ECS K7S5A PCI configuration

[aseries]

:confused:
I have been using a new ECS K7S5A main board for two months and I was fairly satisfied with it. I had some initial misgiving but I stayed with it.
1. Although it has on-board sound it seems to not have any kind of DOS Sound-Blaster emulation for older games like Duke Nukem.
For this reason I stuck in my Turtle Beach Allegro sound card.
2. I just put in an Adaptec AHA2940 SCSI host adapter to drive an HP C5100A photo scanner. I can not get the board to distribute IRQs properly to get all PCI devicecs to work at the same time.

Here are the wierd things the board does with PCI:
A. There is no way to designate IRQs for legacy applications.
B. It does not like to reassign IRQs 3 and 4 if the COM ports are disabled.
C. It likes to assign all the PCI devices to one or two IRQs.
D. It is impossible to assign IRQs manually.

[edtrip]

I hear ya.
I hated the way that board managed IRQs. I sent mine back and got a K7VZA (even though it doesn't support DDR) and have been happy ever since.

Sorry that's not much help.

[aseries]

:rolleyes: :) My K7S5A is now working in a more or less satisfactory manner. I had to reload some of the drivers that became corrupted somewhere along the way as the result of a bit too much thrashing on my part. I still cannot run DOS legacy Sound Blaster stuff fom a DOS box. I have to run in DOS mode. My next move will be to DDR memory.

[Praetorian]

I'm gonna be setting up a box in a few hours with this motherboard. I'll be running some flavor of Linux. Hopefully I don't have the problems you've had. :-/

[aseries]

:confused: More "news" on the K7S5A. I tried to update the BIOS to latest level and NONE of the flash programs would work at all. I think I will avoid Elite Computer Systems in the future.

[Raydeo Ray]

I had good luck with the 3.26 version of the flash program. Had to flash from the hard drive, as the floppy method would not work for me. The OCWorkbench site has a good FAQ on this board.
regards, http://forum.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/ultimatebb.cgi?ubb=forum&f=4

[aseries]

:D Thanks...I'll give that method a try.

[wallie_x]

aseries, what OS are you running? I also own a K7S5A and have had only a few problems with it (it's tempermental to set up, but once set up runs xlnt) You have to turn off the ACPI and Plug and Play OS Aware off in the BIOS and you can then manually assign your IRQ's by switching off the Auto assign function. If u r letting windows assign your IRQ's little wonder u r having problems. Go to the ECS web site in Taiwan. They have the flash utilities "aminf329" Go to OC Workbench and read the FAQ section on flashing because you did it improperly. I've flashed this BIOS X2. Also, Legacy ISA won't work with many new systems, its rather old world isn't it?