Alex, you're missing my point. I understand that your priority is eliminating an interrupt so there is less loading of the cpu, but I'm more concerned about critical devices having to share an interrupt. The PS/2 mouse on my system uses IRQ 12 by itself, but all of the USB 2.0 ports share IRQ 23; if I were running a USB soundcard along with a USB mouse and USB keyboard, they would all be competing for the same maintenance time from the cpu. To avoid conflicts I chose firewire for my soundcard, which shares an interrupt with the USB 3.0 port and the third PCIe bus, neither of which are in use on my machine. With the current setup, the mouse, keyboard, and firewire card each has its own interrupt.

Yup I get you Guitslinger.... all good points... but...
Somebody may correct me but I believe USB works more like ethernet, i.e. it's a bandwidth thing, rather than the IRQ method of polling interrupts (a bit like the network token ring method), this makes USB far more efficient as it understands how to (in effect) prioritise the devices more efficiently. Of course the USB controller itself will have an IRQ but I'm talking about the devices attached to that.... from that one could conclude using a mouse/keyboard should take up a trivial amount of bandwidth...

My real view that is this is more desirable scenario than having an extra couple of interrupts being polled... and like I said, if you are concerned about multiple USB device attached to a controller, you can buy another USB card which would use just one interrupt... and then your sound card could run off that standalone (or keyboard or mouse or whatever).... just like a dedicated firewire card.... that's assuming you have a PCI slot spare.


> To avoid conflicts I chose firewire for my soundcard,
Me too good call. Plus USB can be a nightmare for sound cards in my view (as there are so many standards, not all of them implemented correctly)..
 

CakeAlexS

> To avoid conflicts I chose firewire for my soundcard,
Me too good call. Plus USB can be a nightmare for sound cards in my view (as there are so many standards, not all of them implemented correctly)..
       

that used to be the case back in the day (MANY moons ago) as did the whole IRQ sharing thing (I ran 3 soundcards in 1 pc back in 2002 or something and it was a big juggling act IRQ wise) .. you see a fair few on here posting issues about firewire and chipset issues .

Yes you can still get a PS2 mouse and keyboard which I am ordering myself today. I was normalizing tracks after a 3 hour recording session and while that was working went clicking around with my mouse only to have the system freeze.  Needless to say I lost everything since I had to shut the program down!  My bad for not saving it first. :-( My feelings about using a USB mouse and keyboard is that I don't need anything interfering with the processing especially when you're dealing with 24 tracks simultaneously.

Well done for replying to a 5 year old thread
 
Anyway, I've been using USB Mice & Keyboards for over a decade, more recently using wireless models, and have never had a single glitch or freeze due to mouse related problems.
 
However, one caveat I should mention, my interface has always been Firewire, so there's little chance of conflicts happening.

I'm still using a PS2 keyboard and mouse with ps2 adapter. Occasionally the mouse will freeze but that is due to the KVM more than a system board or mouse issue. I need to get a USB KVM but just don't want to let go of those $$$ to replace something that is working.