Asus Already Shipping USB 3.0 Equipped Motherboards

USB 3.0 is almost upon us. Asus has already built a USB 3.0-sporting motherboard and released it into the wild. The P6X58 is pictured above and you can see on the left side (the two blue rectangular holes) that it has a couple of the new speedy bus ports, along with slow old USB 2.0 on the other side.

As a Mac user, I’ll be happy when USB 3.0 finally comes to Apple machines. The on-again-off-again FireWire story is like the plot of a bad telenovela; I don’t much care what ports are on there as long as they actually stay there. Buying a FireWire device now seems dumb as the protocol will surely be dropped in favor of the new USB soon enough, and no wonder, with a theoretical maximum speed of 5 Gbit/s and a real-life expected rate of 400MBytes/s.

Asus motherboard may be the first, but it’s aimed at the higher end of gaming: There’s a slot for a Core i7 processor, six DDR3 memory slots and three PCI-X 2.0 slots. We’ll wait until the new protocol starts making it into mainstream consumer machines before we start ditching our old FireWire gear.

[XFastest via Engadget]