Abit BE6, 366a, and G200

[GT98]

I was reading a review on the ABit BE6 board and it has UDMA/66 Controler built into the board. The Drivers for it come on a floppy so take a look around for it and try that.See if this sovles your problem with it asking for the controller. You might want to also move your sound card IRQ and the USB IRQ to different ones if possible..that could be causing your problem esp if you are using USB devices.

Scott

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Celeron 300A@464, Marvel-G200, V2 SLI, SB live!, 128mb RAM, Optiquest V95 19in montior

[Gurm]

Yellowjacket,

The BE6 is based on the BH6/BX6, so here's the rundown:

1. The Ultra/66 controller drivers are, indeed, on a little floppy floating around in your box somewhere. I don't really recommend using them, since it's not particularly stable... (I returned mine). Also, you can't enable "DMA" on them, although it might be on by default. However, that controller is probably mismanaging your Ultra/33 devices, so switch to the standard controller.

2. The ABIT boards do a lot of "sharing" of peripheral IRQ's. Here's how:

AGP = Slot0
PCI = Slot1
PCI = Slot2
PCI = Slot3
PCI = Slot4
PCI = Slot5

Slot0 + Slot1 = IRQ A
Slot2 = IRQ B
Slot3 = IRQ C
Slot4, Slot5, USB = IRQ D

So if you have devices that don't share very well (no conflict needs to be present for a problem to be occuring), you may need to rearrange cards and set IRQ's by hand in the BIOS.

- Gurm

[yellowjacket]

Unfortunately, disabling USB made no difference. I may try disabling PNP in the Bios. This is a little frustrating.

Anyone have any suggestions for BIOS settings?

thx

[Kruzin]

Are you running anything in the background? Spiffy little utils like mobo monitors that poll the system at specific time intervals have a tendancy to produce the problem you described. Shut down all your background tasks, and see if it goes away...then you can turn em back on one at a time till you fine the culprit...

[yellowjacket]

Gurm,

Did you return your motherboard, or just dump the drivers? If the mobo, which one did you choose?

Is this sharing of IRQ's you describe common for motherboards?

Kruzin, thanks for the suggestion, but unfortunately, I see nothing untoward running (when I do CTRL-ALT-DEL, right?).

Would there be any reason to reinstall any of my peripherals?

Since I did put cards in PCI slots 3 and 5, I can try moving them to 2 and 3. My understanding is that slot 1 is of no use when an AGP card is present.

Thanks for the suggestions!

[Gurm]

Yellowjacket,

I returned the BE6. It was $50 more than the BH6, and $25 more than the BX6v2 (which has more stuff on board, notably a 4th DIMM socket). And the UDMA/66 conflicted with my SCSI...

Anyway, no Slot 1 isn't useless - it just shares an IRQ with the AGP slot. So if you have a video card that is touchy about sharing, then don't use slot 1.

I recommend putting things in slots 2 and 3, and using 4 and 5 only if the devices are reasonably friendly (I think my 3com card is living there now).

Now, on to slowdowns. You don't, by any chance, have a NIC with DHCP enabled do you?

Also, as Kruzin said, check for running programs. Some totally innocuous stuff does it - like the Office startup, etc.

Try running "msconfig" and seeing what runs at start time.

- Gurm

[motub]

Speaking of startup progs, don't forget about (ditching) the ever-hideous FindFast!! (does anyone actually use this? anyone at all??)

Holly

[Kruzin]

Oh, yes...loose that fastfind crap.
Pal of mine (a PC tech even...smart dude) could not figure out what was slowing down his system and frequently spinning his floppy drives. 'Twas FastFind. What a crap program (but hey...it is Micro$haft...waddya expect )

[yellowjacket]

Abit BE6, 366a, and G200


Until last night, my system was a K6-2 300 (@350 mhz), 128 MB ram, 16 MB G200, Windows 98.

All ran fine, no problems (in fact, I'm keeping the PA2013 and K6-2 for my second computer), but I wanted more speed, especially in flight sims.

Last night I swapped my mobo and chip. I now have the Abit BE6 and a Celeron 366 running at 550. Overall, very smooth, and much quicker.

However, I am seeing some pauses in two games - WWII Fighters and Falcon. The pauses are brief, but occur about every second. I'm not seeing these pauses in Quake II, and haven't had time to test much else yet.

I do notice that my sound card (Ensoniq) and the USB controller both share IRQ 10, but no conflict is reported. Also, when prompted for "mass storage controller" drivers, I inserted the BE6 CD Rom, and some IBM Bus Master drivers were loaded. I do see where the CD Rom has optional bus master drivers as well, but I loaded nothing separately from simply getting the computer up and going.

Are there some BIOS settings I should check? Is there a chance I need to reinstall any drivers, including the G200?

[yellowjacket]

Ah, I was able to spend more time with the machine last night, and have a clearer picture.

Most games play fine, but two are jerky -- WW II Fighters and Half-Life. In both cases, it's more of a sporadic jerkiness than stuttering.

Also, nothing new running in the background, but I did notice that NIS is running...

Can't think of any 3DNow! specific drivers installed.

Gurm, is performance more reliable with the BX6r2 then? I may swap for that mobo, if that's the case.

[Guyver]

Yellowjacket - Unless you did a clean install of Windows 9X - you may have some VIA/ALI chipset specific stuff still floating in your registry. I had some similiar quirks after changing from my EPOX Via MVP3G to my ABIT BX6R2 (which I'm dumping in favor of the BE6 for OCability and reported stability @ 133 and above) - see Hardware forum for complete rundown.

I have currently an SBLive! Value running in slot 3 - IRQ 9, and my Adaptec 2940UW in Slot 2 - IRQ 10, and my Mystique G200 in AGP - IRQ 11. I hardcoded IRQ 7 (I use a USB printer) to Slots 4&5 - which also does some other interface that isn't noted in Windows but shows up at boot time.

I hardcoded IRQ 5 to a legacy ISA device (Windows 98 takes it for SBLive! SB16 compatibility) and I have no IRQ sharing reported in Windows Device information... Sometimes jerkiness can be caused by disk swap (reading/writing from/to hard drive for additional memory whether the system needs it or not)... Try forcing a fixed SWAP area of equal or double the size of your memory - it may help.

Don't know if any of this helps - but it couldn't hurt - unless you count wasted time reading it! - Take care.

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Running an ABIT BX6 R2, PIII-450 @ 581Mhz, 128MB (64x2) PC100SDRAM (running @ 129), Matrox Mystique G200 8MB, SBLive! Value, Adaptec AHA-2940UW (Dual Channel)
All kinds of other SCSI and ATAPI goodies....
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Waiting for my G400Max Impatiently, increasing system performance to give it a good home.....

[This message has been edited by Guyver (edited 07-16-99).]

[yellowjacket]

Guyver,

Thanks for the tips! So, did you opt for the clean install, or edit the registry? A clean install sounds scarier than my changing motherboards (which took three hours).

I've spent this evening testing all games and other software, and so far WWII Fighters is the only game exhibiting this behavior.

Pretty incredible fps increases overall! I must say I'm impressed how easy the BE6 was to set up and maintain (ok, other than WWII F).

Thanks again!

[Guyver]

If the drivers were for the VIA chipset, usually running the same program you used to install them would uninstall them as well. Then all that was needed is to boot into safe mode, and go through the devices and remove the entries stating VIA. The process may be the same for ALI, but as I did a complete reinstall after playing with an ALI motherboard, I couldn't say for certain....

Hope this helps... Yeah - I like my ABIT as well, getting my BE6 sometime this week I believe. Hopefully it will break the 133mhz barrier....

LB

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Running an ABIT BX6 R2, PIII-450 @ 581Mhz, 128MB (64x2) PC100SDRAM (running @ 129), Matrox Mystique G200 8MB, SBLive! Value, Adaptec AHA-2940UW (Dual Channel)
All kinds of other SCSI and ATAPI goodies....
-------------
Waiting for my G400Max Impatiently, increasing system performance to give it a good home.....

[yellowjacket]

Thanks again for all the hints! I do wonder about one tasks that's running.

First of all, I don't see this task when I do CTRL-ALT-DEL, but I do see it under System Tools->System Information.

The tasks is mprexe.exe (WIN32 Network Interface Service). I do have a NIC in my system (hmm, I think it's in slot 3), but I explicitly disabled it under Device Manager.

Is mprexe.exe a default task running as part of Win 98? If not, I'm not sure how I can kill it (sledge hammer?).

Oh, I discussed my setup and games with a few guys at work, and one fellow thinks I'm pushing the G200 too hard by running WWII Fighters at 1024x768. He plays it at 8x6, with his TNT.

So ... maybe I just need a G400 Max to go with my 550 celeron!

Speaking of which, what's this I hear about possible problems between the G400 and celerons? Say it isn't so!

thanks again!
-- Georgia Tech fan ('YellowJacket') --