Hi!

There are also USB 2.0 cards with VIA chips, but I have not tried... Ben
Myers

The few Acer USB chipsets I've seen were pretty bad, only meeting a very
loose definition of working on most operating systems. They worked the best
on Windows, but I never pushed 'em as hard as I did on the other systems. At
USB 1.x rates they worked fine. At USB 2.0 rates they turned into garbage.

The VT6202 was VIA's first USB 2.0 chipset, and it has some problems under
*ix operating systems with maintaining connections at differing data rates
across differing ports. Other than that, and the fact that it is somewhat
slower than the Intel USB 2.0 implementation, I haven't had too many
complaints.

VT6212 is supposed to be an improvement on the 6202, focusing mainly on
performance. As far as I know it did that in some ways and fell short in
others. I remember the ones I used being more stable with mixed USB 1.x and
2.0 devices.

The VT6214 is a 6212 that supposedly allows for the placement of another
device (SATA, Ethernet, Firewire--all usually also from VIA) on the same
board, for a multifunction card. I don't think it has any special PCI-PCI
bridge or arbitration logic on it, as every card I've seen appears to have
the PCI bus directly connected to both ICs. Some motherboards have serious
problems with this idea.

I know I've seen boards with a Silicon Image (!!) USB chipset onboard, but I
have no idea about them. Never got a close look at one.

If you want a combo board (USB+1394), Adaptec and Orange Micro both made
some nice ones--HiNT PCI-PCI bridge, NEC USB 2.0 and a Texas Instruments
1394 IC...basically the best of everything in my opinion. These show up on
eBay now.

William