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Pastimes : Dream Machine ( Build your own PC ) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Zeddie88 who wrote (6122)	2/9/1999 1:40:00 AM
From: Zeuspaul	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

It seems like a hardware contention problem of some kind. Any thoughts? I think you are on the right track. I can only guess..I try different things just like you are doing. I have two ATI Expert98 PCI cards but only one is installed. The Abit board is preferred by the overclocking crowd. One has the ability to alter CPU settings and voltage settings from the mainboard bios. This is an advantage if one wants to overclock the popular 300A Celeron CPU to 450 MHz. There are other mainboards that are rated higher from a hardware compatibility point of view. The ASUS P2B and the Aopen AXB boards receive high compatibility ratings at Tom's place tomshardware.com I think pae may have the ASUS p2b with ATI cards in a multi monitor Win 98 setup...are you there Paul? Do you see any yellow check marks in the device manager when in safe mode? Have you tried two PCI cards only..without the AGP card? Is there another available PCI slot you can try? Do you have any other expansion cards in the machine? Do you have the latest QDI bios? What is your primary card PCI? or AGP? Can you change it in the bios. If you can you my want to inverse the sequence and see what happens. Zeuspaul

To: Zeddie88 who wrote (6122)	2/9/1999 11:35:00 AM
From: Spots	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 14778

>>trouble getting 3 ATI video cards to work together I'm not familiar with that particular motherboard, but you are likely having IRQ and/or busmastering conflicts. An IRQ and a busmaster slot are required for the direct memory access of these latter day video cards. Try checking the motherboard manual or makers web site. Somewhere you should be able to find out which and how many PCI slots are or can be bus master slots and how IRQs can be distributed. My Abit BX6-2 mobo, for instance, shares the AGP IRQ with PCI slot 1, meaning if I put a PCI video card into PCI slot 1 along with a card in the AGP slot, I would have a conflict. There's no way to resolve this but move the card. BTW, PCI slots are numbered starting with 1 at the top (closest to the AGP slot). Also, if you have legacy ISA devices there may be an IRQ conflict if the ISA device is trying to get an IRQ that's assigned to PCI plug and play in the bios. Since the bios usually assigns IRQs to PCI devices from the bottom up, the conflict would appear only when you added enough devices. Similarly, if you have IRQs reserved for ISA devices in the bios so there aren't enough for the PCI cards. PCI was supposed to solve all these problems. Thanks, guys. Go back up your trees and scratch another interrupt architecture and bus standard on your stone tablets ...