IRQ troubles with my dually (Asus A7M266D)

[dragon_788]

Asus A7M266-D rev 1.04 BIOS rev 1011.003 (board does have USB ports and headers)
2x 1700+ DUT3C JIUHB @ 2128
*Edit: this is set up like the board, AGP down the PCI/66 to PCI/33 slots
GeCube Radeon 7000 64MB AGP4x
Intel 1000MT Pro Desktop (66MHz?)
Promise TX2plus w/74GB Raptor (trying to make it bootable) (66MHz?)
Was an Audigy Platinum eX
The eX expansion/connection to external breakout box
ATI TV Wonder Pro (no remote since one will be coming with my 9600XT and I have a Windows MCE one also)


I've had Windows 2003 running fine on this lovely girl for a week or so. I've been tweaking with it to find the highest speed I can get and still stay within the range of my nice'n'quiet Silent Boosts. So far 16x133 (I'm trying to keep the PCI bus within spec.) seems to be a pretty good bet, the only issue being that my idle is 43-45C in Windows according to MBM and if I start priming I'm betting it will go past 50C which is my comfortable maximum. But since this is going to be an encoding machine and also store my movies (DVD backups and such) I wanted to put a TV Tuner card in here along with a decent sound card so that it can become an HTPC (among other things). The first issue I noticed was when I thought about putting MCE on here. (I have an evaluation version that a friend who is a computer reseller picked up for me, since MCE2005 has been talked about as being white-box friendly.) The remote is IR wireless and the connection is through USB, but all my PCI slots are full (well the one is covered by the eX drive expansion card) so I tried enabling the onboard USB ports. It seemed to work fine, but then partway through the install of MCE, just as I was putting in the size I wanted for the partitions on the Raptor, I get one of two outcomes: 1. the computer will BSOD with an IRQ_LESS_THAN_OR_EQUAL error or 2. the computer will just reboot itself. The funny thing is that it only happens when I hit any key on the keyboard after hitting C to set up a custom partition, I'm going to try just using the default of the whole drive. At first I thought it was the keyboard doing it because I would hit Num Lock to use the number pad and it would BSOD or reboot. Using the whole drive seems to be working, but I wonder if Partition Magic will be able to resize the OS partition without making things mad. On a side note, with this controller it seems to be taking quite a while to format the partition, I've had larger Western Digital SATA drives go much faster (on the Asus A7N8X Deluxe onboard SATA controller), is it the fact that XP is having to use the PCI 66MHz bus? Or maybe its not actually running the bus at 66MHz?

Does anybody have any ideas on a way to fix this? I'm still pulling out cards, the sound card is out and I'm going to pull the TV card next, but I'd like to be able to have all my cards in and useable, and I'm thinking of experimenting with the USB onboard again since without it my MCE will really only be XP with TV, minus the remote which makes it worse than XP for TV purposes. Any help would be appreciated greatly, as this is gong to be running one of the 120GB WD SATAs that I used on the old box as a primary OS drive rather than the Raptor, I'm just testing it with the controller since I thought I read somewhere that the TX2 supports TCQ which is something the Raptor can use.

 

[dragon_788]

Using the whole drive SEEMS to be working...

Seems to be is right. It got to 100% on the formatting and then it just stopped, no more activity, the x Lock keys didn't work, so something is still unhappy. I'm going to try one more thing before pulling out some more cards, since it said it got to 100% I'm going to attempt to install without any more formatting. I doubt this will work, so does anyone have any more ideas, please?

*Edit: (I'm trying not to spam so I'll edit each post a couple times before leaving a new reply.)
Well the funny thing is that it forced me to do a format since whatever it had formatted it with before apparently didn't get finished enough to call NTFS. But as soon as I chose to quick format it gave me the IRQ BSOD again. I'm going to pull the TV card and see how that goes, I really hope this thing isn't going to be this much of a pain once I get the slot order figured out.

 

[Stedeman]

Is "MCE2005" still BETA? And did all your problems start when you started to use it?
2 thing the old MP chip-set had bad USB, I would check yours to see if it's an old one, second if you need open up more IRQ's go into BIOS and disable your serial and parallel ports and any onboard options you don't use.

 

[dragon_788]

Well the MCE I'm trying to install is an evaluation copy, its the full version of 2003/4 with all the bugs ironed out (I think). Its pretty much the same as what's shipping on MCE PCs but it has a 120 day eval limit on it.

I had read of the USB issues and wasn't sure if they troubled my revision of the board since its the newest version and they (onboard ports) had been removed from the 1.03 version, but it did come with a USB2 card so I shouldn't get my hopes up.

I had also thought of the serial and parallel ports just before I read your reply so I have them disabled, but for some reason my controller card is still sticking at 100% done on the format, I really have no idea what the deal is there. I'm going to try changing the size of the partitions from default again and I'll give a heads up as to what I find.

 

[cmcquistion]

Try swapping your two 66 MHz cards. The 66 MHz slot furthest from the AGP slot shares an IRQ with the AGP card. Perhaps your Promise card doesn't like sharing an IRQ with your video card. Also, disable AGP Fast Writes in the BIOS as this causes instability with a LOT of ATI cards and yields negligible performance improvement.

 

[dragon_788]

I disabled the fast writes and that has helped the video a bit, but the Promise card didn't like either slot.

 

[diehrd]

Toss the Promiss card in the 32/33 slot ..It may not be a 66MHz card anyway..

 

[cmcquistion]

Toss the Promiss card in the 32/33 slot ..It may not be a 66MHz card anyway..

That will hurt his performance, though.

 

[diehrd]

That will hurt his performance, though.

Not at all that card is 33/32/66 it is not a 64 bit card....Unless i looked up the wrong one..

 

[cmcquistion]

The 33 MHz, 32 bit PCI slots on any AMD dually, suffer from a latency issue, which throttles their effective bandwidth to about 40 MB/s (should be about 133 MB/s.) For most peripherals, this doesn't matter, because they never need that much bandwidth, but disk controllers really will use that much bandwidth and their performance will suffer, if put in a 33 MHz, 32 bit PCI slot. If you leave it in a 66 MHz, 64 bit slot (even if it actually runs at 33 MHz, 32 bit), then it won't be strangled by the chipset's latency issue and will get its entire 133 MB/s bandwidth, there.

 

[diehrd]

How could I forget that lol...

I would use only the video and Sata card and see how it goes.I have seen times when using an add on card for drives causes chaos exspecially when setting them up.

 

[dragon_788]

This is a 66MHz capable card, and that will allow it to use as much of the 266MB/s of available bandwidth on the 64/66-32/33 slot as possible. The problem just seems to be either between the card and the board or the drivers and the board as I just couldn't get it to properly boot. It may also have to do with the fact that I was overclocking considerably at the time, I did try it once at dropped down speeds, but with a FSB of 115 I think the slots may have been out of spec. I may try again eventually at 133FSB and a lower multi, as I'm at 16 right now, but I don't think the multi will affect anything, my goal really is just 2.0GHz per proc or higher, and I'd like to keep the PCI in spec as I want to use an Audigy for sound and I hear they don't like out of spec stuff.

 

[diehrd]

Set the board jumper to 100 and see it it works..

 

[TJworld]

cmcquisition wrote:

The 33 MHz, 32 bit PCI slots on any AMD dually, suffer from a latency issue, which throttles their effective bandwidth to about 40 MB/s (should be about 133 MB/s.) For most peripherals, this doesn't matter, because they never need that much bandwidth, but disk controllers really will use that much bandwidth and their performance will suffer, if put in a 33 MHz, 32 bit PCI slot. If you leave it in a 66 MHz, 64 bit slot (even if it actually runs at 33 MHz, 32 bit), then it won't be strangled by the chipset's latency issue and will get its entire 133 MB/s bandwidth, there.

This solved my stuttering audio and video problems on an Asus A7M266D that is fully populated with PCI cards, with Windows 2003 Server Enterprise Edition, Service Pack 1.

It has dual Athlon MP 2000 CPUs, 2GB RAM, onboard CMI-8738 audio plus:

AGP Matrox Millenium G450 Dual-Head
PCI slot 1: 32-bit 66MHz Promise Fastrak TX2000 RAID 0/1
PCI slot 2: 64-bit 66MHz Intel Pro/100S Dual Port Ethernet
PCI slot 3: 32-bit 33MHz Asus USB 2 Host
PCI slot 4: 32-bit 33Mhz Firewire (IEEE1394) Host
PCI slot 5: 32-bit 33Mhz Hauppauge WinTV 878/9

This is the final working solution.

Before this, I had the Fastrak RAID controller (with 4x 60GB disk to form a stripped/mirrored 120GB array) in slot 5, and later slot 4.

I was experiencing a lot of PCI latency popping & stuttering with audio and with the WinTV card (from an external camera on the composite input) when the disks were being used hard (such as an anti-virus scan).

I had been trying many PCI latency settings using the freeware PCI Latency Tool 3 but couldn't completely solve the problems.

Then I found the quoted paragraph about the PCI 32-bit bus being throttled.

I moved the Intel Pro dual-port from slot 2 to 3 (shares resources with the AGP slot), moved the Fastrak from slot 4 (which doesn't share its INT-C interrupt) to slot 1, and moved the Firewire host to slot 4.

After restarting the first thing I noticed was the Windows start-up sound was perfect (previously it was hidiously stuttering). I then started a manual anti-virus scan and then started MusicMatch jukebox.
Its start-up sound used to be badly broken, but now it was perfect.
Playing audio tracks whilst the a/v scan is going is now perfect, and at the same time I am transmitting the composite video camera signal from the WinTV card out to a streaming server on the Internet.

Everything appears to be perfect - no stuttering of any kind.

I'm running the system with the PCI Latency values I had set previously, which I found gave the best results. They are: all devices set to 160 except the PCI bridges (set to 0), the AGP card set to 128, and the CMI audio set to 248.

After this soak test I shall not use the latency settings, allowing all devices to take the default set by the BIOS (32).

I'll report back if that causes problems, if not, assume it works just as well.

TJ.

 

[dragon_788]

I never did get any of my Promise cards to work in the dually (I have two) it appears that this is a known issue with the MPX chipset and the Promise controller used on my cards. On an offhand chance my dad had a spare 4 port SATA card laying around that was from Silicon Image and so I popped it in, low and behold I had 4 more drives, a very thrilling experience to be sure, but it would have been nice to know that BEFORE I bought the Promise cards way back when.

 

[Juiblex79]

I have to agree with Dragon, Promise Raid Controlers do not mix with the MPX Chipset. I had an MSI K7D and no matter which 66Mhz slot I put it in or how every I tried to mess with the IRQs I would not be able to get my AGP cards drivers to install, it would lock up every time I tried. It was a choice between Raid and VGA graphics. I didn't bother to try the 33Mhz slots because then I'd be clogging and all ready bottlenecked design that already has an ethernet card sound card and USB/Firewire card on it. So Promise Card is going up on ebay soon, I wish I knew about this issue before a bought it but oh well, least I bought it pretty cheap BC it was used. Oh and it was a Promise TX2 aswell.