Building the system as shown in sig file below.
I have tried to get DV Storm to use a non-shared interrupt, i.e. 9 which is free.
With PCI slots set at Auto, DV Storm goes to IRQ 11, but shares this with (of all things) the Highpoint Raid Controller, since this is controlling a 2 drive Raid 0 of total 150 gigs and DV editing is heavy on the Storm Card and on video data drive bandwidth, am I right to be concerned at this choice?
When I set the slot (2) manually in the Bios to IRQ 9, the Storm goes there, but the Raid controller moves there as well!
Because of earlier problems, this is a pretty empty computer right now i.e. no sound card (Blaster 5.1 platinum) etc., and from experience I am pretty sure that as I complete the build there will be other hardware wanting to share IRQ 11.
So the question is: do I worry about this? Will (as I suspect) performance be compromised?
If the answer is yes, then how do I go about getting Storm and the Raid controller on seperate IRQ's and keeping them there?
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Kit under construction:
DV Storm and Prem6.
1300 Mhz Athlon in EPOX 8KTA3+. M/board Win 2000 Pro SP1.
20 gig (C:\SysDrive) and 30 gig (D:\Audio/digi images and misc.) (E:\)Plextor CD rewriter and (F:\)DVD player.
with 2 x 75 gig hd's in Raid 0 as (G:\ DV). 512Mb PC133 SDRAM,
Matrox G450 driving 2 Illama TFT 15" monitors ,SB Live 5.1
Richard, it's Microsoft's ACPI power management in Windows 2000 that is causing your PCI cards to share IRQ's. The 2.1 PCI standard which current PCI cards should conform to allows multiple PCI cards to share an IRQ, and MS's ACPI actually forces any PCI 2.1 standard PCI cards to do just that.
ACPI is also part of Windows 98, but unlike Windows 2000 it's not installed by default.
ACPI is very powerful in that although at bootup you PCI cards are shown as being one IRQ,set by the mother board bios/manually by you, then as soon as Windows 2000 kicks in, it takes over IRQ allocation.
On an older system using *non* PCI 2.1 cards then it will allow manual setting of IRQ's but looking at the components you are putting together,the PCI cards all conform to PCI 2.1
You can choose to not install ACPI while installing Windows 2000, or change to "Standard PC" afterwards via COMPUTER in Device Manager (can have bad consequences, as this causes Windows 2000 to find all hardware again, and during this Windows is unstable).
My suggestion is that unless you have problems with your Storm and Highpoint sharing the IRQ, and I don't think you will, then leave alone.
By the way on my Windows 2000 system I have the following sharing IRQ 11:-
Pyro DV card
Highpoint Raid controller
Matrox G200 MMS
Netgear NIC
Creative Live SB
and VIA USB
And my system is rock solid, I can seriously go for weeks without crashes.
Richard
Thanks for the reply Rich.
My first install was with ACPI, but after serious glitches (reported in the main Computer Video forum), I reset the machine, as you (and others) indicated, to non ACPI, 'standard PC'.
Now the card seems to be working ok (though serious testing is yet to come), but it's good to hear that the IRQ sharing may not be a real problem.
Of course the 'standard PC' setting is not a bed of roses either, for example when switching off now, I get the message to the effect that it's ok to turn the machine off and then have to hold the off switch in for 4 secs to achieve a shut down, this in spite of the Bios being set to immediate reaction to the on/off switch.
But to be fair, my Bios is still (while building) on very safest settings so there is probably room for improvement in this and other respects.
Anyway what little I've seen of editing on the DV Storm on my machine confirms that it's a lovely piece of work, the RT is brill., and now I've even got access to the audio controllers thanks to the latest downloaded drivers from Canopus
Just a quick update.
Bios settings being tweaked up and DV Storm is solid so far, so becoming comfortable with the idea of setting down my next big multimedia epic.
I'll update again in a week or two
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Kit under construction:
DV Storm and Prem6.
1300 Mhz Athlon in EPOX 8KTA3+. M/board Win 2000 Pro SP1.
20 gig (C:\SysDrive: Reads 28Mbs, Writes 21Mbs) and 30 gig (D:\Audio/digi images and misc. R24Mbs, W34Mbs) (E:\)Plextor CD rewriter and (F:\)DVD player.
with 2 x 75 gig hd's in Raid 0 as (G:\ DV, R 47Mbs,W52Mbs). 512Mb PC133 SDRAM,
Matrox G450 driving 2 Illama TFT 15" monitors ,SB Live 5.1
System now working very well.
Slight glitch with DUN and Internet access in Win 2000, but that's probably down to my lack of experience with this OS