What Mainboard for minimal Shared IRQ - PCI slots

Hi,

today most manufacturers fix there onboard components to the PCI slots to share the IRQ with that PCI slot.
Well sharing is no problem for most components, but for there are still problems here.
I have ABIT KT7a Mainboard, where the onboard is share with PCI4 and I can safly use that slot for my SBLive.
PCI2 and 3 get Network adapters and have both no sharing
and PCI1 is share with AGP and SCSI and Grafik have no shareing problems too.

No I want to buy a new mainboard and don't know wich I could use. I tried ASROCK K7VT2 but it was useless to me four USB controllers all on a different PCI slot, so all have shareing. And the onboard lan had no OS/2 driver :-(

Are there any sugestions? Why does the Tom's Hardware comparison not include such information about wich PCI slot and components have to share? (mostly it's easy to figure that out, mine even shows this in it'S bios-setup).

I am happy about every mainboard inforamtion concerning shared slots.

Ciao/2 Christoph


<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by Birdy27 on 02/20/03 05:52 AM.</EM></FONT></P>

Just get a board with the minium stuff that you need. You can easily just turn off the stuff you don't need like USB/serial/RAID or whatever.
Tom's hardware probabaly doesn't include such information in its reviews because it is largely irrelevant. Most modern products support IRQ sharing without any problems, for example I have 3 devices sharing IRQ17. Btw what items do you have that don't support IRQ sharing? Your network cards? Because there are always some slots with unique IRQs just like you have now.

<A HREF="http://www.anandtech.com/myanandtech.html?member=114979" target="_new">My PCs</A>

Nicely explained, Teq.

---There may be more than one way to do it, but why would anyone want to remove the fur from a feline?---

Yes I have IRQ shareing problems with network cards.
And I had to figure out there are not always unique IRQ slots. The ASRock has none and the one my father has has one.
Would need too.

What I wonder about is, that I disable all onboard components that share IRQ with slot and still only the one slot worked with Networkcards ?!?

Jut for notice there is no device manager in the ASRock bios.
The ASRock Bios has none features. Just set harddiscs and bootorder. You feel like having a notebook.

To make things worse all slots share with one of the USB controllers, wich you can't turn off.

But you can see the IRQs after startup iin the overview

I think the "Device Manager" was a reference to your Operating System.

Right click "My Computer" then click Properties, you will find device manager tucked away on one of the tabs.



--->It ain't better if it don't work<---