Next week or so

[Lalaman]

I should be putting together my new PC.( It was planned to be already under construction, but I had to send back the delivery of a company that had put cheap and even used memory in the parcel instead of waht I had ordered. After thoroughly snapping them in the calfs regular parts should arrive next week.)
Before that I would like to question you something that I am still confused about. I have a second sound card ( Delat 66 ) in the closet. Since I will install a soft sampler ( Kontakt ) should it be advisable to use the Delta 66 or would that rather bring me into trouble with the new system?

And two other questions:
1.Provided not using Raid can there still be gained any advantage by use of the HPT370 controller?
2. Do you have any recommendations about setting the PCI cards into which slots, or respective tweakings in Bios?

The main PC parts will be:

1. Mobo Abit KR7A-Raid ( as much as I understood, I shouldn´t use the Raid function though for the time being ).
2. Graphic card: Ati Radeon 7000 64 SDRAM.
3. 2x small hard drives ( one for LE/Win98, the other for WinXP ), and 1x 20 GB for audio only.
4. Power supply: 433W

Specifics on the KR7 are said like this:

"On the KG7-RAID and KR7A-RAID, IRQs are shared by the following devices:

"INT Pin 1": AGP card and PCI Slot 1
"INT Pin 2": PCI Slot 2 and PCI Slot 3 and ACPI (if enabled)
"INT Pin 3": PCI Slot 5 (and HPT370 controller in KT7-RAID)
"INT Pin 4": PCI Slot 4 and PCI Slot 6 and USB
Note you can force a particular IRQ number to be used by a particular "INT Pin #" using the PNP/PCI Configurations Setup in the BIOS. This allows you to force a certain slot to use a specific IRQ. You should not normally need to do this. Note that if you have ACPI enabled (- should I do that?-), Windows will ignore the assignments made in the BIOS and allow ACPI to determine this.

This is not a design fault of the motherboard! PCI devices are only allocated four programmable interrupt pins by the Southbridge chip. The same is also true of almost all motherboard chipsets. The PCI bus must therefore nearly always share IRQs on some or all of its PCI slots. What makes the KG7-RAID and KR7A-RAID slightly unusual is that you get six PCI slots and an AGP slot, which mean that all the slots may need to share! As I said above, this is not usually a problem and you should be grateful for all those slots!

Many AGP cards do not like sharing IRQs with other cards, so try to avoid putting cards in PCI Slot 1. This will solve many graphics card instabilities issues. However, check with your graphics card manufacturer to see whether it can share interrupts - you may be lucky!"

( Yet and at the time, I only use 3 PCI cards: 001, Ethernet - disabled on the audios OS -, and a cheap sound card for Internet - also disabled -in Win98)

I know, this is much to read. As always I like to thank you for your help.

Lalaman

[Lalaman]

I guess you have great weather like here this weekend. Or is it rather because no one has an idea on this?

[img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

[Mark_Knecht]

Lalaman,
The weather here in California is indeed lovely this weekend. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

I would consider putting the 001 in slot 3 with nothing in slot 2. I would look into bulding Windows on this machine WITHOUT ACPI. That should give you the most flexibility in terms of setting interrupts.

I would consider disabling USB.

I do not know much about the RAID controller, but I do know that you do not need RAID to build a good PTLE platform. I would consider disabling the device in BIOS if that option is available.

As for the 2nd sound card, thre's really no reason that a second card should cause any problems. Since Kontakt is new, know one is going to know how much CPU power it will require, nor what sort of disk usage it's going to make. (Presumably little base on our previous conversations.)

Hopefully I've given you a few things to think about. Sounds like fun for you. Good luck.

And now, back to that nice California weekend. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]

Mark

Originally posted by Lalaman:
I guess you have great weather like here this weekend. Or is it rather because no one has an idea on this?

[img]images/icons/confused.gif[/img]

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[Roy Howell]

Lalaman,

Where's my DVD? [img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Seriously though, I would do everything Mark suggests.

[Lalaman]

I like you guys! ( This DUC thing has indeed brought an absolutely unexpected personal sight of Internet to me.)

Mark,
that really was good info for me. Thanks a lot!

Roy,
I had a thorough look in my waste basket. But I could only find banana skins, a rusty nail, strips of wire and an empty tuna fish can. [img]images/icons/frown.gif[/img]

As soon as I find out how to make those parts play a DVD disk I let you know. But you´ll only get it then if you let me have the black beauty for it! As agreed, right? [img]images/icons/tongue.gif[/img]
[img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

Lalaman