All my most demanding hardware routing through the same irq

[drojman]

I upgraded my machine, and when i boot up, my tnt card, my sb live, my usb controller are all going through irq 11. My usb netcam works way crummy now... yet irq 9 is totally free. will this degrade my video and sound performance etc when they share an irq?

[Colonel Casio]

My SB Live & TnT family video cards have been sharing an IRQ for a long time with NO problem. This can happen without problems because of a feature of Windows called IRQ Holder for PCI Steering. As to possibly using IRQ 9, there are two questions. Is there any device using IRQ 2? If so, you cannot use IRQ 9 until IRQ 2 is cleared. Second, does your BIOS allow for you to assign IRQs to specific PCI slots? If so and you have IRQ 2 free then you may assign that piece of hardware to IRQ 9. Another option to free up IRQs is to move as much of your hardware as possible to USB! I had to do that and pretty fancy footwork to fit all of my hardware into the pitifully small number of IRQs provided. There are two excellent books on the subject that I heartily recommend. First "The IRQ Book" by Kate Chase. And "IRQ DMA & I/O" third Ed. by Jim Aspinwall.

[drojman]

Before I flashed my bios, windows wouldn't controll the resourses. so the bios did, but now windows has them... my usb camera worked much better then it seemed. I thought maybe they were all sharing the same bandwidth?