PCI card order

[Fiera]

I've read some things about ordering your PCI cards, that the order does make a difference in system performance. What are the guidlines for this? How do you know what order to put the cards in?

Currently I have a Creative Dxr3 DVD decoder, SB Live 5.1 Plat, Adaptec 2940U2W and Linksys 10/100 LAN card in that order.

 

[AluminumStudios]

I've heard that some PCI slots are mastes while other's are slaves. It doesn't seem to be anything that is documented very well and I've never really seen any references to it in motherboard manuals.

I know in my experience in a number of boards, the PCI slot nearest the AGP slot seems to like to share the IRQ of the video card. There may be other pairs of PCI slots like that. Some devices (like busmastering devices and video capture cards) hate sharing IRQs. I've had cases where there were certain devices I absolutly could not get to work in certain slots.

But all of that was under Windows 9x. I haven't experienced any IRQ shinanigans with Windows 2000 or XP.

I don't believe either that the slot order would affect performance. It is my impression that changing slots is only useful for dealing with picky devices.

 

[DaFinn]

In modern mobos it does not make difference into which slot you put your cards. Modern chipsets support 6-7 master pci slots, and thats what you normally get. Older chipsets (BX and older) only support 4 pci master slots, so if you have an older board with 5 or 6 pci slots, then you have 1 or 2 pci slave slots. Pci masters will accept all pci cards, pci slaves need an "active"card
that has its own controller/processor ie. scsi card, sound card...

Normally 1st pci slot can be given priority in bios settings, this should be done if you have a pci graphics card. So obviously the graphics card should be in 1st pci slot.

Also, sound card and graphics card can disturb each other, so they should be placed as far from each other as possible.

Otherwise... if you have problems with some cards, changing the pci slot can often help.