Some help would be greatly appreciated....
I recently dumped a Mac B&W G3 in favor of the following machine:
Dual 800 MHZ Pentium EB
Tyan Tiger 133 MB
256 Megs RAM
Soundblaster X-Gamer
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
3Com 3c905 NIC
Entrega USB card
(Machine configured as an ACPI Multiprocessor machine-AWARD BIOS)
Now first off I'm not a newbie with configuring these things, but most of the prior configs I've done have been server machines. So I'm having a bit of a problem on the desktop. The problems are the following:
1. Soundblaster Live X-Gamer goes KABLOOEY when any game sets it to 3D sound mode. It sounds like pure digital is getting into the analog sound out(s) as the sound changes volume, becomes unbalanced, and finally starts to "break up". According to Creative Labs this is "bus noise" caused by insufficient bus bandwidth. However, this system should not be bus limited at all (VIA Apollo 133a chipset). Creative suggested downloading the VIA 4 in 1 drivers, which I did. Same result. I called Creative back and they had absolutely no idea what the problem was (ridiculous!), so I asked them if this was a driver issue. The response was an uncertain "yes". I'm not entirely convinced... Any ideas??
2. The onboard USB seems flaky with Win 2K. The mouse is recognized, but runs VERY sluggish (As if the unit was using processor polling rather than an interrupt). And the keyboard is not recognized at all. I finally solved the problem by installing a USB card and WALA(!) the USB mouse and keyboard work fine. Any ideas on the internal USB? I do know that it was configured correctly in the BIOS.
3. Interrupts..... Ahhh that wonderful hell! Ok, as most of us probably know WIN 2K uses a funky manner of handling interrupts. My system has an AWARD BIOS and has the ability to handle both "plug and pray" and non plug and play devices. I have fooled around with this trying to get my video card and network adapter to run on separate IRQs, however they are both still on hardware IRQ 11. I even re-installed Win 2K as a non ACPI machine attempting to get control over this. When it did not work, I returned to ACPI. Since I must have the SMP HAL to take advantage of the two processors (Yes this thing screams!) moving back to "Standard PC" will hobble the machine. Are there any solutions to this? Or, as I have been told more than a few times, does this actually matter under Win 2K?
Thanks very much for whatever comments you can make!
I recently dumped a Mac B&W G3 in favor of the following machine:
Dual 800 MHZ Pentium EB
Tyan Tiger 133 MB
256 Megs RAM
Soundblaster X-Gamer
Voodoo 5 5500 AGP
3Com 3c905 NIC
Entrega USB card
(Machine configured as an ACPI Multiprocessor machine-AWARD BIOS)
Now first off I'm not a newbie with configuring these things, but most of the prior configs I've done have been server machines. So I'm having a bit of a problem on the desktop. The problems are the following:
1. Soundblaster Live X-Gamer goes KABLOOEY when any game sets it to 3D sound mode. It sounds like pure digital is getting into the analog sound out(s) as the sound changes volume, becomes unbalanced, and finally starts to "break up". According to Creative Labs this is "bus noise" caused by insufficient bus bandwidth. However, this system should not be bus limited at all (VIA Apollo 133a chipset). Creative suggested downloading the VIA 4 in 1 drivers, which I did. Same result. I called Creative back and they had absolutely no idea what the problem was (ridiculous!), so I asked them if this was a driver issue. The response was an uncertain "yes". I'm not entirely convinced... Any ideas??
2. The onboard USB seems flaky with Win 2K. The mouse is recognized, but runs VERY sluggish (As if the unit was using processor polling rather than an interrupt). And the keyboard is not recognized at all. I finally solved the problem by installing a USB card and WALA(!) the USB mouse and keyboard work fine. Any ideas on the internal USB? I do know that it was configured correctly in the BIOS.
3. Interrupts..... Ahhh that wonderful hell! Ok, as most of us probably know WIN 2K uses a funky manner of handling interrupts. My system has an AWARD BIOS and has the ability to handle both "plug and pray" and non plug and play devices. I have fooled around with this trying to get my video card and network adapter to run on separate IRQs, however they are both still on hardware IRQ 11. I even re-installed Win 2K as a non ACPI machine attempting to get control over this. When it did not work, I returned to ACPI. Since I must have the SMP HAL to take advantage of the two processors (Yes this thing screams!) moving back to "Standard PC" will hobble the machine. Are there any solutions to this? Or, as I have been told more than a few times, does this actually matter under Win 2K?
Thanks very much for whatever comments you can make!
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