G.L. Cross schrieb:

I've been building my own systems for about five years now but one thing has
always
left me guessing as to exactly what information is being conveyed by the
tables that appear
in every MB manual I've seen regarding the expansion slots and which ones
share IRQs.
Here is the table from the MB manual and it seems to do nothing but confuse
me so I am
here hoping someone can explain exactly what this information means:

[garbled table deleted]
I preferred to d/l the PDF manual... And please, check your line breaks.

It appears PCI slots 1 and 3 do not share an INT line with anything
else, so you should put interrupt sharing unfriendly cards into these.
Slot 4 shares an INT line with the Gb LAN (I wouldn't put anything
bandwidth intensive into that one), while 2 and 5 share one with the AGP
card.

final question: How do I determine if a certain device driver supports IRQ
sharing?

You try out. Frequently it's not only a matter of the device itself, the
drivers also play an important role - there have been cases where a card
absolutely despises interrupt sharing in Windows but miraculously worked
fine in Linux.

I want to configure this system with Windows-XP PRO and the following
add-on cards:

(1) ASUS V9180 Magic GeForce MX 440 8X AGP (for primary display)

Nvidia chips are usually not very keen on interrupt sharing.

(2) Visiontek GeForce4 MX420 PCI (for second display)
(3) ATI TV Wonder Value Edition PCI (TV-Tuner and Video Capture)

Put that one into one of the non-shared slots. Same goes for the 2nd
graphics card, I suppose.

(4) 3Com/US Robotics 56Kbps VOICE/FAX modem PCI (FAX & digital answering
machine)

This can probably live happily next to the Gb LAN.

You may send e-mail if you wish provided it is NOT SPAM. To decode my valid
[snip]

It would probably be easier to get a Yahoo! mail account, where you can
set up disposable trash addresses. You may want to choose one containing
"nospam"...

Stephan
--
Meine Andere Seite: http://stephan.win31.de/
PC#6: i440BX, 1xP3-500E, 512 MiB, 18+80 GB, R9k AGP 64 MiB, 110W
This is a SCSI-inside, Legacy-plus, TCPA-free computer
Mail to From: not read, see homepg. | Real gelesene Mailadr. s. Homep.