Drivers for PCI-E USB 3.0 Card?

byalexandr · February 20

Hey all,

I needed another USB controller for my podcasting setup, as more than three Logitech webcams exceeds the bandwidth available on the laptop we are currently using (with a single USB 3.0 controller). I put together an old desktop I had laying around for the sole use of streaming through OBS, and got a PCI-E expansion card that adds another USB controller to connect some of the webcams to.

However, the card did not come with any driver disk, nor can I find anything online. This is the exact card I got: https://a.co/d/8NP2b5o

Some of the reviews even mention they could not find drivers online, but I figure someone might be able to help me out on here. I also found the same card on Newegg (https://www.newegg.com/p/238-00DE-00266), which mentions I have to install the 'NEC USB3.0 driver' for it to work. Googling that and finding a driver on Dell's website, I installed it and restarted the computer but it still shows as no driver available for the following devices in device manager:

The card had a label on the box to the website cablecc.com, which is a Chinese cable supplier. But I wasn't able to find the card on there nor any driver downloads (not that I would want to download drivers from a Chinese website anyways).

Any ideas on getting this thing to work?

SlayerOfHellWyrm · February 22

So, you're missing quite a few drivers... What you can do is right-click on each of those devices, then go to Properties > Details > Change the property to Hardware IDs. From there you can look up the VEN_#### and the DEV_#### with a PCIe/PCI lookup site online to figure out what the chip is on that device, and try to find a driver for it. Now, those are probably all built-in chips on your board just looking at the names. That said, did you confirm the card isn't just working? A lot of USB stuff is native, especially NEC/Renesas/Intel, because they are freaking old.

It's dummy hard to read, but from experience in seeing the chip enough, I think that's a Renesas/NEC - µPD720201. Any manufacturer that has a card with the 720201 in it, should have a driver you could install that should work. That said, try connecting a USB flash drive or something first to just see if it shows, or check under your USB controllers for it. I don't remember how this specific chip reports, but it should be pretty obvious.

I think, and I'm going off memory from work here, the uPD720201 should show with VEN_1912 and DEV_0014.

byalexandr · February 22

1 hour ago, SlayerOfHellWyrm said:

So, you're missing quite a few drivers... What you can do is right-click on each of those devices, then go to Properties > Details > Change the property to Hardware IDs. From there you can look up the VEN_#### and the DEV_#### with a PCIe/PCI lookup site online to figure out what the chip is on that device, and try to find a driver for it. Now, those are probably all built-in chips on your board just looking at the names. That said, did you confirm the card isn't just working? A lot of USB stuff is native, especially NEC/Renesas/Intel, because they are freaking old.

It's dummy hard to read, but from experience in seeing the chip enough, I think that's a Renesas/NEC - µPD720201. Any manufacturer that has a card with the 720201 in it, should have a driver you could install that should work. That said, try connecting a USB flash drive or something first to just see if it shows, or check under your USB controllers for it. I don't remember how this specific chip reports, but it should be pretty obvious.

I think, and I'm going off memory from work here, the uPD720201 should show with VEN_1912 and DEV_0014.

So interestingly enough, I decided to just plug in a USB device and see what happens. Sure enough, the card was working, though not as expected.

I used a USB viewer utility to see all of the computer's root hubs/controllers, and it is a Renesas controller. However, the card for some reason was giving me a lot of trouble with the webcams - for our podcast, we use 4 (previously 3 as that was the max that would work on the old laptop setup) C920 webcams. The whole reason for switching to a desktop dedicated for livestreaming was to have more USB controllers to provide ample bandwidth for all the cameras to work with OBS. However, putting two cameras, which is not even close to exceeding the bandwidth of a single USB 3.0 controller, on each controller in the PC would just not work for some reason. Sometimes one or two would work, sometimes the controller (both the expansion card and the chipset one on the motherboard) would produce an error that it couldn't get a device ID, sometimes none of the USB devices including the keyboard and mouse would even turn on after restarting.

Just as a test and sort of a last ditch effort to get it working, I plugged everything (including all 4 cameras, audio interface, peripherals, etc.) into the USB ports on the motherboard, skipping the expansion card altogether, and it all works fine. What is interesting too is that in the USB viewer utility, everything is still on one root hub, but I get absolutely zero problems with bandwidth issues.

So I am left completely clueless as to why 4 1080p webcams work on a single controller on this computer, but only 3 work on the laptop, and why 2 cameras on two controllers gives a ton of issues and works even less than before.

Anyways, sort of a rant about USB I guess (maybe it was even something to do with OBS), but at least it's working and since I'm too lazy to take out the $15 expansion card to return it, will just use it as for the time being. I think my next 'upgrade' to our podcast studio will be some proper camcorders and an HDMI switcher, which is unfortunately a somewhat expensive exercise.