Sweex 2 Port Superspeed USB 3 PCI Express adapter card

This small expansion card (model US110) is designed to fit into a desktop computer - it's the equivalent of the same manufacturer's US111 expansion which is designed for laptops.

Both add two USB 3 sockets to the computer, the advantage of which is that they are faster for transferring data, when paired with a suitable USB 3 external storage device. You can still plug an older USB 2 device into one of these sockets but it won't benefit from any speed improvement.

In theory USB 3 is several times faster than the older version of the standard but in practice you're likely to see transfer speeds around twice as fast as before - that's what we saw in our tests with this card. The discrepancy is down to other ‘bottlenecks' around the computer which USB 3 doesn't get around.

Fitting the card required opening the desktop PC's case, and of course it requires the computer to have a spare PCI Express socket, but otherwise it was painless. The supplied driver CD didn't work on our version of Windows (the 64-bit Windows 7) so we had to go to the Sweex website to download the drivers, which was slightly confusing.

However, given its bargain-basement price we're willing to overlook that flaw.