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A8N SLI Premium - Which PCI Slot for Audigy2ZS?

V

Valour

Senior member
I've got the A8N mentioned in the subject on the way, so I have been trying to get everything figured out before it gets here to make it as painless as possible (reading the PDF manual). Like the subject says, I'm wondering if one PCI slot is better than another for my Audigy2 card. I will be disabling the on-board audio, and will likely not be attaching any other PCI devices (with possibly one exception). That possible exception leads me to my other question. The possible exception would be another NIC card (yes, I know there are two on-board). I have read several posts about people having flaky NIC's on-board. Oddly some have problems with the one and some have problems with the other. I would simply chalk it up to the user's installing the Active Armour & Firewall stuff (which I won't be doing), but according to some, they didn't install this and STILL have issues. Can anyone verify this? So basically:

1: Which PCI slot to install sound card (does it matter?)
2: Install my tried and true PCI ethernet card and disable on-board?

Thanks for input!
 
I believe I put my SoundBlaster Live! 24 bit card in PCI 2, as there seemed to be a Resource conflict (between the Video & Sound Card) in slot one .

You have a newer Model, so you may not have this problem.

 
I don't think it matters anymore. When I had an old AMD 1.3ghz system a few years back, it did matter where I put the card. If I put it near the AGP card, they would share an IRQ (PCI slave/master). If i put it far away from the AGP, it would share an IRQ with something else (USB I think). There was one slot I think 2 or 3 away from AGP where it had its own IRQ.

Now in my Athlon 64 system, the Audigy 2 gets its own IRQ. This was a huge help to lower my GeForce 6800 temps. I had the Audigy 2 in the same slot as the previous build but it was only a card or two away from the AGP slot due to it taking two slots. It would idle in the upper 60s and during play, it would hit mid-70s. I moved the Audigy 2 to the very last slot, a slot that didn't work at all in the previous build, and now my GeForce 6800 is much cooler and the Audigy 2 gets its own IRQ still.

Long story short, it doesn't matter anymore.

As far as on-board ethernet goes, I'd just use the on-board if all you're going to use it for is internet access.

I've experienced a little "flakey-ness" with my nForce3 Gb board but it was relatively trivial. For online games and download/upload speeds, nothing seemed different. When transfering files to my Xbox, it was much slower transfering stuff like text files than a stand-alone NIC or even the onboard ethernet on my other motherboard. I don't know why but it would have a slight pause at the start of each .txt file transfer whereas larger files would transfer just like any NIC.

That's the only difference I've noticed though. I think if it affected my pings or overall download/upload speeds on the net, I would have switched to a NIC.
 
Thanks for the information. PepperBreath, that's interesting about the pause when FTPing to your Xbox. I do a lot of that as well, so it will be interesting to see if I also have that issue.

Thanks again.
 
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