pci card slowing down parhelia?

[voltronX]

Hi there,
I was installing the latest Parhelia Drivers last week when i made an irritating discovery.

I´m using a 4x bulk agp Parhelia 128 and an ancient pci matrox mystique 4mb for 1 1/2 years now. I turned off the monitor which is driven by the mystique and suddenly all desktop task run twice as fast (the icons from the quicktask menu took always a few seconds to load before, now they load within 1-2 secs), the mouse also runs much smoother.
I was always wondering why it took so long to load menus with my rig, it seems the mystique slows the parhelia down a lot although that shouldn´t be the case.

My system:
1.2 ghz athlon
512 mb pc133 RAM
ASUS aM266 Mobo
Winxp Pro

The ali chipset from my mobo sucks a lot regarding the agp bus , as i was never able to get the P to run at more than 2x speed (i installed the latest ali drivers 2.20 or smthg)
The bios should also be set up correctly (agp as primary card) and windows shows no device problems.

Has anyone else encountered a similar problem so far? I always thought a secondary PCI grahpics card couldn´t slow down your primary agp...

I´m thankfull to any suggestions as i let my 3rd monitor off at the moment to keep my increases performance, which sucks.

The Parhelia is connected to two 21" CRTs, one @ 1600 x 1200 and the other @ 1280x1024 and a TV, the mystique runs a 17" @ 1024x768, all 32bit color depth and 75hz

[High_Jumbllama]

What else is plugged into your PCI slots?

[shanebrooks]

I noticed that adding a PCI G450 slowed down my AGP G450 considerably and I'm buying K6-III's Parhelia specifically so I can have three screens without the PCI card.

[voltronX]

Originally posted by High_Jumbllama
What else is plugged into your PCI slots?

There´s a soundblaster, a SCSI card and a network card -
Windows says no harware concflicts

[High_Jumbllama]

Conflicts would be a problem but the concern here is with how good the motherboard chipset is and how much bandiwdth is being used. If the SCSI is being used with a bad VIA chipset(bandwidth issues galore) together everything could be saturating your PCI bandwidth. What do you use the SCSI for? Boot? Data? Similar things would happen to me with a promise Ultra 100 and a SBLive on a motherboard with a VIA 686A southbridge.

[voltronX]

Originally posted by High_Jumbllama
Conflicts would be a problem but the concern here is with how good the motherboard chipset is and how much bandiwdth is being used. If the SCSI is being used with a bad VIA chipset(bandwidth issues galore) together everything could be saturating your PCI bandwidth. What do you use the SCSI for? Boot? Data? Similar things would happen to me with a promise Ultra 100 and a SBLive on a motherboard with a VIA 686A southbridge.

hm it´s probably my mainboard then, the ALI chipset isn´t too good. I use the SCSI only for my scanner so it shouldn´t be a bandwidth problem there.

[borat]

i had that problem too, had a radeon 7500 PCI connected with a P8x, the screen ran at a stupidly retarded speed with the PCI card enebled. Thats in my DFI ultra infinity. Gave up on trying to fix it, went back to P on its own.

[Kurt]

AFAIK bus mastering is disabled on non-Intel chipsets. This might slow you down on ALi/VIA chipsets (both s*ck...).

[voltronX]

Originally posted by Kurt
AFAIK bus mastering is disabled on non-Intel chipsets. This might slow you down on ALi/VIA chipsets (both s*ck...).

Hm i don´t know much about hardware but SiSoft sandra tells me my agp and pci ports are able to use busmastering

[voltronX]

bah i just wasted my time with trying to get agp running properly but it seems the a7a266 just sucks too much

i took out all pci cards and ran powerstrip:

Diagnostic report - generated on 10/14/2004
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PowerStrip build - 460
Windows build - v.5.1.2600.2.Service Pack 1
DirectX build - v.5.3.0000001.0904 built by: private/Lab06_dev(DXBLD00)
OpenGL renderer - (n/a)

System board
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
CPU speed - 1223 MHz
Type - Acer Labs M1647-A7A266
BIOS - Award Bios, 04/30/2003
AGP aperture - (n/a)
AGP transfer mechanism - Disabled (desktop sharing?)
AGP non-local memory - (n/a)
AGP revision - 2.00
AGP transfer rates supported - 1x, 2x, 4x
Current AGP transfer rate - 1x
Sideband addressing - Enabled
Fast write protocol - (n/a)
AGP texturing - hardware support, but currently disabled

Graphics card #1
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Identity - Matrox Display controller
Memory clock - 250.00 MHz
Engine clock - 200.00 MHz
IRQ - 11, not shared
AGP revision - 2.00
AGP transfer rates supported - 1x, 2x, 4x
Current AGP transfer rate - 1x
Sideband addressing - Enabled
Display driver - mtxparhd.dll, v.6.13.01.1691
DirectX driver - mtxparhd.dll, v.6.13.01.1691
Attached monitor - ENC1630 (Plug and Play Monitor)
Monitor caps (1) - 3592x2016, 126kHz, 155Hz

Device enumeration
------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Matrox Display controller (0527102Bh) - using IRQ11
Acer Labs CPU-to-PCI/AGP bridge (164710B9h)
Acer Labs PCI-to-PCI/AGP bridge (524710B9h)
Acer Labs Universal serial bus (USB) (523710B9h) - using IRQ5
AsusTek IDE controller (522910B9h)
Acer Labs Universal serial bus (USB) (523710B9h) - using IRQ10
Acer Labs PCI-to-ISA bridge (153310B9h)
Acer Labs Power management controller (710110B9h)


seems i really need a new mainboard

[Kurt]

Originally posted by voltronX
Hm i don´t know much about hardware but SiSoft sandra tells me my agp and pci ports are able to use busmastering

*Capable of* is not the same as *using it*

[voltronX]

hehe true