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What about Conventional PCI support?


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Hello guys,

 

could those of you who has one of the newest motherboard without native PCI support but still with PCI slots present through use of PCIe to PCI bridge to chime in on the topic of support of PCI cards under latest Mac OS X?

 

P67, H61, Z68, Z77 and Z75 are said to not have native support for PCI but many MBs does feature PCI slots. Please let us know how is it working under Mac OS X if you use PCI card on the motherboard with one of these chipsets.

 

For me it's interesting because now I use good old Audigy 2 ZS as an audio card and FW400 interface for external iSight and would like it to stay this way even after Haswell platform will probably drop native PCI support altogether. But if it's not possible I have to look for other options.

 

Thanks.

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  • 2 weeks later...

The LGA2011 socket completely drops any sort of PCI backwards compatibility, yes, but the PCI issue is a lot more complicated than that.

 

All Core i* series chipsets have lacking PCI support due to a lack of true "native" support. The Core i* series processors use a secondaring chipset from ITE to manage the flow of PCI bus data over the PCI-Express bus, however there are several different firmware revisions of this chipset, which can cause varying levels of support. Some motherboard/PCI card combinations work, while others have nothing but problems.

 

The ITE chipset is not something that can be updated through a BIOS update, or a standard firmware update issued by ITE/Motherboard companies. We are at a point where users who want to continue to rely on PCI cards should really stick to older generation Core 2 Duo/Core 2 Quad systems, or simply look into PCI-Express, USB3, Firewire, or Thunderbolt replacements for their hardware.

 

This is especially true of users looking to use their computers as DAWs, as older PCI sound cards (more specifically the higher end, multi-channel cards) do not function properly.

 

It's also not any isolated case with any one company, several company's products have very serious issues with PCI compatibility on newer motherboards.

 

I hope that clears things up for this issue.

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  • 3 weeks later...
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