Gforce 4 256 + Audigy 2 ZS Platinum Pro + Matronix 64 PCI = Disaster

[neelyjohns]

I have an AMD XP2400 w/ 786M ram, and it has been a workhorse from day one. I recently switched towers so that I could accomidate the 5.25 in. interface that the Audigy came with. While I had it all open I decided it would be fun to pop in an old PCI video card I had laying around and plug in a third display. My machine would lock up if installed the sound card drivers with both video cards in, and it would also lock up if I installed the sound card first and then the video card. I suppose I will live with ONLY 2-21 in. Trinitrons. But it would be nice if I could have all three displays. Any thoughts?

Peace...

Neely Johns

 

[shadow_29]

well neelyjohns,first are you running on xp home/pro if not this could be an i/o,irq conflict thats limiting your system.two this might be an issue with power as well, which psu do you have??what is it rated at-300w/400w??
also you might want to restart in safe mode and remove any old "ghost copies"of devices that might have been installed there,this is probably not the main solution to your problem but worth a look.

 

[neelyjohns]

I kind of figured...

I have actually gone as far as completely reinstalling XP Pro (corp edition) on a different HD but run into the same problem. I sort of figured that there was a resource conflict, but I have not been able to figure out how to correct it. I can view the IRQ for my devices, but there seems to be no way to change them...

 

[shadow_29]

if there is an irq conflict then it should show up in device manager as a small halt logo in front of the device,,if you have that then acknowledge in fron of which device,first.

 

[neelyjohns]

Can't even get that far...

The mere presence of the device causes the lock up, if I have them both in at the same time it locks up befor I can even stop it from loading the drivers automatically...

 

[nein]

The mere presence of the device causes the lock up, if I have them both in at the same time it locks up befor I can even stop it from loading the drivers automatically...

The PCI video card pre-dated IRQ sharing, it has to have its very own IRQ assignment. The Audigy is a nasty IRQ master device as well as being a nasty IRQ slave device, it sucked up more than one IRQ assignments and it doesn't like to share them much ever with anything else, kinda like an ATI video card.

For it to actually work, you have to put the PCI video card in a slot which coulc be assign an IRQ solely to that PCI slot and nothing else, using your mobo BIOS in IRQ legacy assignment mode.

However the IRQ assignments, they can't exceed 24 total physical IRQ assignments. If there're too many hardware devices, some hardware devices will have to support IRQ sharing and let windows giving them virtual IRQs which derrived from the 24 physical IRQs available while they functioned as holding IRQ pointers for ACPI (assuming ACPI would still be enabled with legacy support).

 

[neelyjohns]

ummm.... OK

I think I understand what you are saying. The Audigy is assigned to IRQ 17, and it sounds like there is probably another IRQ it is using too? So I guess what I need to do is un-install the Audigy? Then install the PCI video card, change the IRQ, make sure there are not any other resource conflicts and then re-install the Audigy and let it have IRQ 17.

This all sounds good, but how do I change the resources if they are greyed out and not able to be modified?