AGP 4x card & Soundblaster Live! BOTH on IRQ 3 ?

[Spazmogen]

I just upgraded my video card to an FX 5500 128mb from a GeForce2 GTS 32mb. The card is an 8x card running at 4x. Which it can do, according to its specs.

I noticed the graphics are jerky now and the sound crackles a bit as well. Gaming is much more difficult with the jerky graphics.

System information in XP Home shows that IRQ is shared between the AGP card and the PCI Soundblaster.

Is this normal, or should I move the Soundblaster card over to another PCI slot?

Or could the graphics/sound be the new Nvidia driver 6.6.9.3 ?

Thanks for your reply.

[hoxlund]

usually the agp and first pci slot have this problem, that is if you have the sound blaster in the closest pci slot to the agp

but anyways i would move the sound blaster to different slot

[Spazmogen]

Sounds like a plan.

Thanks.

[bill]

Hmm, trying to play HL2?

Creative cards, generally speaking, don't share IRQ's very well. Did the move fix the crackle problem?

[Spazmogen]

Hmm, trying to play HL2?

Creative cards, generally speaking, don't share IRQ's very well. Did the move fix the crackle problem?

I need to find the time to move the card. Probably Monday, as I've been @ work all weekend.


Far Cry & Battlefield 1942.

My system barely makes the minimum requirements for Far Cry, so I expected it to be choppy. But 1942 ran fine with the old 32mb card installed.

[Spazmogen]

OK.

I tried to move the card about, same shoddy result.

Crackling sound from the SB Live! value card & jerky video (video is not always jerky, its intermittent).

Some what jerky video.

Here's a breakdown of my IRQ's as of my last reboot.



Damn near every PCI/AGP slot is using IRQ3. ISA is using higher numbered slots.

[bill]

Spazmogen,

I talked to a friend about your problem. He suggested that I read this and I'll pass it along. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314068/EN-US/

Have you tried removing the sound blaster card and then play a game to see if the choppy video smoothes out? That would isolate the sound blaster as the problem, assuming the game will run without a sound card.

[Spazmogen]

Spazmogen,

I talked to a friend about your problem. He suggested that I read this and I'll pass it along. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/314068/EN-US/

Have you tried removing the sound blaster card and then play a game to see if the choppy video smoothes out? That would isolate the sound blaster as the problem, assuming the game will run without a sound card.

Thanks, I read the article. To sum it up: if I disable ACPI and assign IRQ's manually in the BIOS, then I MUST re-install XP for the changes to be permanent. That's not going to occur anytime soon. Even my wife is complaining about how slow the system is now.

Soundblaster: I've not pulled it as it worked fine before I swapped the video cards. I'll swap the old GeForce2 GTS back in and see if the problem goes away.

I just tried to rip & burn a unencypted DVD. The rip took nearly an hour, and so did the burn. This is twice as long as it usually takes, even when burning @ 2.4x

Alcohol log:
Session 01:
Track 01: DVD, Length: 1965123(3.75 GB), Address: 000000
#############################################################################

####################### Dumping/Recording Progress Log #######################
18:26:44 Processor info: Pentium III (0.18 um) With 256 KB On-Die L2 Cache (997MHz)
18:26:44 Memory Available to Windows: 785,900 KB
18:26:44 Memory Buffer size: 128 MB
18:26:45 Image file loading: C:\name edited.MDS
18:26:45 DVD Source Info: Session: 1, Track: 1, Length: 3.75 GB / 436:41:48
18:27:51 (H:) _NEC DVD+RW ND-1100A(1:1): Recording Method/Speed
18:27:51 Recording - DVD DAO - 2.3X (3173 KB/Sec)
19:10:21 Image file loading completed!
19:10:35 (H:) _NEC DVD+RW ND-1100A(1:1): Recording completed successfully!
19:10:35 Elapsed Time: 00:42:43, Average speed: 1.3X
19:10:40 All recording procedures have been completed!
19:10:40 Elapsed Time: 00:43:49
##############################################################################

Screen shots:






any ideas on this one ?

[bill]

I just tried to rip & burn a unencypted DVD. The rip took nearly an hour, and so did the burn. This is twice as long as it usually takes, even when burning @ 2.4x


any ideas on this one ?

No, no ideas. Hopefully someone wiser than I will see the thread.

Good luck

[Spazmogen]

I am nearly at the point where I'll format C: again.

The situation has improved a bit.

I put the 32mb card back in, and it was still going on. So it was not hardware trouble.

The crackling sound only occurrs during hard drive accesses.

I tried using 2 versions of the NVidia GeForce drivers, I tried a different Soundblaster drivers and updated my VIA chipset drivers.

The mouse is no longer jerky across the screen, but the sound still crackles a bit during the games or when the HDD is accessed.

I put the GeForce 5500 128mb card back in, and it's not too bad. I can probably live with it for a while.

I've not tried to burn another DVD since the one above.

Thanks to all who helped.

[LoneWolf]

What kind of mainboard/chipset do you have? If it's VIA, this sounds very much like the PCI Latency problem that used to occurr between the VIA 686B Southbridge chipset (found mostly on VIA KT133/KT133A-based mainboards) and the SoundBlaster Live! cards. Someone finally created an unofficial patch that should be out on the internet for download, which fixed most people's problems.

[dodecahedron]

George Breese.
links can be found at www.viaarena.com

but i think the patch is already incorporated into the recent VIA chipset drivers, so is spaz reasonably up-to-date VIA drivers that's already taken care of.

[Spazmogen]

Motherboard is a Soyo SY-7VBA133U

"Intel Socket-370 Tualatin, Pentium III & Celeron Based VIA 694T / 686B Chipset Universal Motherboard Featuring ISA Slots".
PICTURE OF BOARD
Via Drivers I had 4.43 and upgraded to 4.55. But the crackling is still there during HDD accesses.

At the time, I needed an ISA board for my old SCSI card (for my scanner) and an old 33.6 kbps modem.

dodecahedron: thanks for the name of the patch author. Google located his page in under 1 second.

I'll give it a shot tonight.

Thanks!

[Spazmogen]

My system is still screwed, but I thought I'd check my IDE settings, just for the hell of it.



Yeah, Primary Master is in PIO mode. It's an Ultra DMA-5 Western Digital 160gb SE HDD with 8mb cache. It's not even a year old.

It's stuck in PIO. I can't get it to change back to Ultra DMA-5 as it used to be.


Worse yet: I didn't change it at all ! I have no idea how it reverted back to that level! But that would explain why it took 14 hours to defrag it, especially when there's only 32gb on it right now.

AND to top it off: my Promise ATA100 PCI card is detected by my BIOS, but it says there is no HDD attached. There is a 40gb Maxtor 7200rpm drive that was working fine last week.

Something bad is going on.

[Spazmogen]

I'd like to thank everyone for their input.

Especially: dodecahedron & cfitz who made the 2 posts that I needed to read in the FAQ section about enabling DMA (forcing it to work in my case).

All seems well.

Now I just have to get the ATA100 Promise card to see the Maxtor HDD. But that will be another day.

Thanks to everyone. You saved me from restoring my system from a Norton Ghost image. I wasn't looking forward to loosing 6 weeks of stuff (my last Ghost update was 6 weeks ago and spanned 5 DVD's).

[cfitz]

I'd like to thank everyone for their input.

Especially: dodecahedron & cfitz who made the 2 posts that I needed to read in the FAQ section about enabling DMA (forcing it to work in my case).

Wow! I'm not even around for a couple of months and get credit for helping out. Still, I'll gladly accept the gratitude.

How are you doing Spazmogen? Hopefully a little better now that the DMA problem is resolved. Now, before you do anything else, Ghost another backup. If the DMA problem is symptomatic of something that is going to go further south in the near future, you want to have an up-to-date backup on hand.

Windows XP will disable DMA access to a drive if there are too many CRC errors (data check errors) during DMA transfers. It is possible this is why your drive was switched to PIO and you could not set it back. If so, you might have a bad or loose IDE cable. Less likely, but still possible, are problems with the IDE interface chips on the drive or the motherboard.

cfitz