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[DarthWoo]

I don't need them just yet, but I've still been looking through the selection of USB 2.0 PCI cards at Newegg, and they all seem pretty much the same. Does it matter which you buy, or are they all pretty much equal in functionality and reliability? Also, I'd probably eventually want one of those nice front bay USB hubs, but there do seem to be wide variations in a lot of them. I know that most of the PCI cards have an internal USB out, so I'm guessing that that is for connecting it to such a front bay hub.

Do you all have any recommendations as to which brands are the best, or at least which ones won't fry my PC the moment I turn it on with them installed?

 

[DarthWoo]

Nobody?

 

[rc213]

Any USB 2.0 Card should be fine. XP SP2 has built-in USB 2.0 drivers so I dont see u running into any problems. I have one by SIIG and front port USB/Firewire from unknown.

USB 2.0
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16815150017

Front Port USB/Firewire
http://www.directron.com/ctusb1394.html

 

[Anthropic]

I have had compatability problems in the past with the cheapo USB 2 card at CompUSA that used the ALi chipset. Both an Archos 20GB player and an iPod 4G refused to work correctly with that card.

Apparently all USB2 chipsets are not created equal. On paper they all work on the same specs but the implementations are all different.

After doing some research, I found that the NEC chipset tends to be the fastest (in terms of actual throughput instead of bandwidth on paper) and most compatable. In this case I bought the NEC-based card and my iPod immediately mounted. I haven't had any problems since.

 

[rc213]

The card I linked to at newegg is indeed a NEC Chip based card.