A while ago, I was given an old 166mhz Pentium computer. I’m going to buy a a 4 USB port card that plugs into a PCI slot.
I can buy 1.1 USB Cards but when I look at buying 2.0 USB cards it says that one of the requirements is a processor speed of 233mhz.
Now I can get a 233mhz overdrive chip (the preferred maximum is 200mhz, but a 233mhz will work).
So, if I install a 233mhz overdrive chip, will I then be able to use USB 2.0 ?
Thanks.
A motherboard and chip 233 mhz combo with onboard USB (1) via Ebay is likely to be about the same price as the add on board and will have far higher overall functionality. USB 2.0 with anything less than a 500 mhz chip is sort of a waste of time as a slower than 500 mhz processor will not be able to do all that much with the accelerated transfer rate anyway.
Are you going to get a huge perfomance gain from USB 2? - sure it’s fast, but then the PC itself is going to be the bottleneck; upgrading the processor like that seems like throwing good money after bad.
Actually, I’m planning on buying a USB port from eBay. As for a whole new system, nah, I’m fine with what I have now. I enjoy owning older systems and upgrading them the best that I can. It’s like a hobby.
Well, USB 1.1 is 12MBits/Second but 2.0 runs up to 480MBits/Second. So you tell me, does that sound like a huge performance gain to you? 
As I said, it’s only a huge performance gain if the rest of the system can cope with that bandwidth, otherwise you’ll have the USB port waiting for the processor or memory (or whatever) to catch up.
Ok, good point. So you’re saying that even if I can get to the minimum processor speed, it might not do me any good to get a 2.0 USB version anyway then, right?
Well, it depends what you’re going to do with all that bandwidth;
Attach a modem? - The maximum transfer rate of the modem is way below that of USB 1.1
A scanner? - in theory this would be worth having USB2 because the data transfer can be the bottleneck, but it’s only going to come into play if you are scanning large images (large in terms of total pixels and colour depth), but what are you going to do with those images?
You didn’t mention what the spec is for the rest of the machine, but my guess (based on the assumption that the machine hasn’t been upgraded already since the processor was new) is that you have a machine with maybe 16MB memory and 1 or 2 GB hard drive? - trying to manipulate massive image files on this platform will make you tear out your hair
The best performance increase per unit currency is nearly always achieved by upgrading the RAM; I’d spend your money on that and get a USB1.1 card, which I’m assuming will be much cheaper (USB2 peripherals will be backward-compatible with it for some time to come).
In short, if you intend to use it intensively enough to warrant needing USB2 then you have already outgrown the spec of the machine.