I've just installed a USB 2.0 5 port card in my 3 year-old PC (Athlon
XP1800) and it does not seem to work at 2.0 speeds. Does my motherboard have
to have something else installed on it for the card to work, or is the board
too old to accept the USB 2.0 format? Sorry, I don't know the type of M/B
The motherboard type should be irrelevant as to the speed of the USB
connectors - that's the beauty of having an expansion bus (you can add
any kind of functionality you want so long as it fits, though it nay
need CPU power)
There are 2 main things that I can think of:
1 = install drivers for USB 2.0, as no OS before WinXP SP1 supports it
(install them anyways even if you have XP-SP1)
2 = the PCI bus is incapable of supplying the full 480 MB/s sustained
transfer rate of USB 2.0. It has a maximum of 133 MB/s, shared amongst
all of your PCI devices (so don't expect your LAN or sound to operate
smoothly with the USB card in full swing).
How do you know that the card is not operating at 2.0 speeds - do you
get an error message that says something to the effect of 'a USB 2.0
device has been plugged into a USB 1.1 port' or is it by timing the
transfer of a known amount of data?