Question 1

Do you have to use a molex to power or is the pci slot enough ???

Accepted Answer

I have not tried it without the Molex plug connected so I do not know if it will work without it connected.  USB3 can supply up to 900 mA and with five ports that means that the card would have to draw up to 4.5 amps just to supply the ports.  That is a lot of current so that, I suspect, is why the need for the Molex power plug.

Question 2

Does the 20-pin socket on this fit the standard 20-pin usb 3 front panel connector, or is an adapter needed?

Accepted Answer

Yes -- this socket is the same that you find on many newer motherboards with USB-3.

Question 3

Is this Windows 10 Compatible?

Accepted Answer

Just updated to windows 10 last week and it is still working.

Question 4

is the pcb black or blue? trying to color match my current build. my board only has 1 usb 3.0 header but need another header.

Accepted Answer

Mine appears to be black, but it's hard to tell for sure looking inside by box.  They could change the color from batch to batch too.

Question 5

tried to find driver from download site on google, found 15 downloads 9 on top part and 6 on bottom part. which one is it?

Accepted Answer

Hi Robert,
Orico's support site is very confusing, they have all of there drivers for all of their products in a long list instead of having a link on the product page for its driver.  It had been a while since I installed mine so I looked it up on Google, in the search bar I just put PVU3-5021 driver and found this link Sorry NEW EGG wont allow links which is really stupid!  I will be filling complaints with them.
In case New Egg does not display the url  I noticed that Orico has a second page of drivers that I did not notice at first so if you go to their website and get to the driver downloads area make sure you are on the second page and just look for the model number and click on the + at the extreme right side of the model numbers, there are I think 4 in the PVU3 series.  The listing will expand and you will find a red download button.  Hope this is the correct driver and you do not encounter any issues with the installation.  I just downloaded it and unzipped the file and discovered that they are using a VIA chip  the driver file is VIA_XHCI_Driver_V4.70C_AP.exe.  I put this in the Google search bar including the .exe and found a link that VIA had posted on Softpedia for this chipset

I hope this helped and is the correct driver, I cannot do an install as I had put this card into a HTPC I built for my parents and it is at their house.
Robert B.

Question 6

Could You Use Sata Power Cable Instead Of Molex? Just Wondering.

Accepted Answer

The photo shows a SATA to Molex adapter.  Molex has a voltage SATA does not iirc, so in theory there could be a problem, but since the manufacturer provides an adaptor, the card must not need the Molex-only voltage level.

Question 7

can i use this to connect the case front panel slots on my haf xb evo?

Accepted Answer

Assuming you mean the version 1 of the cooler master haf xb Evo, then yes, it appears to have 2 standard USB 3.0 20-pin front panel connectors; which this card supports.

Question 8

Do these ports work for an Oculus Rift? Because I don't have enough ports and I need some more 3.0 ports.

Accepted Answer

There's no reason why they shouldn't work with the Oculus. When they're hooked up correctly they're just normal USB 3.0 ports.

Question 9

How many ports can sustain maximum transfer speeds simultaneously?  In other words, since all ports likely pull from a single pool of a maximum realistic speed of ~550MB/s, does the speed of connected devices [HDDs] decrease by a factor equal to the amount of devices connected (as I don't believe this card, or others like it, have individual cores for each USB port)?

Accepted Answer

Previous answer is totally wrong.  'Serial' means the data is sent one bit at a time over a single copper wire, or differential pair, or a set of differential pairs.  'Parallel' means one or more bytes are sent simultaneously along different wires or pairs.  This is a feature of the protocol and has nothing to do with the card in question.  All modern silicon implementations of almost any protocol handle the low-level communication in hardware -- that is, physical transistors in the real world that all operate in parallel, since the real world is parallel (as in parallel processing, not parallel communication protocol).  That doesn't mean there isn't a bottleneck in the overall design, like a single-core processor that all the USB interfaces actually connect to.  Note a (programmable) processor isn't even a technically necessary part of the design -- there's no reason a chip maker couldn't make a specialized ASIC that connects several USB ports to the PCI-e bus without a general purpose CPU built in at all.

But, in all likelihood, on an x1 card, the on-card circuitry is probably not the bottleneck.  This appears to be a PCIe 2.0 card, which has a maximum throughput of 500 MB/s.  Coincidentally, that is the exact top speed of one USB 3.0 port.  So I'm afraid the maximum number of devices you can plug into this card and operate simultaneously without sacrificing (maximum) bandwidth is exactly one.  In the real world however most devices don't come close to this individually, and even when they do, how often are you pulling more than 250 MB/s sustained from two of them at the same time -- and for how long?  I would think the overhead of translating PCI-e -> USB -> SATA and back again on each little I/O request, and the added overhead of multiplexing multiple HDDs on a single card, would be the performance killer.  Go eSATA or PCIe -> eSATA and cut out the middleman, while cutting out the bandwidth limit with the same stone.

Question 10

where can i get a driver for this card (can't find the disc that came with it)?

Accepted Answer

You can download it from the Orico site at:
http://oricoonline.us/support.php?id=4896

Questions & Answers