[LAU] Delta 44 on recent motherboard

[David Causse]

Le 06/05/2011 11:21, alex tinsley a écrit :
> Even though the P67 and H67 do not support the PCI bus natively, PCI 
> is accessd through a PCI - PCI-e Bridge. If you look at page 8 in the 
> manual you'll see there's a little bridge chip between the south 
> bridge and the PCI slots. PCI slots have been running through these 
> bridge chips for a while now, this doesn't appear to be the issue.
>
> It appears as though some of the settings are getting changed but 
> audio isn't passing, it may be possible that there are other on-board 
> devices bound to the PCI slot where the Delta 44 card is plugged into. 
> There may be 16 IRQ's however as indicated on page 11 of the manual 
> there are more than 16 devices on that motherboard, so the system will 
> share devices on the same IRQ. I would suggest disabling devices that 
> are bound to the PCI slot in the BIOS to see if that frees up enough 
> bandwidth for the card to operate. Unfortunately Gigabyte does not 
> include an IRQ sharing matrix like ASUS does, however if you refer 
> back to page 8 to the block diagram you can see on the left side of 
> the diagram which devices are sharing with the PCI slots.
>
> There you will see a single line for a PCI Express bus, dropping down 
> to the bottom is the ITE Bridge chip which goes to the PCI slots, 
> however on the same line dropping down you'll see the Network 
> Controller is on there and on the top of that line are all the other 
> PCI-e slots except for the primary PCI-e x16 slot which is running off 
> of the NorthBridge. At this point you'll need to do some 
> experimentation with pulling any other cards you have in your system 
> that is not the primary graphics controller. If you're running dual 
> graphics cards, try removing one out of the second PCI-e x16 slot to 
> see if that changes anything.Also if you have any PCI-e x4 or x1 cards 
> you should remove them just to see if that helps to narrow your search.
>
> Also, typically USB ports are also bound to PCI slots for power 
> management. If you have something plugged into the USB ports that take 
> up a lot bandwidth (ie hard drives, cameras, scanners) these will 
> cause a card like the Delta 44 to malfunction. Try toggling settings 
> on and off to see if that changes the behavior of the Delta card.
>
> Why is this all necessary? The Delta 44 was developed back in 1999!! 
> before all this newer technology came out that surrounds it. The Delta 
> is a bus mastering card which requires full bandwidth of the slot, 
> anything that takes away from that requirement will cause the card to 
> not operate properly, so it doesn't play well with power management 
> schemes.
>
> Also this motherboard has a ton of features for power management, 
> consider turning that off too temporarily to see if that changes the 
> situation too.
>
> It also doesn't hurt to see if Gigabyte has an updated BIOS release 
> providing improved PCI performance.
>
> Try that and see if anything improves.
>

Hi Alex,

many thanks for the reply (I reply to the ml because your post is very 
informative).
Unfortunately I wasn't able to activate the card, I tried nearly 
everything at BIOS level, tried also some kernel parameters (nomsi, 
noacpi) but all without any success...
I'm a bit tired, too much time lost...
I give up, I don't know what else I could do.

Regards,

David.