I'm more worried about the card's chipset. I've never heard of them before.

http://www.plasma-online.de/index.html?conten … icture/cmd.html

CMD - famous (or infamous) for the CMD 640 IDE disk corrupter, one of the notorious buggy disk controllers of the Pentium 1 era (the other was the RZ1000)

Half-Saint wrote:

I found this card in one of the boxes and got an idea but I'm not sure it would work and I don't want to damage my motherboard.

It has space for an 8 pin connector next to the PCI connector and I thought this would let me solder the connector and connect the front case USB ports. However it looks like it is connected directly to PCI lines which makes me think that there is some other purpose behind this. Any ideas?

Cheers

I believe your fear that the 8-pin header is for a different purpose, entirely is correct. However, there are plenty of adapters to go from a USB plug to the motherboard pin-out of 9 wires or whatever it is. Rescuing the functionality of your case USB header should not be a problem--just use the internal port on the back of the card with the appropriate adapter.

Although, I agree with the others about the questionable nature of the chipset. I'd find a nice NEC or Adaptec based USB card.