A7N8X Deluxe-Beware of Slots 2&3 if using onboard sound!

[Mike89]

Man what an experience I have had with this motherboard and trying to get the onboard sound to work.

This is what I have found out through a lot of time consuming checking.

I have a PCI modem and a Winfast TV2000XP tuner card.

The onboard sound will not work when either of these cards are plugged into PCI slots 2 or 3.

I can use slot 4 and both the PCI device (either one) and the onboard sound will work. I haven't tried slot 5 yet.

This is what this hassle has cost me. I RMAed the board because I had not figured this out at that time. I just could not get the onboard sound to work. At that time I did have the modem into slot 2.

When I got the second board, it did exactly the same thing! I started messing around and first removed the TV Tuner. Still no sound. I then removed the modem from slot 2. Now I finally had onboard sound. At that time I had the TV tuner in slot 4.

Well then my tv tuner starts messing up. The sound would cut out after the tuner was on for a minute or so.

So I said hell with this and disabled the onboard sound and put my Santa Cruz sound card back in. Well the TV tuner sound did the same thing. I emailed Leadtek and found out that the sound cut out problem with the TV tuner was related to Norton Antivirus 2003 monitoring MSN Messinger. I unchecked the monitor for that in the antivirus and it solved the tuner sound cut out problem.

OK by this time I had re-arranged my sound card, TV Tuner, and modem in different slots and all were working fine.

Now I start thinking about my original problem again. So I go and buy a US Robotics External modem for $100 thinking my PCI winmodem just was not compatible with the onboard sound.

Now I figured I will go back to the onboard sound. So I take out my Santa Cruz sound card, and PCI modem, hook up the external modem, boot up, and guess what? No sound!

&%$@)*^&%#!@(&%&^*

Now I'm REALLY tripping. The only device left in (besides the vid card) was the tv tuner card. I take the tv tuner card out, boot up and guess what? I have sound!

Jeez jeez jeez!

The TV Tuner had been in slot 2, the same slot the modem had been in what I experienced my first onboard sound problems. So now I have isolated that slot 2 is the issue.

I then put the TV Tuner card in slot 3, boot up, and guess what? No sound!

&%$@)*^&%#!@(&%&^*

So now I figure that for some reason, slot 2 and 3 have an issue with the onboard sound.

Then I drop the TV Tuner in slot 4, boot up, and guess what? I have sound.

Now I have onboard sound, TV Tuner working right, and external modem (through serial port) working right.

I sure don't know what the deal is here with slots 2 and 3.

I would be interested to know just what slots you A7N8X Deluxe owners, who are using the onboard sound, are using.

This is really screwed up. I don't use slot 1 because it's just too close to the vid card (and upcoming NV30 is supposed to take up that slot anyway). Now I can't use slot 2 and 3. That leaves slots 4 (which I've tried) and 5 (that I haven't tried yet) to use.

That's pretty flaky if you ask me. Now with using a sound card, then all slots can be used (I know this because I had tried them all with the sound card, tuner and pci modem trying to get the best IRQ spread).

I would love to hear comments on this.

[PreDatoR]

If ya had dug one page deeper and I just thought of this... the onboard sound is more than likely using the IRQ shared by PCI slots 2 and 3... when something was in these slots for some oddball reason the onboard sound would disable. This is just an educated guess but i bet if ya figured out what IRQ those slots use its the same as the onboard sound.

[Mike89]

Well how does one figure out that stuff? The Asus manual has a little chart but I can't make any sense out of it. It goes like this.

PCI Slot 1. INT-A is shared. INT-B is blank. INT-C is blank. INT-D is blank.
PCI Slot 2. INT-A is blank. INT-B is blank. INT-C is blank. INT-D is used.
PCI Slot 3. INT-A is blank. INT-B is blank. INT-C is shared. INT-D is blank.
PCI Slot 4. INT-A is blank. INT-B is used. INT-C blank. INT-D is blank.
PCI Slot 5. INT-A is shared. INT-B is blank. INT-C is blank. INT-D is blank.

I don't know what the hell that means. Anyone care to explain that, please do.

To complicate this more, this motherboard has an setting in the BIOS (that I had never seen before) called APIC. This thing gives more IRQs, I have 22 now. Beats me how that works in the scheme of things.

[chottoED]

Here's what it looks like to me (I've the manual on hand for the Deluxe version):

Slot 1 shares the same IRQ with Slot5
Slot 2 has its own IRQ
Slot 3 shares the same IRQ with the Serial ATA controller
Slot 4 has its own IRQ

so, I'd recommend you put your cards into Slots 2 or 4 if that particular card needs its own IRQ
good luck!