Using all PCI slots

[Greg12]

My friend swears my system will become radically unstable if I use all my PCI slots.

i have enough power to run them all.

He said he had a modem in one of his pci ports, and it was running at 28kps and he changed n it's no at 56.

I don't believe it, why would thy make it so u can't use all the pci ports.

[ChrisX]

My friend swears my system will become radically unstable if I use all my PCI slots.

i have enough power to run them all.

He said he had a modem in one of his pci ports, and it was running at 28kps and he changed n it's no at 56.

I don't believe it, why would thy make it so u can't use all the pci ports.

Very weird indeed, never heard of this problem.

[sterno]

I have two machines, both with all four PCI slots used (plus some ISA cards and an AGP card in one). Neither has ever had any problems. Your friend probably has cheap low-quality hardware.

[snowmoon]

When dealing with PCI/CPU interaction their are two types categories of systems. Those that have a fully supported ACPI bios and those that don't.

If your systems does not have ACPI your PCI bus will have some problems with IRQ sharing since with 5 or more PCI + AGP slots some IRQ's will more than likley be shared. Many MB addons ( raid, sound, video ) actually interact on the PCI bus and requre their own IRQ's as well.

With ACPI the CPU can deal with each card speratly and even assign the same IRQ to every card in the system without any ill-effect ( in theory ).

So why have X slots?

Because most MB's do support ACPI and not all PCI cards require an IRQ ( the original 3dfx accelerator jumps to mind ).

So if he is have trouble he should check a few things. Forst off update to the latest revision BIOS for his system since ACPI bugs are being fixed all the time. Second he should make sure that his OS is updated and recognizing the ACPI subsystem. If they are running 98 or ME they should upgrade ( especially if it's ME I've never found ME to be stable ).

[Greg12]

Under Computer in device manager in XP it says "ACPI Uniprocessor system"


does that mean im clear to use all 3 PCI slots?