wont boot with 4 PCI cards

[cosmocat]

In defence of one cheapo PSU...

I had to replace my original PSU about a year ago and bought an Ebuyer Extra Value 500W PSU - it was £12.99 and has been powering my rig since then. It's not particularly quiet though but that isn't too important in my situation.

Cheers,
Brian

Same here, an Ebuyer Extra Value 400W PSU , I think is was about a tenner has been powering my rig 24x7 for a year so far without issue.

I had to increase the power of a power supply on one system I was upgrading. The BIOS screen would come up , but XP would not boot. If I slowed the CPU clock right down in the BIOS, it would boot.
A test you might want to try.

[fuzzweed]

OK I'm back on this topic with no joy
I bought the Seasonic S12 430W, which to be fair is a rather nice PSU (well as nice as any small black metal box can be ) and while it seems to have made my system a whole lot more reliable, I still cant get it to boot with 4 PCI cards.

Sooo having learnt a whole lot about PSUs in this thread, how about some questions on mobos......

Does anyone know if there's a power limit on the PCI bus itself, regardless of PSU output?
Is anyone out there running 3 tuners + soundcard on a socket 462 mobo, and if so which model?
Mine's currently an ASrock K7s8X which I have to admit I bought because it was cheep (doh!) - anyone got any suggestions for a replacement? Is the asus A7n8x any good???

PS in answer to the last post, I've both slowed the clock speed in BIOS (3200->2800) and also with the jumpers (3200->2500) no luck....

[bgowland]

Does anyone know if there's a power limit on the PCI bus itself, regardless of PSU output?

Power supplies don't 'push' power - the power is 'drawn' from them. In other words a PSU with X Watts rating means that is the maximum it can supply. If the devices in you're system only pull 100W, for example, then a 500W 'rated' PSU will only have to deliver 100W.

I'd still suspect resource conflicts. Do you know anyone that has a totally different make of souncard to yours? Borrow the card - see if it boots up with it and the three tuners.

Cheers,
Brian

[fuzzweed]

I just thought that maybe the mobo itself was restricting what could be drawn, but thanks, it sounds like a good idea before I start parting with more cash.

do you know how xp manages its resources?? I remember in the days of win 98 you could run out of IRQs, but I thought 2000 and XP managed the irqs dynamically so that didnt happen....?

[zaphod7501]

Most resource conflicts are not IRQs but memory allocation. IRQs can usually be shared now but memory cannot. Capture cards often have large requirements as do video cards. One method that sometimes works is to go into the BIOS and set AGP Aperture to match the amount of memory on the graphics card and set reset ESCD to "On" (also called Reset Configuration Data or Clear ESCD). This should force the BIOS to reallocate resources at next boot.

You could also try a video card with less memory onboard.

It is also possible that you just don't have enough upper memory area available for all the devices in the system.

[pwborders]

Is anyone out there running 3 tuners + soundcard on a socket 462 mobo, and if so which model?
Mine's currently an ASrock K7s8X which I have to admit I bought because it was cheep (doh!) - anyone got any suggestions for a replacement? Is the asus A7n8x any good???

Yes the A7N8X is a very good board. I have two. One of them is my gb-pvr machine, check out the specs in my sig. This is all in an Antec SLK3800B case with a 400W Antec SmartPower 2.0 PS.

Your ASrock board is a SIS chipset and I have had problems with them in the past. I wouldn't be surprised at all if it was just a chipset issue.

PeteB

[zaphod7501]

BTW, I am running a socket 462 on an MSI KT880 (VIA w/SATA) with a Haup PVR250, HVR1600 (dual tuner), MyHD MDP130 (NTSC/ATSC w/QAM), and Hollywood Plus DVD decoder card: audio and LAN onboard: GF3 video.

[bgowland]

I just thought that maybe the mobo itself was restricting what could be drawn

No it shouldn't work like that as far as I understand things.

do you know how xp manages its resources?? I remember in the days of win 98 you could run out of IRQs, but I thought 2000 and XP managed the irqs dynamically so that didnt happen....?

I stopped doing PC hardware support at that level about 9 years ago so I'm not an expert.

I will say that what zaphod7501 says about IRQs is right in theory although it depends on how the other drivers, chained into a particular IRQ, handle requests. In theory, they're supposed to check to see if the IRQ came from the bit of hardware they're handling and, if not, gracefully pass the request to the next driver in the chain. Badly written drivers may not do that as gracefully as they should - it's unlikely but not impossible.

Cheers,
Brian

[maddog]

i'd lay money on the tangled irq allocation
try removing all cards and boot making a note of irg allocation on post screen
shut down
only install one card at a time and boot making a note of irq allocation.
label cards 1-4,
start with card 1 in slot one and boot,, at failure pull all cards and move card 4 to slot 1,,,card 1 to slot 2 and repeat etc,,,
you may spot a fatal pattern such as card 4 forcing card 2 to move to an irq it cant handle (dont forget onboard devices use irqs as well)time consuming and boring but usually gets results
if no success after full rotation the whole process can also be repeated after toggling the bios setting PnP OS ie if on switch to off and vice versa
another thing some of the older boards really liked the acpi to be on irq 9(legacy issue from older design specs) and were very fussy about sharing this with some devices(about%90 of other devices unf) so try and keep irq 9 clear if u can
happy rebooting
regrds
mdb
ps dont know this board but u could try disabling some of the onboard usb controllers and utilising a hub instead

[rscheller]

Don't know if it's related but I had a similar issue when I installed a second PVR-150 tuner in my PC. You can read about my problems and resolution here.

Bottom line fix for me was updating my mobo bios and mobo drivers and it's all still working well. In fact I'm considering adding a third tuner for those occasional conflicts but then again I can barely keep up with what I record with two tuners. :o