Abit BE6-II PnP BIOS

[AlChuck]

Hi all,

Maybe somebody out there that has an Abit BE6-II board can answer me this question:

How do the PIRQ #s map to PCI slots? I don't think I understand that little table there in the manual, where the rows are PIRQ #s and the columns are PCI slot #s, and the cells show INT x, where x = A, B, C, or D.

This is on p. 3-41 of the user's manual...

Thanks in advance...

-AlChuck

[inon^]

Let's just step back one and ask you this. Why do you need to dig into the details of IRQs?

The reason I am asking that question is...when the menu "PnP/PCI configuration" is selected there are

[*]PnP OS: yes/no[*]Second menu is something like controlled by [Disabled/Enabled][*]IRQ resources: [Auto][/list=a]

The last one is ideally set to auto, unless you want to assign everything manually. You need to refer to the table (in the manual) only when manual adjustments are desired. with the now-a-days devices [AUTO] should be ok.

I don't know if I am giving you some clear picture or messing up your mind, but instead of digging deep into the manual (IRQ assignments) I would do [AUTO]. I will look into the manual and see if I can explain any clearer than it reads.

Cheers !!!!

[AlChuck]

inon^,

What I (was) trying to do was resolve a conflict on a system with two soundcards and a USB MIDI interface. I could not seem to get the soundcards to take an IRQ that was not shared with either the other sound card or the USB controller. Some folks on PC digital audio workstation newsgroups seemed to think that might be a problem. I thought I might need to set the IRQs manually for the cards. But I managed to play the uninstall-remove-reinstall game such that they all are now separate from one another. I still don't know if I've solved my problem for sure...

But I'm still curious. How does one with this board set, say, Slot 2 to use IRQ 5? The other thing that's not clear is what other things are relevant -- do you tell the BIOS you don't have PnP OS? Do you also set the IRQ to Legacy ISA device? And how does Windows 98 relate to all this?

Thanks!

-AlChuck

[Guardian]

AlChuck, I've got the same board and went through a major fight getting my IRQ's set up right. And I couldn't figure out that table either.

But here's what I know, the AGP Slot and PCI slot 1 seem to share IRQ 11; PCI Slot 2 unknown, PCI Slot 3 seems to take IRQ 10; PCI 4 seems to take IRQ 9; and PCI Slot 5 unknown (I don't have anything in either Slot 2 or 5).

I could be all wrong about this but that's about as good as I could figure out. I have no idea how this lines up with PRIQ_0 thru PRIQ_3! I do know that I had to assign PRIQ_3 to IRQ 3 in order to get my SoundBlaster Live Value card to go to IRQ 3 and it's in PCI Slot 4.

Ok, now I've got a headache!

[AlChuck]

Guardian,

I can relate to the headache! Ai yai yai! I've been trying to address this for days and thought for sure that someone out ther on the net would know exactly what I needed to know... instead it seems almost everyone only got about as far as I did and crossed their fingers and moved things around.

I think I might now have a handle on the PIRQ # and the INTA-D stuff now, but alas, my notes on this are home and I'm at work. I'll try to digest my notes and post it here in a day or so. But I have a further problem, which has to do with how do you get the BIOS and Windows to all cooperate? Do you need to change the initial BIOS setting to be a non-PnP OS? Do you need to set the IRQs you want for the cards you want to fix as Legacy ISA devices?

I set the PIRQ stuff manually a few times and it seemed to almost work. But I kept getting only one of the cards I set to take that IRQ, and the other card took the same IRQ and not the one I (thought I) specified...

-Alan

[glc]

I dunno about the Abit, but this is how things work on an Asus:

PCI, AGP, and USB have exactly 4 IRQ's to play with. AGP shares with slot 1, slot 2 is discrete, slot 3 shares with slot 6 (if you have a 6 PCI slot board), and slot 4 shares with slot 5 and USB. Easiest way to resolve conflicts is to move the cards around and keep the board in Auto.

[AlChuck]

glc,

Yeah, that's the way the Abit is too (must be the 440BX chipset), except there are only 5 PCI slots. Slot 3 shares its IRQ with the onboard Highpoint UDMA66 controller. I suspect this is the crux of my problem; if I put the SB Live on slot #2, it will be alone but the Delta card will always be sharing with either the UDMA66 controller, the USB controller, or the AGP video card.

A look at the IRQ usage from the previous incarnation of my system (when it was a Pentium MMX 200 MHz) shows me that the SB Live then shared an IRQ with both the USB controller and the Promise Ultra66 controller card I had in there... and I never observed any failure. So maybe I'm barking up the wrong tree. My next attempt will be to put the Delta card in slot #2 and the SB Live elsewhere, and see if it works OK then.

I've also read that there seems to be a fair bit of problems people are having with the built-in Highpoint controller on this Abit board, particularly associated with large Maxtor HDDs (mine is a 30-GB Maxtor...). So if the Delta in slot #2 still crashes on me, maybe I'll try disabling the on-board controller and stick my Promise card in there...

-AlChuck