NZXT IU01 USB 2.0 Internal Expansion Hub Review

Testing The NZXT IU01 USB Hub

To try out the NZXT IU01 USB hub expansion device we tossed it into our test system that is based around the Gigabyte EX58-Extreme motherboard and an Intel Core i7 975 processor with three GeForce GTX 280 video cards running in SLI, six 2GB 2000MHz Kingston HyperX DDR3 memory modules for a total of 12GB of system memory. The system is powered by the Corsair HX1000W power supply and kept cool by a custom dual 120mm water cooling loop. This Intel X58 chipset based system should have no problem testing the NZXT IU01!

To see if the USB controller being used on the USB 2.0 expansion hub performs close to seen directly from the motherboard header we did a quick speed test on both the NZXT IU01 and the Gigabyte EX58-Extreme motherboard. For this test we used the fastest portable USB device that we have and that is the Super Talent 64GB RAIDDrive! The image above shows how the Super Talent RAIDDrive does on the NZXT IU01 expansion hub. AS you can see the read speed was 36.4MB/s with a burst speed of 37.6MB/s

Plugging the SuperTalent RAIDDrive straight into the motherboard I/O panel saw scores of 36.8MB/s read and a bust speed of 37.6MB/s. AS you can see using the NZXT IU01 doesn’t greatly impact performance as we didn’t observe a significant performance decrease by adding this device with the additional controller to our test system.

In case you are wondering no special drivers need to be installed for the NZXT IU01 USB Expansion device to work as it uses the standard Microsoft drivers that come standard in the Windows operating system. If you open up Device Manager you can find the NZXT hub listed under ‘Generic USB Hub’ having 7 available ports. This is interesting as NZXT is marketing the device as having six internal and two external USB expansions. Shouldn’t 8 ports be available?

We wouldn’t be doing our job unless we checked and after finding all the right pieces we had eight USB 2.0 Flash drives running on the NZXT IU01 and functional in Windows with no issues at all. This device gives you some serious USB 2.0 flexibility and is great for those that need something like this!

Also noticed that each port can source 500mA instead of 100mA max on some devices. This is thanks to the fact that the card is powered by the additional 4-pin molex connector! This is good as many media card readers, cell phones and other large power devices need more than 100mA per port. Even running NVIDIA Stereoscopic 3D requires 400mA for example.