Has anyone ever had trouble with NEC chipset USB 2.0 cards? I recently acquired one for my PIII system but it just wrecks stability. Instant reboot when I plug in a USB drive but also random reboots if I don't. My PCI slots are pretty much all full and I wonder if it's just too much with the added USB 2.0 card. I've read some stuff regarding issues when using a USB 2.0 card and a SB Live! at the same time. Is there something to that?

Compatibility with any USB card in these early motherboards are known to be problematic. Try using a different driver and see if that helps.

Been trying a bunch of drivers yesterday and I didn't get anywhere unfortunately. It either freezes the PC immediately or some other card stops working and the PC starts freezing later on. I think I'll just give up and use network shares, since they are pretty much the same speed.

What motherboard chipset are you using?

It's an Asus TUSL2-C with Intel 815EP chipset. The USB 2.0 card is an Adaptec AUA-4000C. Honestly with the way it behaves (freezes the system anytime it's asked to do anything) I wouldn't rule out a defective card.

That's a very late chipset. I would expect it to work fine. When I have USB issues, it's usually with chipsets like 440 and earlier.

Another +1 for NEC chips. I picked up this SiiG branded card today. USB 2.0 works fine under Windows 98 (NUSB36E.EXE) and OpenBSD 7.0.

Attached are benches against the onboard USB 1.0 VIA chipset (FIC VA-503+), K6-2 500MHz, using my fastest Sandisk Extreme USB 3.0 USB drive. It's about 0.9 MB/s vs 7.5 MB/s. One of the devices shows up with the multimedia icon, I thought that was interesting.

that's the exact card i have, just no siig sticker. performance is lackluster, but i'm getting twice what you get on amd761/kt133a systems.

smeezekitty wrote on 2014-04-27, 07:58:

swaaye wrote:

What cards have you guys used that work reliably on old boards? I have a card with a VIA controller and it isn't even detected by 440BX or AMD 750. It does work on newer chipsets like KT266 though.

I am surprised even on my 486 board both opti 82c261 and VIA vt83c572 are both picked up. I cannot verify functionality because Win95 has terrible USB support
but once I upgrade the RAM I can test it. A P2/P3 era chipset should have no problems with USB cards

Hi, for DOS 6.22, there are some drivers for usb hub, usb keyboard, usb mouse and usb pendrive / storage devices,
it´s surreal using the good old norton commander with the F: usb drive!!!
slow, ....but works

i used an nec board on my 440bx. flawless
NEC D720101

I managed to use an Ultra UM5273A-20 six-port (4x external, 2x internal) card and Windows 98 found all the drivers it needed from the CD. It uses some sort of Nvidia chipset on the card itself. I needed the internal ports to hook up an NZXT header hub and connect my case USBs.

Originally I tried using StarTech's PCIUSB7 card with four external, one internal, and a set of headers on the card (which would allow me to go directly from the hub to the card without having to adapt them into type A connectors) for a total of 7 ports but it had trouble and didn't behave the wanted (even with the drivers I found on StarTech's site and despite the fact they support 9x). According to the spec sheet it uses the VT6212 chipset from Via so...I dunno, maybe that's not that 9x compatible after all.

Adding More USB Ports to Retro Motherboards

By the way, I thought I had posted this but I don’t see it.

this is what I am doing these days, I like it because it gives me all the ports that I need and doesn’t slow the system down

VIA controllers do not work with SS7 systems at all ?

TonyStark wrote on 2022-07-22, 00:37:

VIA controllers do not work with SS7 systems at all ?

Super glitchy has been my experience on the combo card I have

TonyStark wrote on 2022-07-22, 00:37:

VIA controllers do not work with SS7 systems at all ?

I had a bog-standard VIA card which was pretty stable on my P5A. I now have a NEC card in there and I can't see differences - didn't make any performance tests, though.

TonyStark wrote on 2022-07-22, 00:37:

VIA controllers do not work with SS7 systems at all ?

I have an USB card from VIA which works fine on my DFI K6XV3+/66 (VIA MVP3 chipset).
It's just super slow. The NEC cards I got are much faster.
I posted benchmarks of both here in this thread a few months ago.

I didn't know that these NEC controllers had five ports until I decided to look up the datasheets today. I thought these controllers only had four ports, so I was avoiding the 5-port cards.

The VIA VT6212 card I have seemed to work on a socket 7 motherboard with an SiS 5598 chipset, but I didn't use it very long because the CPU usage was too high. Transfer rates to a flash drive were actually slower than the onboard USB 1.0 ports, even with a K6-2/500 (because Compaq decided to support K6-2s on that motherboard for some reason).

There was a recent thread that detailed the performance hit that a Pentium 3 system had with a USB 2.0 card, and that got me thinking about my "Weak" Pentium 4 system. Amptron M930, 2.8/533/512 P4, SiS 645, one gig of DDR @ 266 MHz, a Radeon 9800 SE with Omega drivers unlocking the extra four pipelines, and Win98SE.

This system had an Nvidia two port USB 2.0 card in it when I rescued it from a junkpile, but I wanted a USB 2.0 card that had front USB ports, and I finally found one. So I installed the NEC card for the front ports, but left the Nvidia one installed as well. I decided to test it with several benchmarks with both USB cards, neither, and just the NEC card. Removing the Nvidia card boosted the 3D 2000 score by about 400 points, 3D 2001 by about 300, and Aquamark increased by over 1,000 points. The system tested the same with the NEC card installed as it did when it was removed. So the Nvidia card is not going back in this machine.

It’s crazy. These usb 2.0 cards are cancer for retro systems. Imagine all the lag we could have avoided back in the day 🤣

They are useful for occasional file transfers though, and Disabling it in the Device Manager restores the performance.

I'd rather Enable/Disable the device than transfer files over USB1 speeds 🤷