ASUS [2357] have announced that they are pushing USB 3.0 in a big way by including the standard on each and every Eee PC that they make from now on. As well as creating Eee PC USB 3.0 netbooks the company will also include USB 3.0 ports on ASUS PC’s and the Eee Box devices.
This move will help bring the new USB 3.0 faster standard in to mainstream although it could be a while till hard drives and other hardware can keep up with those speeds.
“Asustek also claimed that the PLX high-speed transmission chip that the company adopts on its motherboard can boost the transmission speed of its USB 3.0 technology to 74.38% faster than its competitors.”
It isn’t clear when the first netbook, PC or Eee Box will show up with USB 3.0 ports, but once they start showing up all models after that will come as standard with the new ports.
Via: Digitimes
Too bad ASUS’s claim turned out to be just so much hot air.
After leading us to believe that the much delayed ASUS 1215n would have
USB 3 ports, it turns out that it doesn’t. Even now if you look at the brochure on
their web site, you’ll be led to believe the 1215n has USB 3 ports…but it doesn’t.
Makes me wonder if I should consider buying anything from such a company.
It amazes me…we’ve got two EEE and they’re two of the best built machines we’ve ever had. High quality parts and construction, a few annoyances, like soldered ram and SSD on one, but fast enough system components to overcome Atom deficiencies and basically work like desktop systems at home (3 monitor setups without significant slowdowns). In fact, the old little one was our primary television set for a few months of living on the road because it had a clear screen that could be viewed from any angle and worked well with our usb tv and various antenna and cable connections. Can install a variety of snappy linux OS’s in the SDHC port, or go with the Windows XP on the SSD or Hard drive. Battery life is really, really good on these systems too. We even run windows 2000 and linux inside of virtualbox on top of xp or easypeasy without much problem.
But, with all of that, their support websites are a maze, and sometimes don’t work. They’re littered with terrible scripts, instead of being straight html. They’re very region specific. The announced products and releases vary so much, as partially detailed above. You can’t count on published specs when purchasing or upgrading any of these systems, as you pretty much have to open them up to see what’s inside, for which they like to place void warranty seals throughout. The screens are prone to breaking under normal travel conditions in padded laptop cases, which kind of kills the whole portability thing. The Intel video works fine for Office programs, Chrome, Opera, an surprisingly even basic Photoshop editing, but you’ll be sorry if you try to do any video editing, watch youtube, use Firefox, or play games.
Basically, I’d have to highly recommend ASUS EEE netbooks because they’re good products, but with the caveat to be careful about what you’re really getting. My primary recommendations are to 1) wait for full USB 3.0 support, or at the least eSata-III support before buying, because they’re not very expandable otherwise, 2) Get one with at least 1280 horizontal resolution, because it’s getting harder and harder to programs that are compatible with 1024 screens, and 3) Get one with some kind of video help, because Intel junk just won’t do; the Nvidia chip is good or wait for a AMD Fusion chips to hit the EEE. In other words, I’ll be enthusiastically upgrading our EEEs when these conditions are met because of how happy I’ve been with the quality of previous generation of EEEs.