IRQ sharing leads to bad performance?

[absinthe]

I posted an earlier thread which hasn't gotten any responses yet, but I found something that might have to do with my problem. The URL for the last post is here if you haven't read it:

https://www.techspot.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2277

Anyway, my Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 and Geforce 4Ti4400 are sharing an IRQ at IRQ11. I know it's better to have your video card by itself if you can, but I simply CAN NOT manually change any of the IRQ's on my system, be it through BIOS, Windows, or what have you. I'm getting really frustrated. Argh!

Any ideas guys?

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

Yes, sharing interrupt requests leads to worse performance than each device having its own IRQ. This is sometimes crucial, for example, when video capture card shares IRQ with another card - frames begin to drop.
General Description of IRQ Sharing in Windows 2000 (applies to other NT5.x too) tries to explain why it acts like that.

Windows 2000 does not have this ability because of the more complex hardware schemas it is designed to support.

blah blah..
However:

Manually assigning IRQs to PCI slots in the System BIOS as a troubleshooting method may work on some non-ACPI systems when using a standard PC HAL, but these settings are ignored by Plug and Play in Windows if ACPI support is enabled. If you need to manually assign IRQ addresses through the BIOS to a device on an ACPI motherboard, you will need to re-install Windows to force the installation to use a Standard PC HAL.

So, you need to upgrade your computer driver (Yes, in Device Manager, there's "Computer") to Standard PC or MPS Multiprocessor PC if you have more than one CPU. Note that if you do this, OS will find every device again during the next reboot and it will install default drivers for most, if not all, things. Also, network card's IP address will be set to automatic (because that nonexistant card has the older IP) and so on.
If you upgrade your system like this, you don't need to disable ACPI from BIOS - sometimes it's not even possible.

 

[Rick]

If you do decide to change your computer driver, I suggest you make a backup of your hardware configuration just in case.

Windows 2000 doesn't like to change computer types sometimes... Neither does Windows XP.. And if that happens, you can run into serious problems which can be avoided by having a backup of you old hardware configuration.