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According to the specifications of the USB-IF, a general USB 2.0 port can provide up to 500mA of power, whereas, a USB3.0 port can actually provide 900mA of power. Because of the power delivery capabilities of the USB standard, today, there are a multitude of chargers and 5v power adapter products available on the market that use USB as their connection and charging interface. Most of you probably have some USB device such as a small fan, LED light, cell phone or PSP adapter plugged into your PC at the moment?
While it may seem that if it has a USB plug, it will work correctly with your computer, you need to look closely at the fine print. For example, the cooler cup below requires more than 1A of power, but as mentioned above USB 2.0 is only able to deliver a maximum of 5000mA (.5A), which is not enough to power this device.
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 The package clearly shows that the device needs 1.5A of power.
I tried reading through the entire USB 2.0/3.0 specification guide books to see how a USB device requests power and came across an interesting point.
The USB device has a controller onboard which tells the computer how much power it needs. For example: I'm keyboard I don't need too much power!! Please only give me 100mA. Or, I'm an USB hard drive who needs more power, please only give me 500mA.
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| Page 178 of the USB 2.O specifications mentioning the power restrictions. |
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Page 432 from the USB 3.0 specifications explains the relationship between the USB power demand and the main controller. |
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USB is a useful interface for devices because USB allows it to easily access power on the main system whenever it needs it. Although devices may connect with the main system host controller, the main system host controller is not the one who decides how much power to send to the device, it is the controller on the device which makes the power request. |
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The USB 2.0/3.0 specifications manuals talk about over-current protection: The devices can not exceed 5A. If more than that, the host controller will cut off the power supply directly to the USB devices. |
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As you can see from the above text, the host controller is in charge of shutting down the power if it exceeds the 5A limit. However, some manufacturers, in order to be on the safe side, may set that limit even lower, which is not something we can really test here. This is where GIGABYTE's unique 3x USB Power design is able to solve the power supply problems such as the USB cooler and warmer cup mentioned above. On GIGABYTE motherboard packaging and in the BIOS setting screen, you will notice 333. The first 3 stands for support USB 3.0 support, the second stands for SATA3 support and the last 3 stands for 3x USB Power.
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| >This is a unique selling point! |
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In general, a USB 2.0 hub port has a current limitation of 500mA, but GIGABYTE motherboards equipped with 3x USB Power supply are able to provide 1.5A for each USB 2.0 port. Additionally, USB 3.0 hub ports Moreover the USB3.0 hub port can even provide up to 2.7A of power for USB 3.0 devices.
The 12 USB 2.0 ports on a GIGABYTE motherboard can provide a total of 18A of power and the 2 USB3.0 ports are able to provide a total of 5.4A of power. This means that a GIGABYTE 3x Power designed motherboard are able to deliver a total of 23.4A of power. |
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| This is the equipment for testing USB device power. |
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This is an USB hub which contains 12 USB ports. We can use a power meter to measure USB devices power usage.
As the image above shows, the USB hub's LCD light needs 10mA of power. It may seem strange that the power meter shows negative mA, but we can solve the problem during the experiment.
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First, I plugged in a mobile phone, a PSP and and an iPod. Both the mobile and the iPod are already fully charged, so the electronic meter only shows the PSP needing 350mA for charging. |
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| Coffee cup warmer/cooler plates |
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The coffee cup warmer/cooler plate allows you to keep your coffee warm in winter and with the thermoelectric cooling chip designs, it also allows you to keep your dinks cool by just switching the power. For cooling, it looks like the plate needs just 1A of power.
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This USB vacuum cleaner with built-in LED light which can light up dark places needs less than 500mA of power. But it seems to have problems vacuuming up even eraser dust at a normal mode. |
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After switching to turbo mode, the machine seems to operate better, but the amount of current did not increase by much, only to 300mA. |
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A wool fabric electric blanket is the best choice to keep you warm for winter and it only needs 400mA. |
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An ultrasonic humidifier, a necessity product for dry weather needs 240mA of power.
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These are some useful USB LED Torch lights.
Recently, it has become very difficult to read the labels on transistors, but the LED light has solved my problem!
The LED Torch light needs a total of 180mA, which is 36mA for each.
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So I plugged all of these devices into the USB hub at once, but the total current only reached 3.17A. So, I bought something that need more power for further experimentation.
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A funny animal feet style electronic foot warmer heater which allows you to keep your feet extremely warm with a special heating design.
I asked the salesperson: "Is the price ¥1980 for a pair?" He answered: "¥1980 for one, but it works well enough for keeping both feet warm."
After using, I have to agree with him!
This ideal USB Foot Warmer needs 500mA of power.
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A general thermoelectric cooling chip designed heating plate above can produce a temperature between 50 ℃ and 60℃,
But what can a heating plate made from wire do? We are very looking forward to see the result!!
What!!! It only uses 530mA.
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Even adding these two products, the total electronic current is just slightly increased to 4.25A!! So I guess I need more USB devices. |
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This motor fan (which I have no information for) was bought from the "Sengoku" electronic store. Without any product description it is hard to tell how much power the device needs.
It seems like it needs 180mA to turn on, but the wind was quite weak when I use the USB to operate it.
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After adding these devices, it still can't achieve the over current amount as I need! So before the experiment begins, I'll need to add another 9.8volt power and 4A more to drive a thermoelectric cooling chip.
Because the other side was too hot, I used a heat sink to reduce the temperature.
Using half Rated voltage, it is about 135mA! Wow~ 1350mA, quite a high power requirement!
It will need 3 USB ports to provide enough power to operate, but with GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3R, you just need one USB port.
After connecting all the devices, we have reached a total current number of 5.78A, and it would exceed the USB standard of 5A. So, let's begin the experiment with GIGABYTE a GA-P55A-UD3R.
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| Orion and full moon as the background for GA-P55A-UD3R experiment |
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Even though it was cold outside, the sky was bright, so we can have an outdoor experiment.
Yes indeed, we are using a GA-P55A-UD3R
in the case.
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Because the outdoor temperature is only 3℃,
we don't need any additional cooling for the CPU and VGA!
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It is really hard to connect the devices when my hand was cold and frozen!! But as you can see, we have connected all of the USB devices to the machine as previously mentioned and it shows the total current number of 5.8A. Surprisingly the machine still remains functioning!
Due to the cold weather outside, I went back inside to finish the rest of the experiment. As the result shows, the machine was still operating with the total current of 5A and without any noises or strange smells after a large number of devices were connected to the machine. Most importantly, Windows7 maintained stable in operation. That's the really cool part!
I have tested PSP charging with both a traditional motherboard and GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3R. Through this experiment, we have noticed that the PSP power need for charging is less than 500mA, so the charging time didn't show any different between the traditional motherboard and GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3R.
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Connect all the devices!!
The whole system is operating in a green mode!!
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This experiment proved that the GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3R USB ports can provide more than 5A of power. But in fact, the USB is designed to achieve 23.4A. In order to achieve such a high power draw, I might need to connect the microwave, oven and air-conditioning to test it. But that might be dangerous since I doubt that the housed electrical wire can really afford such strong power, hmm…. I guess I'll need to find a thicker electrical cable. |
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>This guy! It really has a completely different speed and strength |
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Today, there are many articles testing the speed of USB 3.0 and SATA3.0 on GIGABYTE GA-P55A-UD3R motherboards. These help confirm there is a definite advantage for both. In the future, high-definition video clips will become increasingly popular, the file size will also become larger, the capacity hard drives and other storage devices will also continue to increase! You might say you may not use these functions very often, but these new technologies can shorten the time of file transmission, as well as speed up the time for file copying or removal. This is really an advantage for the consumer.
It is worth it to mention that the GA-P55A-UD3R USB's unique USB design provides three times the power than a standard USB power supplies. Compared to a traditional USB port, GIGABYTE's USB 3X Power can provide more power to more devices all at the same time.
To learn more about GIGABYTE USB 3X Power, please click here:
http://www.gigabyte.com/microsite/102/data/mb-usb3.htm#power3x |
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All intellectual property rights, including without limitation to copyright and trademark of this work and its derivative works are the property of, or are licensed to,
GIGA-BYTE TECHNOLOGY CO., LTD. Any unauthorized use is strictly prohibited. |
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