Netbooks with USB 3.0 or ExpressCard slots?

[PingSpike]

There don't seem to be a lot of netbooks (I'm just talking about anything 10-12" here, whether its really a netbook or not) with express card and I'm having a hard time finding which ones do. I'm not talking about the atom ones either though, they aren't particularly interesting to me. CULV or AMDs newer platforms.

USB 3.0 is even harder...I don't see many notebooks with that yet period. But maybe I'm not looking hard enough.

 

[Zap]

I think USB 3.0 will suddenly become more popular in 2012. That's when Intel integrates it into their chipsets. The Dell Latitude 13 that I just got (13.3" screen, but only 3.4 pounds) has an ExpressCard 34 slot.

 

[heymrdj]

There's not much reason to have those high speed peripherals attached to a slow atom processor. Atoms have enough of a hard time using high end SSD's, let alone pushing gb/s through a PCI-E format.

 

[Kivada]

Maybe not to an Atom based machine, but an AMD Neo based machine it should really have it but inexplicably don't, just as they should have required the XGP port...

That said, The cheapest small laptop I'm seeing on the egg with the express card 34 is the HP Probook 4310s, Which is more fail then the Dell...

 

[PingSpike]

Yeah, I was thinking you could attach a discrete graphics card through a port with that kind of bandwidth (still some performance hit) but there aren't many available. Intel seems to explicitly trying to prevent anything like that from happening with the atom since nvidia was forced to run over a pci-e 1x slot for the ION2 it seems. But even the nice CULV units lacked it as well as the old atoms.

I guess it wouldn't be that practical a setup now that I think more about it anyway. There are cheap + decent battery life units out there but that all come with terrible graphics options. This would sort of give you a compromise setup. That said, it seems like the few laptops that come with this port are either big or so expensive that its not worth it.

 

[California Roll]

Only notebooks I'm aware of with USB 3.0 are the Asus Bamboo series. U33JC (13") and U43JC (14"). They have 1 x 3.0 and 2 x 2.0 ports.

I was about to purchase the Asus U35JC (13", i3-370m) for $816 at Amazon because I really want the 13" form factor and don't want a DVD drive. Then I saw the U43JC (14", i5-45m0m) for $999 + $150 Amazon gift card. Amazon GC is same as cash for me so it's now $850 which makes this real tempting.

Unfortunately the 13" version is not out yet, otherwise I'd be all over that.

All 3 of these have Nvidia N310M switchable graphics. Not the greatest but way better than integrated graphics serviceable for games.