How many slots can be used

vgoraz · Post by **vgoraz** » Mon Oct 28, 2002 4:40 am

Has anyone used all the slots on the motherboard at the same time and had the thing run stable. I already am going to use 3 of the pci slots and one of the isa slots and am thinking of buying a ide raid card instead of using the hpt controller and well i was wondering how well it would work out. on my old motherboard i had (yes even older than the bp6) i remember it had some problems when i filled them all up as some of the pci slots shared things and one of the isa slots was shared with a pci slot (and some other wierd stuff with the onboard lan). anyways yeah any help on how well this will work and where to put each thing would be helpful.
The Parts:
pci SB 128 card
pci wireless network card
pci usb/firewire card
isa network card
pci raid ide card (may not buy)
and of course my beloved nvidia tnt2 card (though yeah obviously this goes into the agp slot

of course for the hell of making this the ultimate old tech box, i may bust out my pci voodoo5 5500 as its more powerful than the tnt2

nullshark · Post by **nullshark** » Mon Oct 28, 2002 3:13 pm

It would help if you tell us what you have in each PCI slot currently (if it's set up).

Some info on the slots:
PCI 1 & the AGP share an IRQ signal (If you're using an AGP video card, any PCI device you put into PCI 1 must support IRQ sharing)

PCI 3 & the HPT share an IRQ signal (you need to put a card that supports IRQ sharing in PCI 3)

PCI 4 & 5 & ISA use the same Bus Master signal, so you can only populate 4 & 5 if one (or both) of the cards DON'T use the Bus Master signal (like Voodoo cards and supposedly some NICs)

Just a note. Most modern PCI devices support IRQ sharing.

The last successful setup that I had that filled the motherboard was:
AGP: GeForce2 MX
PCI 1 ATI TV card
PCI 2 SB Live
PCI 3 Voodoo 3 3500
PCI 4 D-Link 530tx NIC
PCI 5 empty
ISA's empty
I was using the HPT controller with one HDD on IDE 3.

The only problems with that setup were driver related and I've since removed the TV card.

I tried to use my old ISA SB AWE64 once but couldn't get it to work in either ISA.

Personally, I'd make sure you have a good return policy on the RAID card before you buy it.

Snugglebear · Post by **Snugglebear** » Mon Oct 28, 2002 6:49 pm

It also depends on what OS you use. Win2k/XP are much better with sharing than is the 9x series. UNIX is usually pretty good, though I've never had good experiences with linux (solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD have all done fine, though). BeOS had some issues, but that was a long time ago.

The configuration I use is:

AGP: Matrox G400Max
PCI1: empty
PCI2: Adaptec 2940u2w
PCI3: Some Intel nic
PCI4: empty
PCI5: empty
ISA1: USR 56k modem
ISA2: empty

Also note that IDE1 & 2 are disabled, as is the LPT and second serial port. USB and the first serial port are up, though. No devices on the HPT.

RRLedford · Post by **RRLedford** » Mon Oct 28, 2002 8:58 pm

I had all five PCI slots filled when I first installed winXP

AGP=TNT2 ultra 32MB Viper
Adaptec 2906 SCSI
Promise ATA100
Creative 7610 DVD decoder card
SB Live5.1 Value
Netgear 10/100 NIC
-No ISA cards-

When no support from XP for the DVD decoder card could be found, pulled it & installed a USB 2.0 card. When too many BlueScreen crashes kept happening with "USB IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL" message - I gave up and pulled the USB 2.0 card

Wolfram · Post by **Wolfram** » Tue Oct 29, 2002 5:55 am

AGP: Matrox G400
PCI: 3com 3C905B NIC
PCI: AVM Fritz PCI ISDN
PCI: Lifetec 9415 TV-Card
PCI: 3com 3C905 NIC
ISA: SCSI card for Mustek 12000 SP
ISA: SB AWE64 value

All onboard components enabled, USB webcam, Com 1+2 used. No problems with Win2K SP3, Win98 SE, Mandrake Linux 9.0

I´m surprised myself, but it works

The IRQ_not_less_or_equal message is said to usually indicate a driver problem. I got the impression that more people got these problems with XP than with 2K.

Regards,

Wolfram