Z420 USB3 pcie adaptor not working Win10

[Marcus529]

Have fitted 2 adaptor pcie x1 USB3 cards and not recognised. Both worked fine in another non HP workstation. Fitted in all my pcie slots and wi not work in any. My gpu is in a pcie x16 slot and works fine. Is thier a specific chipset card that will only work with the mobo?

[SDH · Accepted solution]

Why would you want to do that? The Z420, Z620, and Z820 all have a bunch of USB3 ports already built in. Maybe you ran out?

That generation of HP workstation's USB3 ports is driven by an on-motherboard Texas Instruments chip. The same type of chip from TI also is on a specific HP PCIe card, which they call their "2x2" card which was engineered by HP initially to bring USB3 to the Z400, Z600, Z800 family of workstations. That same card also runs fine in the xw family of HP workstations, and runs well under W10 and W11 in all of the above HP workstations. It should be placed in at least a PCIe Gen 2 slot to provide the full USB3 speed potential.

You would not even need to load any drivers for that assuming you have a normal Z420 W10 install because that chipset is already supported automatically by W10 and W11 on your workstation. Yes, those can run W11 if you know how.

That card has two USB3 ports on its backplane, and two added ones can be made available from a port on the card to the front of the workstations with a proper interface cable and front hardware, described in detail HERE . It is important to provide the card power before you first turn on the computer after the card's install. That way the OS can see all of the components on the card and do a proper install of the necessary drivers.

[Marcus529]

Thank you for the reply, much appreciated. Yes, i have run out of USB ports. Will have a search for the HP pcie 2x2 cards. Thank you once again.2👍