IRQ problem lowered my 3dmark score by 1200

[Arkaine23]

Have video card, onboard sound, usb controller, and nic all sharing IRQ 11. When I added the USB card to my system, my 3dmark scores dropped 1200 points! Using Win 2000 and I found device manager/resource manual controls are locked. IRQ's 5 and 7 are both free. I tried swapping PCI slots and nothing changed. SO I was looking for a way to fix this and found:

1) Reserve the shared irq through bios and see if that redistributes the devices to new irq's.

2) Disable ACPI in bios and format/clean install OS.

I'm going to try these fixes tonight and see if I can get my 3dmark score back up. Hope this might help some other ppl with Win 2k or XP having too much IRQ sharing/inefficent AGP.

[Arkaine23]

I also just hooked up a 4 port router w/ firewall. Could that be causing the problems?

Also, found a better (I hope) way of disabling ACPI in Win 2k. Device manager--> + Computer--> ACPI--> Update driver, pick Standard PC. Reboot, reinstall some devices, turn on APM in power management.

Gonna try it and see if rearranging irq's restores my previous 3dmark scores.

[Arkaine23]

disabling ACPI didn't help any. But when I formatted and reinstalled win 2000 my previous scores were restored.