PCTech Forums

hi i have a gigabyte GA-965P-DQ6 motherboard it has 4gig ram, quad core 3 sata drives asus graphics card and this is where it gets troublesome. on my 2 PCI slots i have a 3usb 2firewire400 port card IRQ20 and on my 2nd slot a 3firewire400 port card. this 3 fw400 port card just doesn't seem to get recognised iv replaced the card too and swapped them round but i cant seem to get 2 cards working at once. it occured to me do i need to increase the voltage to the slots if at all possible?
many thanks
paul

Try unplugging everything that is USB externally to the computer, printers pen drives etc. This is easy if you don't have a usb mouse and key board. Go into Device Manager and delete all of the USB stuff and then click on "Actions" and select "Scan for hardware changes." Your computer will re-find the devices.

Every time you install a USB device in a new slot, you reserve resources for that item. So if you have 4 USB ports and plug your one printer into all 4 of them, you have 4 printers installed. You might be prompted for drivers on some of the USB on a removal.

This should free up enough resources to get both cards working.

it recognises the port now but when i plug the external device in the firewire port it powers up for around 30 seconds then dies

I'm not sure what you are doing. Your motherboard as a rule of thumb puts out 2 ma of juice to external devices. Thats about enough to power 4 usb devices. One usb port can support up to 127 usb devices with a hub plugged into it. Once you exceed the 4 usb devices, you need a power assisted hub. They're about $25.

I don't know the properties of the devices you are hooking up to the firewire outlets, but unless they have power assist, you are probably drawing too much power from the Motherboard.

Is it really necessary to have two firewire cards on your system?I've never had anyone request two firewire cards installed on one system. I have had requests for a second USB card and I have steered them to a power hub. I don't make any money on that call

ok long story short, i run 2 audio interfaces and don't want them sharing IRQ reason for the 2 seperate ports. i have 5 USB connections 1 being a hub with 3 authorisation keys installed the others, key board and remaining 3 MIDI controllers all powered off the mother board, should i get a powered hub for the 3 MIDI controllers so the second pci card works?

Try a powered hub for the MIDI. Bear in mind when I suggest that you can run 4 USB devices, a USB printer by itself could take the whole 2 ma if it doesn't have a power source. Extra fans hooked to the MB also count as a draw.

I would also make sure your USB hub has a power assist. Then again wipe out the USB from device manager and scan for new items.

I just meant turn of and turn back on if you lose the mouse and Keyboard. You can't hurt the O/S if you clean out some of the extra USB installs.

You can install each USB device on each USB connector on the computer. So with 6 USB devices, and 4 ports on your computer, you could see 24 installs of the 6 items.

If you don't know what it does, leave it alone. If you see a device with a question mark, delete it, and then search again for hardware. Don't mess with the video card, if it shows two active ones. You might have to go into safe mode and install a generic in order to get it to boot.

Like I said before, if you loose the mouse plug it into another USB port and wait 30 seconds.

Good luck

hi icecube could i have deleted something in this process as i can no longer choose the audio driver for default playback