Sick to death of IRQ problems.

[Cardinal 0]

It seems that I am not alone in suffering the problem of 'IRQ sharing'. There are now many posts regarding the issue. Most people seem to state that as long as ACPI is enabled in your OS then IRQ sharing will be automatically used. And by changing your system type under hardware settings to 'standard computer' (instead of an ACPI computer) you can then automatically assign devices to IRQ's yourself. Well in my case, this is not true. I have succesfully set my system up in w2k as a 'standard computer' but my two major components (video card/sound card)are still sharing the same IRQ (in my case, #11). Some people will claim that this won't cause a problem (in ACPI mode anyway) but lets face it, when running a program that utilises these cards heavily (like any 3d game) there are going to be problems, hence, my pc locks up. Someone suggested physically changing the pci slot that my sound card uses (this was correct in theory, as some pci's share IRQ's with the AGP slot) I tried that, and upon booting up every time, it detects the card, and allocates it IRQ 11. I DO have free IRQ's available (eg, 10) Anyway, the microsoft online knowledge base proved useless with IRQ allocation. So if anyone can help (yes I know this topics getting stale) it would help myself, and many others.

 

Cardinal

[someone_nt 0]

This also happens in my computer (Riva TNT and DXr2 decoder card use irq11). However, this doesn't cause crashes in my system.

[BladeRunner 0]

On the ACPI argument.

I'm using an ABit BE6-II (BIOS certainly appears to be 100% ACPI complient)

I have my Win2k machine setup as ACPI not as 'standard machine'

All of my devices 'appear' as sharing a single IRQ.

I have had NO lock-up problems at all.

All of my 3D games (that run under Win2k anyway) run without any issues what so ever.

ACPI doe not automatically mean you will have problems.

I love the fact that I don't have to sit there and attempt to assign IRQ's to video/sound/SCSI/IDE/ATA-66 controller/USB ports etc manually.

In my eyes ACPI is one major ste forward in resource management.

Before ACPI I wouldn't have dared add in any further devices due to all my IRQ's already being in use, now I don't have any issues with this.

Personally I think that those PC's having problems with ACPI, the majority of the time it's a Motherboard BIOS issue, just not quite complient.

Just my opinions and observations, I'm happy with ACPI - Life is now so much easier.

 

Paul

[Ulden 0]

I have had the IRQ assignemnt problem before in win98 before I upgraded to win2k and had fully acpi compatible bios. The way you can attemp to solve this in your bios. Depending on the type of bios that you have you may have the option to manually set the irq for each pci/isa slot. I have a tyan board with AMI bios and I can do this. It worked for me. OF course now all of my cards appear to share the same irq due to acpi and everything functions great.

[Ronin 0]

Heck, under the W2K system properties it tells me that all my pci cards are sharing IRQ 9. But everything is working and has been so I'm not going to *****. But I see your point for some people it can be a major problem.

 

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[euankirkhope 0]

The AGP slot and PCI slot 1 are physically connected to the same IRQ line. So if either slot has a hungry device the other slot must be left empty.

[ComputerMan 0]

Well even the SB card used irq 11, but if you

can use the new drivers from Creative, there is a tiny program to switch the irq from the sound card it self, in my opinion you have 3 devices using the irq 11, cause the SB had the irq hardwired unless re-programmed....