Gigabyte 8PE667 Ultra problem

[Garric]

Any way to not have the USB and AGP sharing the same IRQ? Games seem to be VERY laggy, and I think this could be the problem. Alternately, is there a way that I can assign a specific irq to the AGP slot?

Any help would be greatly apreciated.

Garric

[gondo]

You could try to manually assign IRQ's to the slots instead of running in 'auto' in the BIOS.

Although I have not tried this in ages. I also
do not like sharing anything with AGP, but it
is causing no problems here.

I only have one small gripe with the gigabyte
board I have, is the options for USB. It is
either all 6 on, or all off. I do not like
having to use all the USB IRQ's when I only use
2 ports.

But you might have a point, my P4 system does
seem a bit laggy in Everquest, compared to my
Dual AMD MP system that blows my P4 away.
Although my Dualie board is a very basic server
board, and does not share any IRQ's.

It makes me ponder why we are still stuck with
the same amount of IRQ's that we had 20 years
ago... 15 just doesn't cut it anymore, and makes
system setup a challenge.

[Garric]

I guess that the problem I am having is that I don't see how to assign an irq to the AGP slot in the BIOS. I am using the latest (F3) bios for the board, but I can only see how to assign irqs to the 6 PCI slots (4 IRQs shared between the 6 slots).

I'm stumped with this, either I am missing something or Gigabyte has made a really dumb design decision.

Garric

[Garric]

I managed to solve this by disabling ACPI (install WinXP with Standard PC HAL), and disabling all onboard functionality (lan, sound, memory card reader, etc), and disabling 2 of the USB Host Controllers, after I did this each device had it's own IRQ. Now, I no longer notice the lagginess as much (still seems laggier than my Epox 4BEAR, but maybe that is just me remembering incorrectly how the 4BEAR used to work). And no, this has nothing to do with framerate, which I have capped at 125 FPS in Quake3.

Try this if you are having problems with this board and you think it is due to irq sharing, which I always see as a very EVIL thing.

Garric

[gondo]

Couldn't you have just reassigned the IRQ of the first PCI slot? It shares with AGP. I have not tried this though, it is just a guess in the dark.

I do not know if the AGP slot would follow it, just seems to me that if you change Slot 1 the AGP would follow.

I cannot stand boards that don't let you enable/disable each USB Hub. Yeah you can do it in Device manager, but that is messy.

Geez, can't they figure out how to get more than 15 IRQ's? It has been over 20 years.....

And I don't count USB 2 systems that have 16 and above... those are virtual, and hmmm IRQ 16, what is it really sharing with???