A7N8X-E Deluxe IRQ nightmare

menno · Post by **menno** » Mon Jul 05, 2004 4:13 pm

Does anyone who has this board know how to manipulate the IRQs? I tried installing Windows 2000 using Standard PC HAL, but I still am unable to get my 3 Pulsars (1 Pulsar2 and 2 Pulsar1s) to get seperate IRQs, or at least not share with the SATA or AGP controllers. Everything works fine with 2 cards, but with 3 I get cracks and pops, and SFP.exe goes through very high CPU utilisation at the same time as the cracks and pops occur. I'm assuming it is because of the IRQ sharing with the AGP graphics card or the SATA controller.

Any pointers appreciated.

Cheers,
Menno

valis · Post by **valis** » Mon Jul 05, 2004 11:07 pm

You might try WinXP with ACPI enabled. That board is definately recent enough for APIC 2.0 support.

menno · Post by **menno** » Tue Jul 06, 2004 4:46 pm

Yeah good point, maybe it is the only way.

Although I'd prefer to stay with Win2k if possible.

oxygenial · Post by **oxygenial** » Tue Jul 06, 2004 5:20 pm

But as in my other thread, http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... forum=1&12 ,I've tried just about everything on this board, and I can't get rid of the crackles when recording!

Tried every PCI slot, several gfx cards, W2k and XP in both ACPI/Standard mode, Service Packed and no packs at all, several harddrives, no serial/parallell ports etc. I too would be really glad for any help to get it working properly!

Running:
A7N8X-Deluxe (SATA/Serial/Parallell/Onboard Sound are disabled)
Athlon 2100+
2x512MB
Nvidia Geforce 4 Ti4200 with latest WHQL drivers (v56.72)
Luna II in PCI Slot 4 (with 2496 ZLink box)
WinXP SP1a
SFP4.0
Cubase SX2.0.1b7 (2.2.0b33 is so buggy)

menno · Post by **menno** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 4:33 am

Hi Oxygenial,

Not to give you false hope, but I can run one Pulsar without cracking & pops problems, it's only when I add in a 2nd or 3rd one that I get problems. FYI when I tried one board it ran ok in slot 5. Whilst testing I also have Serial/Parallell/Onboard Sound/and USB disabled (need SATA for my disk), Standard PC (APIC mode disabled in BIOS).

I can reproduce the cracking & pops quite easily now. Add a 2nd Pulsar and it happens always if I play sound in say Winamp, and then scroll in my webbrowser a large webpage (Opera and IE), or if I click on explorer and open folders it sometimes does it too. So maybe it's conflict with the graphics card, an ATI Radeon 9200 that is the problem.

Also on your board have you got a capacitor right by slot 1? It means you cant put a Pulsar in slot1, stupid Asus design or what.

[ This Message was edited by: menno on 2004-07-07 05:40 ]

oxygenial · Post by **oxygenial** » Wed Jul 07, 2004 4:23 pm

ummm... I'll try PCI slot4 (PCI slot3 at the moment) and Standard mode with APIC disabled and see if I can get it right.

Do you have SP1 on your install, I'm reading tons of posts that something in SP1 messes up things (when SP1 also includes some bug fixes regarding audio!?!?)

USB disabled ??? (I've got a Midisport 4x4 on my USB so can't do that!)

[ This Message was edited by: oxygenial on 2004-07-07 17:24 ]

menno · Post by **menno** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 5:46 am

On 2004-07-07 17:23, oxygenial wrote:
ummm... I'll try PCI slot4 (PCI slot3 at the moment) and Standard mode with APIC disabled and see if I can get it right.

Do you have SP1 on your install, I'm reading tons of posts that something in SP1 messes up things (when SP1 also includes some bug fixes regarding audio!?!?)

USB disabled ??? (I've got a Midisport 4x4 on my USB so can't do that!)

Just to clear up I'm running Win2k with SP4. I havent tried XP yet. I just disabled the USB while testing, with 1 Pulsar it works fine.

braincell · Post by **braincell** » Thu Jul 08, 2004 5:06 pm

It's not enough to have it in standard mode. You also need to assign the slots IRQs in the BIOS and set it to manual in the BIOS and you need to have them in the right slots and disable as many motherboard devices as you can in the BIOS such as onboard audio and ethernet etc.. I am sure this is an IRQ conflict. I would use XP over win2k. If you switch to standard mode from ACPI your computer will not boot un Win2K.

[ This Message was edited by: braincell on 2004-07-08 18:09 ]

menno · Post by **menno** » Fri Jul 16, 2004 6:31 am

Well, I'm getting somewhere finally. After many late nights of installing Win2k and WinXP with and without ACPI I was about to give up.

But then I switched off all hardware acceleration on my graphics card and that stopped the problem. So it's definitely some clash with the graphics card, ATI Radeon 9200.

Anyone know if there is a solution which allows me to put hardware acceleration back on?

menno · Post by **menno** » Tue Jul 20, 2004 8:33 am

Woohoo I finally fixed the problem. Very odd, but I decided to overclock and changed the AGP aperature in the BIOS at the same time. And my problem went away. Even when I changed the AGP aperature back to what it was (64mb) everything still works. I'm scared to try changing anything else now, it all works. But as the PCI bus is locked on this motherboard I dont understand how overclocking could fix the problem.