VIA USB PCI card unreliable on OSX
Here's a frustrating one. I inherited a PC recently that had a USB 2.0 PCI card which I figured I'd try to get to work in my Mac. The card is based on the VIA VT6212 chipset and after some searching I found official drivers for the card (that only work with G4 Macs). Well, after rebooting the Mac the card seemed to work fine - it showed up in the system profiler and I could work with devices connected to it without any problems. At that point I decided to leave it for the night (it is set to go to sleep after 30 mins), so this morning went to see how it was doing only to discover the machine had locked up. It appears that there's a major problem with the VIA drivers that cause the Mac to not waken up properly after going into sleep mode. Rather unfortunate as I was looking forward to having the extra USB ports. So, I suspect if I hadn't set the machine to go into sleep mode it would be fine, but that isn't something I'm interested in doing. Ah well, back to ebay I suppose.
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2 comments postedI have a box full of these cheap VIA pcb's
if you want some good advice STAY AWAY from the Via chipset VT6212L for OSX.
go for the NEC chipset.
There are somre REAL issues on timing and power smoothing with most of the VT6212L boards, 10.5.X has built in drivers, before that you need the VIA driver.
you may get it working with just the KB plugged in, but it will keep hanging, and in most cases will not even work with a hub.
Thanks for the reply, Steve. I've since moved on to a Powerbook and then a MacBook so it is gladly no longer a concern for me, but hopefully this will help others out there.
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