Help AMD 690G with slow USB transfer speed <8mb/s

[yanon]

I built this HTPC last summer. It has Biostar TA690G (with latest bio installed), AMD64 X2 4200+, 2Gb of ram, Samsung 500GB hard drive, and Windows Vista Ultimate 32bit installed.

Everything works fine, except I couldn't overclock (but that is okay) and it has slow USB transfer speed. I tried three different portable hard drives---Seagate 250GB desktop harddrive inside a Vantec Case (I built this one 3 years ago), Fujitsu 120GB notebook harddrive inside a small external enclosure (with internal battery supply) with flash memory reader, Western Digital Passport Elite Edition 320GB (notebook hard drive format, just bought this). All of these drives transfer speed topped out at 8mb/s when connect to the above mentioned HTPC (I tried all the usb ports, back panel ports, front panel ports on my antec case).

I ran the same tests with my Toshiba Laptop (amd X2, vista home premium), I gott 15-16 mb/s for the two notebook portable harddrives and 19+ mb/s for the Seagate/Vantec. Just to be sure, I also ran USB file transfer test on an old desktop (Intel Pentium 4 2.4B Northwood, MSI 848P-V2 motherboard, 1GB of Ram, with XP sp2), I got 16+ mb/s for the two notebook portable hard drives, and 23-25 mb/s for the Seagate/Vantec.

What is wrong with my HTPC's USB connections? Please help.

Biostar TA690G contains the following chipsets

North Bridge AMD 690G
South Bridge ATI SB600
Onboard Video
Onboard Video Chipset ATI Radeon Xpress 1250
Onboard Audio
Audio Chipset Realtek ALC888
Audio Channels 8 Channels
Onboard LAN
LAN Chipset Realtek 8111B(PCI-E)
Max LAN Speed 10/100/1000Mbps
Onboard USB
Onboard USB 3 x USB 2.0 connectors support 6 ports

the Toshiba Laptop has the following chipsets
Turion 64X2 TL-52 (1.6Ghz)
RS690
SB600
ATI Radeon X1200

Practically the same chipsets as in the HTPC but much faster in term of USB transfer speed!

 

[VirtualLarry]

Originally posted by: yanon
What is wrong with my HTPC's USB connections? Please help.

South Bridge ATI SB600

That's what is wrong. Poor USB performance on those ATI southbridges.

 

[yanon]

but the Toshiba laptop using the same south bridge seems to work just fine.

 

[yanon]

Appearantly, many people complaint about SB600's SATA driver wasn't working well for them.



Biostar hasn't update its driver for the SB600 since June 2007.

I am thinking about installng the AMD chipset driver package for ASUS M2A-VM (which has the same 690G and SB600 chipsets) on my HTPC since ASUS's latest update is January 2008. Do you guys think this update going to cause a problem?


http://support.asus.com/downlo...age=en-us&model=M2A-VM

 

[Peter]

SB600 USB performance is a bit poor, in that it doesn't quite reach the typical ~30 MB/s others do, but not THAT poor.

 

[deruberhanyok]

Instead of installing the drivers from Asus' website, why don't you just install the Catalyst drivers from ATI? Go to their website, select your OS, then integrated/motherboard and Radeon X1250. They were updated less than two weeks ago (and the package includes a south bridge driver).

There may also be a BIOS setting holding it back, but I'd try the reference drivers first.

 

[yanon]

I did update the Ati catalyst drivers regularly. last update was two months ago. Never tested usb transfer speed until recently. Maybe, I should update it again to see if newer driver makes any difference. What bio setting can possibly affect the USB transfer speed?

 

[deruberhanyok]

Dunno, any of the USB ones might cause a problem. I'm looking at the manual for that model and it doesn't say anything about limiting them to a lower speed mode, but check and make sure you didn't disable the USB EHCI Controller option.

Do you have the latest BIOS?

I'll agree with what Peter said - SB600's USB wasn't quite where some of the others are, but it was pretty darn close. The last one to have the slow USB rates was SB450.