Solved Strange behaviour after video card upgrade.....

The fan on my old video card has been grinding for weeks so I ordered another one off of EBay. Old card is an Amd Radeon 7570 HD 2GB. New card says it is a Dell AMD Radeon R7 450 4GB. Figured it couldn't hurt to add the extra video RAM. After installing the card none of my USB 3.0 external drives showed up. I checked my usb connections and they were secure. What I found out is, none of my USB 3.0 drivers are present in Device Manager and they will not install no matter what I try. I did find out that if I move my USB External Drives to my USB 2.0 ports they work just fine and the USB 3.0 ports work fine for powering devices. In device manager I have an exclamation point by USB xHCI Compliant Host Controller, and when I try to install the driver for it in Windows I get the message that the "Drivers were found but the device could not start : Code 10".......My external drives are working right now but they are just deathly slow. Any help would be appreciated. I found some old threads similar to this but never found an answer.

New card says it is a Dell AMD Radeon R7 450 4GB.

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Hi,
But you don't have a Dell.
Where did you get the new card?

I bought it on eBay. Why should it matter. My computer is a custom PC. I built it from spare parts. I just made sure to use all AMD hardware.

rdburke said:

I bought it on eBay. Why should it matter. My computer is a custom PC. I built it from spare parts. I just made sure to use all AMD hardware.

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It matters because it bears the name Dell which means it probably was in someone's laptop or someone 's Dell desktop or if new, was meant to be a replacement for a Dell PC.
OEM GPU cards tend to operate at different voltage based on the manufacturer specs and are tuned to work on specific MoBos.
Those cards differ from the over the counter models.

I'm skeptical that a Dell branded graphics card wouldn't be compatible with a non-Dell PC. But I don't know for certain.

One way to check things:

Image the Windows installation.

Do a clean install of Windows 11 to the same drive.

Does the issue with the USB 3 ports remain?

(You should be able to restore the Windows image is 10 minutes or so., afterward.)

I did something like that when the USB 3.2 ports on my new motherboard (less than 2 weeks old) went flaky. A clean install of 11 didn't eliminate the problem. (The ports worked normally on the previous clean 11 installation.) I swapped for a new (identical) copy of the MB, and all is well again. Using the restored Windows 11 installation. (I hope the new one lasts much longer than 2 weeks.)

I'm sorry that I can't suggest a course if the clean Windows install has no problems with the hardware. You may not be pleased to have to restore your setup with a clean install.

That's some seriously old (if fairly powerful) hardware. I doubt that it being unsupported hardware is relevant.

Best of luck.

I would check in Device Manager for any conflicts reported between your graphics card and 3.0 USB controller, specifically IRQ conflicts. You could also go into your BIOS and select to use the motherboard onboard graphics then see if the 3.0 USB ports are working again.

Edit: I should say that your drives connected to the 3.0 USB ports will be recognized and working properly.

wordsworth said:

I would check in Device Manager for any conflicts reported between your graphics card and 3.0 USB controller, specifically IRQ conflicts. You could also go into your BIOS and select to use the motherboard onboard graphics then see if the 3.0 USB ports are working again.

Edit: I should say that your drives connected to the 3.0 USB ports will be recognized and working properly.

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IRQ conflicts? What is this, 1994?

It may be a resource conflict, but I don't know why one would be caused by swapping graphics cards.

rdburke said:

After installing the card none of my USB 3.0 external drives showed up.

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Backtrack yourself. Reinstall your old card. Do usb-3 ports come back?If so, it's the replacement card. I can't understand how swapping a graphics card could break usb unless it is some kind of conflict or another, but stranger things have happened.

Lubricate or replace the fan on the original video card.

Ben

bobkn said:

IRQ conflicts? What is this, 1994?

It may be a resource conflict, but I don't know why one would be caused by swapping graphics cards.

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Yea, I don't recall having such a conflict at least since Win 3.1 days but this sounds like an odd problem, even Twilight Zone weird.

I finally caved to the whole thing and robbed the fan from the newer video card and replaced the old screaming fan on the original card that the drivers were working fine with........Thanks for all the suggestions. Live and learn.