Other uses
- Thread starter jutnm
- Start date
On an SLI or Crossfire capable board Creative Labs now has a new PCI-E sound card out that utilizes the second 1x slot on a single card system. For the most part video cards rule in that dept. since that's what they were intended for. As time goes on the development of other types of devices using the unused 2nd or 3rd slot would be the thought on this. The primary unless using onboard would still see a video card needed for display.
Some boards allow for PCI-E 4x cards explaining the combination of a single 16x, 4x, and 1x slots seen. This is a combo type board for seeing an older card still able to run on a newer board if the original board quits or is simply upgraded. Of course that means losing out on the obvious benefits of a 16x over an old 4x model card.
Due to the high cost seen on the new type of PCI-E sound card by Creative I simply went for a board seeing only one 16x slot while seeing 3 PCI type slots for sound. tv tuner, and even a Vista ready video capture card being looked for. Currently the sound card is installed in the second slot to avoid a not always well known problem of XP's resource sharing issues generally seen on AGP board while not ruling that out for a PCI-E model.
Due to the high cost seen on the new type of PCI-E sound card by Creative I simply went for a board seeing only one 16x slot while seeing 3 PCI type slots for sound. tv tuner, and even a Vista ready video capture card being looked for. Currently the sound card is installed in the second slot to avoid a not always well known problem of XP's resource sharing issues generally seen on AGP board while not ruling that out for a PCI-E model.
As time goes on there will be more and more PCIe cards, the slots are backward compatible, a PCIe X1 card will run in a PCIe X1 X4 X8 or X16 slot. And you dont need a SLI or crossfire board to run the Creative PCIe sound card.
XP didnt really have that problem, if you were running 98-ME with a AGP card it was recommended not to use the first PCI slot next to the AGP slot because of IRQ sharing problem because the AGP ran off the PCI bus, but it didnt happen with XP. Plus it not a problem with PCIe at all because it doesnt run off the PCI bus.
That problem was directly tied to XP's resource sharing. On the old 9X cases here the first slot was always used to the sound card never seeing that type of problem.
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/307918/en-us Resources for Troubleshooting Sound Problems in Windows XP
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310697/en-us Resources for troubleshooting games and multimedia in Windows XP
http://www.pctoday.com/editorial/ar...t04.asp&guid=F7E6F9571B55422DA34CBADF1749A7BF
Troubleshoot Audio Problems
What did any of those links have to do with having your sound card in the PCI slot next to your AGP card? With windows 98 the OS went by the bios to set the IRQs for the hardware, the bios shared the AGP slot and the first PCI slot with the same IRQ, it can cause conflicts. With XP it sets it own IRQs regardless of what the bios says and will use a different IRQ for the AGP and the first PCI slot.
Last edited:
The problems seen in the 9X family into ME and 2000 along with XP are file sharing where the item being mentioned here has more to do with resource conflicts seen in XP. These are problems that came up orior to SP2 on AGP type boards while not ruling out seeing any potential on newer PCI-E models. That as well as the force of habit is one reason for seeing it on the new build. I ran into that problem on a build back in 2003.
Forget it, its pointless!
It's not pointless just an old issue that's rarely seen now with SP2 and other updates since as well as running PCI-E most often instead of AGP. The recommendations seen in some now rather outdated articles then was to simply move the card over a slot or two on the older boards that saw 4 or 5 pci slots there.
Why are you just saying the same thing over and over. It pointless getting you to understand why it was a problem for 98-ME and not 2000-Vista