RDRAM and IRQ for Pulsar only

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sharcsound
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Joined: Tue May 07, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Vienna, Austria
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Post by sharcsound »

I have an ASUS P4T533 with 2 Samsung 1033 RAM sticks (512 total), running on a P4 1.8 CPU. It's very nice with the 850e Intel chipset.

1) How do I get 2 gigs of RAM when there is just 2 slots for RAM? The ASUS board will take 2 GB of RDRAM. How do you get that...with 2 pieces of 1 GB RAM? Does Samsung make 1 GB RDRAM? if I put 2 pieces of 512 RDRAM then I only get 1 gig.

2) How do I change the IRQ settings in BIOS so Pulsar doesn't share IRQ with something else? There are some IRQ's that are not being used, but Pulsar is sharing IRQ 23 with the 2 USB hosts. I set the slot 3 for the Pulsar card to IRQ 9 in the BIOS but the IRQ setting in the Device manager says it's still 23. Is that because Pulsar is on PCI bus 2? Should I try to set the slot 3 to IRQ 24, which is unused?

thanks,

richard
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valis
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Post by valis »

About the ram: Yes you'll need 2 1GB sticks to get 2GB of ram. The reason that motherboard has only 2 slots is because it is using 32bit RDRAM. I believe (may be mistaken) that you can use only 1 stick at a time, since 32bit RDRAM is essentially 2 16bit sticks in a single package.

About the Pulsar: You need to start with resolving IRQ conflicts at the board level. Most BIOSes these days give options to fiddle with to try and resolve conflicts but in my opinion the following time honored techniques will always serve you best:

Start by disabling ALL unused built-in peripherals that you won't use (serial/parallel/c-media sound/extra unused USB devices etc). Now look in your manual for an IRQ/PCI sharing diagram. You can get the latest copy of your manual from http://download.asus.com.tw/mb_dl_menu. ... 3=11&mid=1 . Almost all motherboards have slot1 sharing with the AGP slot, and generally speaking every other slot will share with something, be it another PCI slot or an onboard device. By mapping out the devices that you've left enabled and the PCI slots you should be able to identify a few slots that are usable without conflict. It may even take a bit of shuffling around to get all cards to be the 'happiest' with their irq assingments. Once conflicts are resolved (or attempted to resolve) at the hardware level THEN you can go in and manually steer things around. But hopefully you won't need to =]
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