Question for Asus A7V mb owners

[broadwayblue]

Have you had any problems with running out of pci slots since your mb only has 5? I was trying to decice between the a7v and the kbit kt7 but am now concerned about the a7v's lack of a sixth pci/isa slot. Even if I only have 5 pci cards installed I still think its a good idea to have an extra slot for expandability or for rearranging the cards into different configurations should an irq or other conflict occur. What have you done?

 

[Vpham97]

To my understanding. The ATA 100 on the Asus a7v was put on instead of the 6th pci slot. If you check around, there are many people, including myself that are having Irq conflict problem w/ their motherboard. The Abit people are having their problems as well. Do you research b4 u decide!

 

[broadwayblue]

what kind of problems are the abit owners having? irq conflicts?

 

[paulip88]

It really depends what you want to do and what kind of hardware you know you might buy. Five slots - two for the sound card and the NIC leaves three for everything else. Thinking of getting a TV tuner? SCSI? Second video card? Second NIC?

5 should be enough for most typical purposes. Besides, if you had any more, you'd probably end up running out of IRQs.

 

[rmblam]

There are ways of freeing up IRQ's also. Disable the com ports on the back of your tower in the bios to free up 2. Most do not use them. Also, you can disable SB live dos emulation to free up another one That is if you use SB live. You can disable one of the IDE channels (secondary) to free up one or just use the ata100 to free up another. You won't be able to boot off of the cd-rom though this way. 5 slots is plenty and a crappy mobo is not one that ties up IRQ's. That is the software/drivers. Both are good boards from what I can tell. Most are having problems that are simply due to lack of problem solving experience and avoidance... ie user error.