USB info needed for 8K5A3+

[scot]

My 8K5A3+ has 6x USB2 ports on 3 headers. I intend to use USB, and eventually USB2, devices - running Win98SE. would really appreciate some answers to this little lot:-

A) should I install both the USB and the USB2 drivers during the initial installation, or would installing the USB2 driver alone, be usuable for USB as well as USB2 devices?
C) is the bandwidth shared between all 6 ports, or by the 2 ports fed by each header? IE do devices on separate headers each get the full bandwidth?
D) does a USB device on, firstly the same header, or secondly another header, reduce the speed of a USB2 device?
E) why is there only one IRQ for USB2 in the table on page 4-23 of manual,but three IRQs for USB?
F)any comments on putting a Firewire card into PCI 3 and SBL 5.1 card into PCI 4?
G) why doesn't a mobo manual tell us these things?
Thanks for all help........

[surlyjoe]

there are 3 individual USB controllers 2 on the chipset and one for USB-2.0, in w/98se it will be 3 seperate IRQs', so teh badwitdh is shared by the 2 ports on each header.

check and see what IRQ the onboard audio is on before you turn it off in the bios, that is where youd like the SBlive to show up, so try swapping slots if you can, but PCI slot 2 is always a good bet

[scot]

Many thanks for reply,surlyjoe.
Could you confirm what I think you imply is:-
Given the 8K5A3+ IRQ details I have copied below (and that I shall be using LAN and RAID), the S.B.Live card should go into PCI 3 slot, and the Firewire card should go into PCI 4 slot.
This would have the Firewire card sharing the USB2.0 IRQ - any problem there?
Also, can I install the onboard AC97 audio driver,and the S.B.Live audio driver,then disable the onboard audio in the BIOS?


PCI 1 shares IRQ with onboard USB1, AGP and LAN
PCI 2 " " " onboard USB2 and RAID
PCI 3 " " " onboard USB3, PCI 5 and onboard AC97 sound
PCI 4 " " " PCI 6 and USB 2.0