When will motherboards have better IRQ management

[richough3]

Back in the days of DOS, you had to manually set IRQs (Interrupt Requests) for your devices via jumpers. Of course, you also followed simple rules like never let your video card, network card, or sound card share the same IRQ. Even though PnP was meant to address IRQ deficiencies and allow multiple devices to share IRQs, I find that it is still essential that these basic statements hold true. For example, my 8800GT was sharing the same IRQ as my network card, so I got extremely bad graphic tearing in World of Warcraft and graphic stuttering in Call of Duty: World at War. OK, so I turn off my serial and parallel port to free up those IRQs and even pull out the video card and disable the network card to see if it will reassign the freed up IRQs to one of those two when they are reinserted and reactivated. No luck as they still had the same IRQs. In the end, I had to set my motherboard to run both PCIE-16 slots to run in 8x mode and put the video card into the 2nd slot. I remember there used to be some motherboards where you could assign an IRQ to a certain slot and I wonder why more motherboard manufacturers don't do that if it is still possible. It's frustrating to have to juggle cards around to try and get non conflicting IRQs so your system functions as it should.

 

[DAPUNISHER]

Advanced IRQ sharing in a ACPI enabled system is normal. I doubt IRQ sharing is the source of your problems.

When XP first came out, some had problems with it, and would have to do a standard HAL install instead of ACPI. But that was usually due to using older hardware. The BIOS option for PnP OS was recommended to be set to disabled when using XP too.

 

[taltamir]

I have gotton tons of IRQ errors over the years... none have ever EVER been an IRQ issue. except for the dos days when i was manually setting irqs.
Look for a non broken driver if windows tells you "irq conflict"
Tearing has NOTHING to do with IRQ, a simple google search would show you that tearing is caused by the way video cards work, and are ELIMINATED by v-synch. (vertical synch), which can be forced on in the driver. Forcing your drive to work at 8x speed COULD have slowed it down enough that THESE games stopped appearing to tear to you... but using v-synch would have slowed it down more efficiently, perfectly matching render speed to monitor speed.