A Word of Warning

[glendower]

Haven't been to the forum for a while and it's good to be back here-- I just hate that I can't currently enjoy my hardware!

I upgraded my main system with an Asrock Dual775-VSTA board so I could migrate to C2D and a PCI-E video card. What I ended up sacrificing was somethign that I never imagined! none of my audio boards will work in this system! When I boot I get an IRQ Routing Error message no matter which slot i use (after disabling the onboard sound) and no matter which board I install! This means that i can't use my Santa Cruz, SW1000XG, or my MT-32! I had a dos box dedicated, but it quit working... I decided to save myself some time and after a day of trouble shooting, just tossed it (DOSBox, the program, was working just fine). Now, though, I'm screwed! I'm going to move away from this mobo in a couple of months (that was my plan all along), so I hope that will fix this problem.

There's no way to dedicate or isolate IRQs in the BIOS... I checked

Oh, and I moved all of my old stuff to a 2nd system, but the video card has crapped out! It's still under warranty (hurray for people who still give 3 year warranties) but I still need to get that sent off.

[BlueMax]

I could give your SW1000XG a nice, new home. 

[Ari]

That really sucks, man.
I guess I'll be staying with AGP and regular PCI for the next decade or so...

[Locutus]

As I recall, the SW1000XG is really picky about its host chipset. It's often said to cause freezing and hanging up. I originally planned to use my SW1000XG in my nForce2 ASUS board, but it just didn't work right. The system tended to hang when I played digital audio. I ended up using it in my somewhat older Windows 9X system with a VIA Apollo chipset. Intel chipsets are said to be compatible as well.

Regards,
locutus

[glendower]

Hahah Nooo I'm going to be swapping board soon enough and I'm hanging onto the SW1000  I hunted for this thing (at a reasonable price) for too long to give it up!

I don't think the problem is necessarily PCI-E, it is, as was mentioned, a chipset issue. This has a Via... something or other... in it. It's a very weird board in that it has BOTH PCI-E and AGP, DDR and DDR-II, and a few other features that make it great for slowly crossing over into new tech for more budget-constrained persons.

Odd-- the last board I had was an N-Force II and it worked great on there! The other good thing is that I'm still running Win2K so I don't have to worry about OS complications. I picked up Vista Business (student... it cost me 10 bucks and it's legit) and that is a turd... I'm sticking with 2K for a while longer :>

[glendower]

Whoot! I managed to get my Santa Cruz working after shuffling a couple of cards around-- I still can't get the system to work (at a bios level) with my SW1000XG--- I decided to put my DB50xg on it instead of the SCB-55 for the time being-- once I can get the SW1000 back in I'll use that and the SCB... anyway, not sure what is wrong with this momboard--- looking forward to dumping it.

[glendower]

It's so much more fun to watch my own MT-32 making music than listening to MP3s of the exact same thing Listening to HOC theme... and it's making me glad.

[davesedg]

looking forward to dumping it.

When you decide to get rid of the mobo, please let me know, I'd be happy to give it a new home - I was looking at the exact same model in the hope that I could check out the Core 2 Duos some day... from your comments it seems that it would have to be used for a box that only did modern games or general PC use, rather than classic gaming.

Thanks for the heads-up!

[glendower]

I can use it for class gaming with my MT-32 now (inside of dosbox)! I played a little Commander Keen last night (not MT-32, but still) and a few sierra titles just to make sure that everything was functioning well. The problem seems to be using multiple PCI cards, or, perhaps, the PCI cards have a certain quality that the board can't handle... multiple Bus Master cards? I think that the SW1000 might be a bus master as well as the SATA card (the motherboard has SATA built in and it seems to work just dandy with drives that it formats, but I bought an expansion card and the onboard controller has a tough time reading the drive that I've formatted and loaded up on that controller)... it gives me an "IRQ Routing Error" when I put the SW1000 in and it was doing it with the Santa Cruz until I shuffled the cards around--- still isn't happy with the SW1000 anywhere, though.

But if I were a "normal" user (A lot of the people I know don't use expansion cards anymore unless they want a more fully-featured soundcard) I wouldn't even notice this problem and would be 100% happy with this mom because it's done exactly what I've wanted it to do-- gradually move from AGP & DDR to C2D and PCI_E & DDR-2.