Enermax are well known for their high quality power supplies, however some of you wont be aware they also produce a line of gadgets and peripherals such as the unit we have for review today. Just about everything you buy nowadays to connect externally to your PC comes with a USB connector so extra ports are always handy -- enter the Enermax USB hub.

The Hub

driverheaven uses custom javascripts to display high resolution images, some software may class these as popups.

The Enermax hub comes packaged in a brightly coloured pack which tells you everything you need to know about the hub. You can also see the hub at the top of the pack.

On the rear of the package is more detailed info on the unit such as data transfer rates.

Here’s a shot of the hub itself, you can see the unit is very small, ideal for this type of device. For comparison purposes we have placed the unit beside a floppy disk to show how small it actually is.

On the front of the unit there are 4 usb 2.0 ports which are topped with blue LED’s to show activity of the ports. The main area of the casing is made from aluminium and so is very light.

On the rear of the unit the power connector is attached as well as the usb cable which connects to your PC.

As far as the bundle goes the Enermax USB hub comes with everything your likely to need. A power adaptor, and USB cable.

With our unit we also received a leather wallet with space for the USB hub as well as a few bank cards…a handy extra that makes the unit all the more portable.

Performance

For this test we have connected the USB hub to our A8N SLI and tested file transfers to and from the Corsair Flashvoyager USB drive. We then connected the drive to the Enermax Hub and recorded the time taken to do the same transfers.

	350mb to Drive	350mb From Drive
FlashVoyager Only	26.71 s	21.84 s
Via Enermax	27.58 s	21.41 s

	30mb to Drive	30mb From Drive
FlashVoyager Only	2.39s	2.0s
Via Enermax	2.45s	2.0s

Conclusion

The Enermax Aluminium USB hub is a great product, it is well designed and portable which is exactly what you would want from a hub. The Enermax module looks much nicer than the plastic models which saturate the market. The device was a breeze to set up though, no drivers needed on XP and within seconds of plugging it in we were up and running.

With regards to hub performance, this Enermax model excels and connecting our usb drive resulted in no noticeable drop in performance regardless of the file size transferred.