BadAxe (D975XBX ) Motherboard

I am planning an upgrade to Core 2 Duo. The machine will be used mainly
for development, with perhaps half a dozen instance of VS 2005 running
plus half a dozen tools. I am hoping that Core 2 will give me good
responsiveness when switching apps.

I also want to be able to stream MP3's to a Hauppage Show Center - which
is a bit fussy about chipsets, it won't play with my current Nvidia NForce
4 setup.

Tom's Hardware seem to rate the D975XBX as rock solid, if a percent or two
slower than others.

Is anybody using the board who can give a view on it? I am not interested
in over-clocking, modern PC's think much faster than I can :-)

--
Jeff Gaines
Posted with XanaNews 1.18.1.3

Jeff Gaines wrote:
I am planning an upgrade to Core 2 Duo. The machine will be used mainly
for development, with perhaps half a dozen instance of VS 2005 running
plus half a dozen tools. I am hoping that Core 2 will give me good
responsiveness when switching apps.

I also want to be able to stream MP3's to a Hauppage Show Center - which
is a bit fussy about chipsets, it won't play with my current Nvidia
NForce 4 setup.

Tom's Hardware seem to rate the D975XBX as rock solid, if a percent or
two slower than others.

Is anybody using the board who can give a view on it? I am not
interested in over-clocking, modern PC's think much faster than I can :-)

I've been using a D975XBX with a Core 2 Duo E6700 for two or three
weeks. Mostly I give it very high marks, but I am having a problem with
dual graphics cards. I'm a software developer, and run three monitors.

I have to start the machine with only one board enabled, then manually
enable the second card with Win XP Device Driver. Otherwise, both cards
get assigned the same IRQ, and the system hangs. By enabling one later,
they get separate IRQ's and all is well.

I haven't found a way to submit a problem report to Intel. If anyone
knows how to attract the attention of a real person there, I'd
appreciate hearing about it.

--Beman Dawes

On 29/09/2006 in message gv_Sg.10708$KK.402@trnddc08 Beman Dawes wrote:

I've been using a D975XBX with a Core 2 Duo E6700 for two or three weeks.
Mostly I give it very high marks, but I am having a problem with dual
graphics cards. I'm a software developer, and run three monitors.

I have to start the machine with only one board enabled, then manually
enable the second card with Win XP Device Driver. Otherwise, both cards
get assigned the same IRQ, and the system hangs. By enabling one later,
they get separate IRQ's and all is well.

I haven't found a way to submit a problem report to Intel. If anyone knows
how to attract the attention of a real person there, I'd appreciate
hearing about it.

Thanks for your reply, Beman :-)

I have just re-organised my study to make space for a third monitor, I was
planning to run 2 x XFX 6600GT graphics cards, looks like it may be an
issue so it's good to know!

I can't help with an Intel contact. I had a similar problem with a dual
processor Asus board once, even though I managed an email exchange with
them they were unable (and uninterested) to solve the issue. I'm not sure
manufacturers spend much time testing multi-head.

Is it possible to allocate a specific IRQ in the BIOS for each card? It's
been a long time since I had to do that but it was useful with ISA cards.

--
Jeff Gaines
Posted with XanaNews 1.18.1.3

Jeff Gaines wrote:

I have just re-organised my study to make space for a third monitor, I
was planning to run 2 x XFX 6600GT graphics cards, looks like it may be
an issue so it's good to know!

A three monitor rig is wonderful for software development. I run the IDE
on the central 24" monitor, the reference document (design, or whatever)
on the right 17" monitor, and the program under test on the left 17"
monitor.

I can't help with an Intel contact. I had a similar problem with a dual
processor Asus board once, even though I managed an email exchange with
them they were unable (and uninterested) to solve the issue. I'm not
sure manufacturers spend much time testing multi-head.

Is it possible to allocate a specific IRQ in the BIOS for each card?
It's been a long time since I had to do that but it was useful with ISA
cards.

Yes, according to ATI it is possible via the Device Manager by disabling
ACPI on the Computer property page. Then on the Device Manager property
page for one of the monitors, Resources tab, uncheck "Use automatic
settings" and assign the IRQ by hand.

I haven't tried that yet. While having to do a special startup song and
dance is a PITA, it does work and I'm worried about destablizing my system.

If you get your three monitor rig running OK, please send me an email
and tell me how you did it.

Thanks,

--Beman

Beman Dawes wrote:
Jeff Gaines wrote:

I have just re-organised my study to make space for a third monitor, I
was planning to run 2 x XFX 6600GT graphics cards, looks like it may
be an issue so it's good to know!

I finally got my two graphic card / three monitor rig to run reliably
without problems. The solution was simple; both graphics boards have to
use Nvidia GPU's. If either or both use ATI GPU's, there are serious
problems that I was never able to resolve. When I switched to two Nvidia
cards, everything worked right away.

--Beman

On 06/10/2006 in message hPqVg.19924$3T2.18261@trnddc06 Beman Dawes wrote:

Beman Dawes wrote:
Jeff Gaines wrote:

I have just re-organised my study to make space for a third monitor, I
was planning to run 2 x XFX 6600GT graphics cards, looks like it may be
an issue so it's good to know!

I finally got my two graphic card / three monitor rig to run reliably
without problems. The solution was simple; both graphics boards have to
use Nvidia GPU's. If either or both use ATI GPU's, there are serious
problems that I was never able to resolve. When I switched to two Nvidia
cards, everything worked right away.

--Beman

Thanks for the update Beman, looks like I'll get myself an early Christmas
present then :-)

--
Jeff Gaines
Posted with XanaNews 1.18.1.3