this follows through with sequential reads so it's really just reads here this the writes are performing just fine it's reads that are an issue and reads we lose almost 80 megabytes per second and speed now is this a huge deal well it really depends if you're just transferring movie files music files things like that and you need those extra ports you might as well just buy this because it's 80 megabytes per second out of 200 yes it hurts but if that's the only option you gotta take what you can get right you can spend a little bit more and get something higher end so it ultimately depends on your budget and in terms of budget the card I tested the expansion card is actually only 16 dollars so if you're on a budget this is performing extremely well considering it's cheap it's from a relatively unknown brand it's probably supplied from somewhere in Asia and then just rebrand it as an attack but hey if it works it's cheap who cares it seems to be doing the job now if you're going to be doing a lot of high saturation data transfer with all ports saturated you're gonna have some speed and performance degradation but that's just the risk you take so in that scenario what you need to do is look for a better better motherboard or look for a higher-end controller and card in one unit which will cost you a bit more money probably closer to the 30 to 50 dollar range because you're gonna need more throughput so that's just the nature of it if you're the kind of person who's just looking for 1 to 4 slots and you're really not pushing true USB 3.0 constant throughput on all these devices the initech 4000 5 PCIe card is really just fine for your needs and at 16 dollars the price is pretty damn good so I would recommend this if you are one of those people if you need more speed don't buy it buy something better because you're just gonna regret the purchase that is all I have to say about this click the link in the description below for the full article please subscribe if you like this content it really helps us quite a lot like and comment and I will see you all next time peace