GA-MA785GMT-UD2H problems with addon cards!!!

[brit_orc]

GA-MA785GMT-UD2H motherboard with 4gig DDR3 memory (running in auto 1333mhz) AMD phenom 2 quad core 3.2ghz processor on Windows XP pro sp3
All seemed fine until i added PCI-E Gigabyte 9800 GTX+ (1gig DDR3 ) video card,and X-fi music platinum sound card.

First symptoms were video corruption in certain games (all codemasters games upto now racedriver GRID and Dirt2 especially,Silent hunter 4 and 5 by ubisoft) games that do run include live for speed,cricket revolution,warbirds,Arcasim Racing and rfactor.

Grid for instance loads upto main menu,then as you go to select an option the screen freezes,then gradually corrupts until it either hangs my PC or if  alt+tab quick enough i can kill it thru task manager,it has produced at least 1 blue screen of death.

I am running latest drivers for vid card and sound card,rest of drivers i installed from mobo install DVD.
I have upgraded bios to F5 thinking this would cure it maybe but to no avail.

When booting i noticed acpi reporting screen was showing that the bios assigns USB 1.1 ports (6 of them),on board network port,Graphics card and sound card all to same IRQ 10 !!!

Im not an expert but even with quad core and 4 gig DDR3 cant IRQ share that many devices without collision taking place,doesnt matter what I choose in bios for assigning irq for pci slots,and turning off all ports im not using ,printer and com etc,it assigns IRQ 10 everytime,and when i check in hardware manager,devices by connection all these devices are using IRQ18.


Any advice would be most welcome,im gonna upgrade to windows 7 just to see what happens.
thx in advance
brit_orc

[absic]

You could try changing the cards over so they are in the opposite slots. Doing this can sometimes change the IRQ's.

If that fails to resolve the issue you may have to try and manually change the IRQ's (not always an easy task).

A fresh install of the OS may also resolve the problem as the new components will be detected as the OS installs and will automatically have the IRQ's assigned.

[oggmonster]

Well do your fresh installation of Win7 first just to see how that goes. That will elminite any driver problems etc. Though if this has only started happening since installing your 9800gtx i would imagine that would be the problem.

I also don't think the IRQ thing will be a problem. But you could try clearing the CMOS to see if it will re-asign them.

[brit_orc]

Now this is starting to annoy me, windows 7 was a no go for the moment,so removed  sound card and vid card and used on board sound and video, guess what the bios assign irq 10 to both of them too!!!!,so now i have the graphics card,sound card,network card and all the 1.1 usb all on same IRQ!!!!!!.

Re installed Gigabyte  9800gtx + and Creative X-fi sound card, btw the sound card will only go in bottom PCI slot as fan from vid card doesnt permit it to go in top pci slot, also tried resetting cmos to no avail,assigns exactly same IRQ's, also the IRQ's are assigned before the operating system is installed so canrt change anything there, but now video is starting to corrupt in every game i play, and sound is crackling and popping loudly anytime i try to run anything graphically intensive.

This is totally unacceptable as i play a lot of online simulations and is causing me to lag, I would like to know how you got 3dmark scores so high,you must have tested with the USB controllers offline?

I am completely out of ideas, if these boards had been tested this would surely have been picked up.

[absic]

Hi there,

I have built several systems with this board and have come across no issues with add-on cards. I suspect the problem is due to the software environment rather than the hardware.

Adding components after the system has been running for a while can cause problems with drivers, Interrupt Requests and the way that windows wants to address them. If I add new parts to old builds, I have got into the habit of doing a clean install of the OS. I know you shouldn't have to do this but I have found that, in the long run, it saves a lot of time and frustration.

So, my advice would be to do a clean install.

[brit_orc]

Cant see what difference its gonna make,as IRQ's are assigned before i get the press any key now to boot from CD message for fresh install of Xp or any other OS for that matter.
Just out of interest what IRQ's does the PC's you built assign to graphics,sound network and usb ports.

thx for your time

kev seal

[absic]

To be honest, the IRQ's in the rigs I built are assigned just like yours but are working without issues. 

I learnt, in the very early days of my building PC's, that when things of this nature go wrong, the first thing to do was re-install the OS and also to load the drivers one at a time.
I now have a routine of :
Build PC
Disable Intergrated Peripherals that I won't be using in BIOS
Install OS
Install Mobo Drivers (reboot)
Install Graphics Drivers (if I have an add-on card) (reboot)
Install Sound Drivers (If I have added Sound Card) (reboot)
Install any other drivers needed. (Normally I check in Device Manager to see if anything else is required)
Download and install any updates that the system wants.
Once I have the basics running OK I then install Apps etc.

I'm not saying that this is the way you have to do it but, it is the method that I have found the most reliable and it also seems to address the problems with IRQ's and the like. I'm not exactly sure why and someone maybe able to enlighten me on this.

I know that you have an already built and working system and that, in theory you should be able to just add components, install drivers and carry on but sometimes, the driver paths and other scripts needed by the OS do not get re-written properly. A clean install just eliminates this as a possible cause of the problem. Once you know the OS is clean and stable, if the IRQ conflict still persists you can then start looking at other areas for the cause of the problem and for a solutioin.

[brit_orc]

thx for your response absic115,
to tell ya the truth I do exactly same as you stated above,but this is first mobo i have bought that had built in graphics, dunno if this is cause of problems,anyways i have reinstalled XP sp3 loaded mpbo drivers,nvidia and x-fi drivers,added all my wheel and joypad software, connected to internet etc then backed up the image to another partition using utility that comes with mobo.

Just got in from work so havnt loaded up anything that was causing problems before,but i will let you know when i do.
Again thanx for your time and comments its much appreciated my friend.

kev seal

[brit_orc]

Ok problem sorted,seems my gigabyte 9800 gtx+ standard settings are in fact overclocking speeds,the memory was running at 1000 hz so reduced to 750 and everything now seems normal.