new 8RDA, same IDE issues...

Here is a thought, check the IRQ's and see if there are conflicts. I just fixed a systen that was locking up at random and for no apparent reason. After investigating I found the sound, Nic card, modem,parallel port and video card all on IRQ 11. The system was running XP Home. After changing some IRQ's and flashing the bios in the motherboard the lock up problem stopped.

There is also an issue with the Nvidia IDE drivers and some CD-RW's. If you have loaded these drivers You may be better off by removing them and using the Windows drivers.

I think there is a motherboard bios revision out for your board also. What do you think of the on-board sound?

Quote:

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Originally posted by Mechanic
Here is a thought, check the IRQ's and see if there are conflicts. I just fixed a systen that was locking up at random and for no apparent reason. After investigating I found the sound, Nic card, modem,parallel port and video card all on IRQ 11. The system was running XP Home. After changing some IRQ's and flashing the bios in the motherboard the lock up problem stopped.

There is also an issue with the Nvidia IDE drivers and some CD-RW's. If you have loaded these drivers You may be better off by removing them and using the Windows drivers.

I think there is a motherboard bios revision out for your board also. What do you think of the on-board sound?

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yes i tried the latest bios - it had mentioned it was supposed to resolve some system resource conflicts in certain cases so i gave it a shot, but had no luck. the only thing sharing IRQ's are the USB controllers, and i've had no problems with usb devices at all.

the nvidia IDE drivers are only an issue under winXP, i'm running win2k here and when you install the nforce2 chipset drivers the ide drivers are not installed - i've seen the issues it causes on some winxp machines though, and it's not pretty.

i also tried a different network card, and with this new one there is no skipping in games, at least at default clock speeds. when i take my fsb high though, the skipping does come back, but before it would occur at default speeds as well, so i guess i'm on the right track.

and on a side note, the onboard sound is ok, but it's not the 8rda+, so it's certainly not terrific...i might switch back to the sblive, FLStudio4 doesn't work too great with the onboard sound, and i use that program a lot.

It sounds like you found the problem. You might also try a different slot for the card. I failed to notice the lack of the + on the model of your motherboard. That does make a big difference. If you had the 6 chanel sound I think it would equal the Sound Blaster. Are you on cable? You have Comcast in Howell don't you? I know a little about that town, my daughter lives there.

small world, eh? ;)

yeah, comcast in howell is definately not the best service, but it's all that's around for us right now. i'm gonna throw my sblive back in here tonight after work and see what happens.

It sounds like you found the problem. You might also try a different slot for the card. I failed to notice the lack of the + on the model of your motherboard. That does make a big difference. If you had the 6 chanel sound I think it would equal the Sound Blaster. Are you on cable? You have Comcast in Howell don't you? I know a little about that town, my daughter lives there.

I thought you might find this interesting. The question was in regard to the optimum setup for a system having two hard drives and two optical drives:

Dear Mechanic,

Below is a response to your recent question. If the response Sincerely,

Reigneer
Western Digital Service and Support


Summary
IDE Configuration

Discussion Thread
Response (Reigneer) 04/30/2003 12:12 PM
The recommended setup is to have both hard drives as master. One as primary master on IDE0 and the other as secondary master on IDE1. The optical drives will be connected as primary and secondary slaves. The reason for this is hard drives communicate directly to the motherboard. Optical drives' communication with the motherboard goes through the operating system. This is why optical drives; like CD-ROM, CD-RW, and DVD-ROM, all need drivers. The master IDE device on each IDE port has first priority in communicating with the motherboard. So, having the hard drives connected as master, they have priority to communicate with the motherboard over the two slave optical drives which need to go through the operating system to communicate with the motherboard.

ok, problem not solved....last night i installed and played a bit of worms: world party with a couple friends at a mini-lan we had last night...this is a game which is not very demanding AT ALL, yet my system had troubles running it smoothly...whenever there was a decent amount of action it would chunk pretty badly.

i also discovered a couple days ago that unreal tournament has some sound issues as well. sometimes it would kinda lock onto a certain sound and make it echo and repeat over itself for a few seconds, and then all the sounds would be like that...and then it would randomly go back to normal, but not without the video skipping once or twice first...

i just don't know what to think of this anymore, i've tried almost everything i can think of...tonight though i'm gonna remove everything except the main hdd and video card and see what happens after i plug each device back in individually. maybe it's a cd-rom or hdd causing the problems?

I don't think Win2k likes the Nvidia chipset. I wonder how your system would run with XP and the Nvidia drivers for the chipset. Sorry but other than that I really don't know what to suggest. I set up a EP-8RDA+ board running XP and had all kinds of burner problems until I uninstalled the Nvidia IDE drivers. After that issue was addressed the thing was rock solid and would simply fly with an XP2600/333FSB CPU. Not the first hint of a stutter. Borrow a disk and load XP and see if it works. If it does you can get the home edition upgrade at Staples for $89.95 on sale.

Also is it possible that you could have a corrupted install if Win2K?

well, got my copy of XP Pro the other day, and now i'm up and running again, and the same skipping problem is still there....what a load of s*it....i'm beginning to think it might be video card related...

I'm experiencing a similar problem, whenever the cd-rom drive is reading data everything starts stuttering and the sound gets distorted. And this is Win2K SP3 with all the pre-SP4 hotfixes.
I've upgraded the nforce2 drivers with the ones from the epox site, but to no avail.


*EDIT* Well, Occams Razor sure owned me this time. Apparently Windows thought that my cdrom drive should run in PIO mode instead of DMA, the problem is gone now. :) *EDIT*

Quote:

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Originally posted by MrBling
I'm experiencing a similar problem, whenever the cd-rom drive is reading data everything starts stuttering and the sound gets distorted. And this is Win2K SP3 with all the pre-SP4 hotfixes.
I've upgraded the nforce2 drivers with the ones from the epox site, but to no avail.


*EDIT* Well, Occams Razor sure owned me this time. Apparently Windows thought that my cdrom drive should run in PIO mode instead of DMA, the problem is gone now. :) *EDIT*

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yeah, all my drives are running DMA, so that's not the issue here...

Quote:

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Originally posted by thebove
well, got my copy of XP Pro the other day, and now i'm up and running again, and the same skipping problem is still there....what a load of s*it....i'm beginning to think it might be video card related...

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Are you overclocking the card?

There is no driver problem as such with nFOrce2 and Win2K cause I am running Win2K on nForce2 IGP platform and it worked perfectly with great performance first time. But then I have a so-called "crappy" mobo so maybe they didn't put the 'bug-features' in to save costs. ;)

Does that mobo have onboard video? If yes, try enabling that and see if it performs any better. Also, which nForce2 drivers are you using? Latest ones or the ones on the CD?