IRQs...

I've spent most of the last week in IRQ hell. I built a pc for my housemate using a e6600 and a P5k-VM. The build went flawlessly but when recording there was distortion on his firewire audiophile sound card which m-audio advised us was an IRQ conflict. So we decided to change the IRQ....

So windows xp doesn't allow you to change IRQ, we tried everything including changing the HAL to standard processor and in the end bought a P5N-SLI just to avoid intel chipsets and a discrete video card.

Now his sound card works beautifully with the machine and his usb m-audio keyboard wont install. I swear I'm off to join the foreign legion if we have another compatibility issue with this build...

/end rant

on modern boards, IRQs are set per-pci-slot. if you look in the manual, it should tell you which slots have their own IRQ and which ahre one

We used the onboard firewire and also tried a pci firewire card with the same results. To be honest I suspect that the m-audio hardware is very very picky and irq conflicts don't quite explain it to me. It's just since I last played with irqs, you used to be able to play and change them and all sorts, this was many years ago mind.

We ended up trying to disable as many things as possible as that would supposedly allow windows to reallocate some irqs between devices but all to no avail.

The card gave faultless playback no matter how complex the layers of sound from pro-tools but immediately distorted when recording. If it was just an irq bandwidth issue due to the way windows shares them I would have expected more issues with playback as well.