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Antec 1080, front USB only works at 1.1 speed

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Old Thrashbarg

Member
Joined
Sep 26, 2007
The other day I shifted my main system into my old Antec 1080 (or 1040, or whatever it is... it's one of the old Chieftec variants, anyhow), and I found that the front USB only runs at 1.1 speeds. I get the "This device can perform faster" popup.

I've tried several different ways of wiring it, and I can't figure out what's going on. Here's how I have it set up now:

R--W--G--Bl-Br
2--4--6--8--10
1--3--5--7
O--Y--Gr-B


The blue wire actually has two wires there, a blue and a thick black. I did some reading, and found a couple other things to try, like disconnecting the brown wire, or switching the blue and brown wires, or moving the brown wire to pin 8 and then leaving the blue wire disconnected. None of that works.

This thing should be able to do USB 2.0... it's just a direct pass-through wire going to the front ports, which is all the same between USB 1.1 and 2.0.

So, any ideas what might be going wrong here?

Update: I figured out how to get the front panel off, and the cable for the USB ports looked pinched. But even when I tried a new cable (with various wiring configurations), I still couldn't get it recognized as USB 2.0. I don't get it.
 
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Sorry to double post, but I figured it was worth an update: I got it working, and it was not easy.

It turns out that the little daughter-board was just stupidly designed. It has the two USB ports and a firewire port on this tiny board, with pin headers for each that the cable plugs into. The way the board was designed, you had some little SMD inductors and capacitors serving as filters in the lines between the USB ports and the pin headers. It also had shielding on the board, in the form of grid-shaped traces covering both top and bottom surfaces of the PCB, tied to both the metal shielding around the ports, and the USB ground lines. The problem seemed to be twofold: the unnecessary filter circuitry, and the chassis ground being connected to the signal ground.

So, what I did was, first, remove the inductors and bleed-off capacitors, and bridge the traces where the inductors were, to restore a direct continuity. This fixed a problem I had with some of my flash drives not being recognized, but it still only worked at low speed.

Then I cut the ground traces, thus floating them from the chassis ground, and took a piece of wire and bridged the signal ground directly to the respective pins on the cable header. Result? USB 2.0.

I'm quite proud of myself. Well, except for my soldering work, but hey, I didn't have much space to work with, and I wasn't going for 'pretty' anyhow.
 
more details please

Hi- I have the same problem. Amazed that you found the solution. Can you provide some more specifics- for example, how did you cut the ground trace? Where did you do your cut?

Thanks.

Sorry to double post, but I figured it was worth an update: I got it working, and it was not easy.

It turns out that the little daughter-board was just stupidly designed. It has the two USB ports and a firewire port on this tiny board, with pin headers for each that the cable plugs into. The way the board was designed, you had some little SMD inductors and capacitors serving as filters in the lines between the USB ports and the pin headers. It also had shielding on the board, in the form of grid-shaped traces covering both top and bottom surfaces of the PCB, tied to both the metal shielding around the ports, and the USB ground lines. The problem seemed to be twofold: the unnecessary filter circuitry, and the chassis ground being connected to the signal ground.

So, what I did was, first, remove the inductors and bleed-off capacitors, and bridge the traces where the inductors were, to restore a direct continuity. This fixed a problem I had with some of my flash drives not being recognized, but it still only worked at low speed.

Then I cut the ground traces, thus floating them from the chassis ground, and took a piece of wire and bridged the signal ground directly to the respective pins on the cable header. Result? USB 2.0.

I'm quite proud of myself. Well, except for my soldering work, but hey, I didn't have much space to work with, and I wasn't going for 'pretty' anyhow.
 
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