Bus mastering causing major instablity

[Muad'Dib]

Don't you hate that Kii!?! Everything looks promising and then BAM! Stupid restart button....

[Gphreak]

The G400Max works great on a SS7 board, with bus mastering enabled.
Maybe the problem is power supply related?

[HollyBerri]

For what it's worth Kii (which may not be much)... I'm absolutely <u>not liking</U> that onboard sound (which I hate anyway, never seen it be anything but trouble) sharing an IRQ with your NIC... much less that SB emulation on IRQ5 is not used at all. Or did you turn it off?

And why is the NIC taking up 2 IRQs?? For all I know, that might be perfectly correct (just got my first NIC a couple of weeks ago and it's currently disabled...), but it looks unusual to me.

The 'turn off DMA on your CD-ROMs' tip is a good idea... I solved a lot of problems by doing that.

But you're right, you should be able to use busmastering on your G400, in fact afaik you <u>should not</u> run without it... so I hope we can identify your problem and eliminate it.

---------------------
Holly

[Haig]

Hi Kii,

Don't know how much this will help but here's how we got our K7M system setup:

Network card in PCI slot 2
USB add-on card in ISA slot
Using on board sound

After installing win98, we installed the AGP miniport drivers and then the Via bus mastering drivers. We got these from the Asus cd.

Then we installed our powerdesk.

Haig

[RAB]

Holli is right. Those sound cards and NICs are always troublesome it seems. On my 3 VIA chipset boards, the only way I have gotten NIC's to work with G200's and G400's is to put the NIC's in the two PCI slots closest to the AGP slot. I don't think this is just a Matrox problem, but it appears to be busmastering related. NIC's generally don't use busmastering, but sound does. So putting the NIC's near the AGP slot somehow reduces busmastering conflicts.

If you put the NIC in slot 2, leave slot 1 open. But if you have two NIC's this may not be an option and put them in PCI slots 1 and 2. If you need to move them from where they are now, remember to delete them in device manager before you move them. Also, connect the CAT5 network cable to them before you reboot and Windows will load the necessary protocals automatically. If you move them, also delete the sound in device manager and hope Windows detects it after the NIC's. This will maybe move it down to a lower IRQ and keep it from causing problems with busmastering. Since IRQ 5 is free, I suspect that the sound drivers are causing problems. Sound or NIC's usually loads something in 5.

One more thing to try. Before you put the cards back in, reboot in safe mode and in device manager delete anything that has duplicate icons such as sound or NIC's. Don't worry about duplicate "System" items.

RAB

[Kii]

After trying one last time with a bare system (just G400 and the K7M onboard audio disabled, but otherwise the bios was set to fail safe mode)...I've decided to give up. The K7M is back in its box on its way to asus. Hopefully its replacement will behave a little better.