"Stephan Grossklass" wrote in message
...

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

It was fine when it went out but I noticed the post when it showed up
and sent a cancel request for the first one. I guess you didn't notice the
repost I put out 46 minutes later...
Is there some reason why I should leave the "automatically wrap text at"
setting to 76 characters? That's what happened to me the first time (those
true-type fonts) and it garbled the table...

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.

Here's the thing that never got explained to me: this table implies that
each
slot has four "INT lines" but I don't get the relationship between what this
means (hardware design-wise) and how these INT A, INT B, INT C, etc.
relate in any way to the sharing of IRQs. Plus the use of the word "used"
I've never run across before...

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.

This fact I am already aware of. Also they sometimes get unstable (at least
some
of the older ones) if you enable the "Read Around Write" BIOS setting of the
VIA chipset. I do not know if this issue has been resolved with the newer
Nvidia
chips or not. All that aside, Nvidia makes some damn good video chips (the
GeForce MX 440 is capable of real-time full-screen antialiasing at a quality
I've
never seen before and a 200Hz refresh rate at 1024x768 resolution in 32-bit
color).


(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.

Yes, this is how I was planning to arrange them:
AGP === ASUS video card
PCI-1 === Visiontek video card
PCI-2 === Two additional USB ports cabled to MB header (PCI-2 unused)
PCI-3 === ATI TV-Tuner / video capture card
PCI-4 === 56Kbps voice/fax modem
PCI-5 === (unused)

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"...

Funny! I did that once already. After returning from a two-week vacation, I
had
over 800 SPAM messages, the vast majority of them porno...