Video and motherboard question

[Lifegard]

I have a Pcchips 810LR motherboard 2 pci and 1 agp slots and i am using a Video Excel AGP Gforce 2 MX 32meg card, Netgear lan card and SB live and 196megs of mem. When i go into Microsoft Motorcross Madness 2 or Train Simulator at the main menus it locks up and it would lock when i was browsing the web then i would have to reboot i have tried installing the latest Nvidia drivers and it still did the same thing. the motherboard has on board video,sound,network but i disabled all of them before inserted the cards. The motherboard docs say nothing about the the agp slot and the first pci slot being shared, could they be shared? and the cmos says that there are 2 items in slot 1 (which i am assuming is the agp slot)1 Input Device with not irq assigned and 1 multimedia device with irq 10 assigned. i am totally confused. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[dakota81]

Buy a different motherboard. For the love of God, throw that awful thing out. I've been building computers for businesses and also just regular consumers for coming on seven years now. For a stretch, the supplier I get parts from started carrying PC Chips boards, and they were low price, so I used them. Every single motherboard had to be meticulously tweeked to try and find some sort of stable configuration. And even still there were always unexpected problems with a wide range of software and drivers.

These motherboards are not worth the money you save buying them. Do yourself a big favor and spend the money on a quality board, you'll be so much happier with what you've got, and not have to worry about the computer locking up intermitently.

And about irq sharing, every motherboard with an agp slot shares the agp irq with the closest pci slot. Almost all video cards, yours included, do not use nor need an irq, so there are no problems.

And, if a motherboard has four, five, or six pci slots, there will be some pairs of pci slots sharing irqs. I'm not sure how motherboards handle this, but I've got an FIC board with a network card sharing an irq with a TV tuner card, and a dvd decoder card sharing the irq with the onboard sound, and there's no performance drop that I can tell.

 

[onewilly]

I saw your response with respect to a Pcchips M810LR motherboard. Unfortunately, I purchased one to build a simple inexpensive system for my parents. For several months they endured mysterious rebooting problems. For no apparent reason, while using their PC in a normal fashion, the system would simply reboot as if the reset button was depressed. They are running the latest version of Windows 2000 (service pack 3). I tried to flash the BIOS but was unable to complete the task. I believe the BIOS is v 1.0. Have you experienced this problem or have any suggestions other than trashing the darn think? The vendor gave me a new motherboard, processor and memory with the same results!

Thanks!

 

[CapsMan]

Don't throw anything away, recycle it![color]
In the BIOS setup, go to the PCI / PLUG AND PLAY SETUP page, set the Primary Graphics Adapter to: PCI
and Allocate IRQ for PCI VGA to: Yes

The default settings for PCI still lets onboard display work with a secondary card installed in a PCI slot. If you have the most recent drivers installed for your graphics card, then this will still use the AGP bus.

CapsMan.
The Computer Unprofessional.