IRQ sharing

Reiver

Reiver

Reiver

Associate
Joined
12 Oct 2005
Posts
382
My graphics card is sharing an IRQ with my network card (PCI 18). Is there any way to change this without moving the card into a different slot? It's in pci slot 3 (the network card that is) and according to the manual that's not supposed to share an IRQ with anything. I don't know if this is the source of the freezes and instability i've been having (probably not) but i'd like to see if it makes a difference.
Everything else is got it's own IRQ.
 
18 isn't a real IRQ anyway; physical IRQs go up to 15.

On my NF2 board I can run everything on its "real" IRQ by changing the computer driver from APCI -> "Advanced Configuration and Power Interface (ACPI)"

I doubt the sharing is causing any issues anyway?
 
Back in the day of Windows 98 and earlier, IRQ sharing used to cause endless problems, however these days it shouldn't be causing any problems. Freezing and Instability would lead me to think you have either a problem with your Power Supply or your RAM. But as phil said, IRQ's only go up to 15 on the physical hardware, running it in real IRQ mode may be better.
 
Simply forget everything you once knew or think you know about IRQ's.
The days when you hit to sit down with paper & pencil working out which IRQ's were available, which IRQ's certain devices could actually use and then having to place the devices in certain slots and programming them in certain ways are thankfully behind us.

Since Win95 IRQ sharing hasn't been a major problem.
Certainly since Windows 2000 it hasn't caused any kind of problem - what with ACPI most devices share a single real IRQ (that of the ACPI controller) which in turn uses virtual IRQ's.

The apparent sharing of an IRQ is highly unlikely to be causing the issues you describe.
Look for some faulty hardware - usually RAM or PSU.
If you overclock run everything at stock for a while.
 
Cheers for the replies. It was a last ditch, long shot. I'm stumped as to the cause of the problem.
RAM:Tried it with only one stick, tried different slots even bought some RAM to test and be 100%. Memtest86+ runs 25 hours without a sinle error.
PSU: The freezes are so random and seem to happen regardless of the load on the computer. All the windows tasts have shown the V rails to be stable and withing acceptable limits. Also the progressive deterioration, in that the freezes have become more frequent and also the way that a reformat temporarily (2 months) fixed the problem would suggest it's not.

I'm totally stumped as to the problem so i'm replacing the mobo to see if that makes a difference.
 
I've run chkdisk a few times and not found anything and i've used prime and sandra on the cpu without problems. The difficulty is testing whther any changes have worked as there's no way i've found to reproduce the freeze with 100% accuracy. It's so random that it may appear fine for days and then suddenly go into spasms.
I'll try downloading the disk checker from the seagate website though. Wasn't sure how that worked with striped disks so i hadn't tried it.
 
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