"3 in 1" or T2P or T2R DLX anyone?

[Beemer Biker]

I picked up one of these as it was really cheap and I needed wireless,
firewire and gigabyte ethernet.
http://tinyurl.com/akszh
Newegg said it would work only on the T2P or T2R DLX asus systems. I
thought I might be able to get it to work with some other motherboards but I
was sadly mistaken.

- does not come with drivers
- has 3c940 ethernet chip. had to really hunt to find driver, finally found
it, supposidly same as 3com-2000

after spending several days, the best I could get was that all of the three
devices were properly recognized by win2k pro sp4 or xp pro sp2 but the
firewire and gigabyte devices had error 12: not enough resources.
Disableing either the firewire or the ethernet did not free up a resource.
The wireless did pick up a signal and connect, but I needed the gigabyte and
firewire.

Tried: V2DP and M7VIG motherboards wireless worked but not the other two
devices
Tried CUV4X-D: hung consistently right when it saw the device. Never got
to install drivers
Tried ancient motherboard I am embarassed to mention as owning. Would not
even boot to cmos.

Has anybody ever got this 3in1 to work? Does it work in T2P or T2R?

any ideas?

...thanks..


--
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Beemer Biker (e-mail address removed)
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http://TipsForTheComputingImpaired.com
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[Paul]

I picked up one of these as it was really cheap and I needed wireless,
firewire and gigabyte ethernet.
http://tinyurl.com/akszh
Newegg said it would work only on the T2P or T2R DLX asus systems. I
thought I might be able to get it to work with some other motherboards but I
was sadly mistaken.

- does not come with drivers
- has 3c940 ethernet chip. had to really hunt to find driver, finally found
it, supposidly same as 3com-2000

after spending several days, the best I could get was that all of the three
devices were properly recognized by win2k pro sp4 or xp pro sp2 but the
firewire and gigabyte devices had error 12: not enough resources.
Disableing either the firewire or the ethernet did not free up a resource.
The wireless did pick up a signal and connect, but I needed the gigabyte and
firewire.

Tried: V2DP and M7VIG motherboards wireless worked but not the other two
devices
Tried CUV4X-D: hung consistently right when it saw the device. Never got
to install drivers
Tried ancient motherboard I am embarassed to mention as owning. Would not
even boot to cmos.

Has anybody ever got this 3in1 to work? Does it work in T2P or T2R?

any ideas?

..thanks..

I looked at the pictures on Newegg, and one thing I don't see on
that card, is a bridge chip. (It could be hidden underneath the
wireless board, and only you'll be able to check under there.)
What that does, it split and buffer the multiple loads on the
PCI add-in card, from the rest of the motherboard PCI bus.

Strictly speaking, AFAIK, a valid PCI card is only supposed to
place one electrical load on the edge card connector. The chip that
connects to the bus is supposed to be pretty close to the
connector, to avoid creating a long wire "stub". Such a stub
upsets some of the assumptions about reflections on the PCI
bus, and that would be a bad thing. In other words, plugging
six non-compliant PCI add-in cards, would cause havoc on a
normal motherboard.

Another trick about PCI slots, is the way they are addressed. For
reference here, take a look at how a motherboard is designed.
This is a small schematic for a 440BX motherboard, from Intel.

http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/designex/BXDPDG10.PDF

On PDF page 22 of that document, there are two PCI slots shown.
In the lower right hand corner of the schematic sheet, are two
resistors. The signals R_AD26 and R_AD27 come from those resistors.

To give each PCI slot a unique address, on the motherboard side,
one of the multiplexed address/data bits (like AD26) is connected
not only to the bus feeding the card (as part of the 32 bit
multiplexed address/data bus), but the AD26 signal is also
connected to DEVSEL. What this means, is when a certain magic
value shows up on the address/data bus, that signals the PCI card
that it is selected.

Now, consider what happens if you connect an "unbridged" PCI
add-in card with a multitude of chips on it. Each chip needs
a unique identity. Say Asus connects AD26 to the Firewire chip's
DEVSEL, AD27 to the Ethernet chip, and AD28 to the wireless miniPCI
card. Also say that the motherboard designer, of the several
motherboards you've tried, also connects ADxx on their other PCI
slots or to PCI chips on the motherboard itself. Now, there are
two chips responding to the same probe. Not good.

I'm guessing, for an unbridged card to work, Asus knows that
certain ADxx signals are not used on the T2-P and T2-R. In
addition, you will notice that the motherboard in those two
machines, doesn't have a lot of PCI slots, and the PCI bus on
the motherboard is pretty short. That means they can abuse the
PCI standard if they want.

So those are the concerns I can think of, with respect to
getting that thing to work. If there was a bridge chip,
things might be different.

Here is a picture of a card with a bridge chip (has "HINT" on top).

http://images10.newegg.com/NeweggImage/productimage/15-150-026-03.JPG

Paul

 

[Beemer Biker]

I looked at the pictures on Newegg, and one thing I don't see on
that card, is a bridge chip. (It could be hidden underneath the
wireless board, and only you'll be able to check under there.)

you may have found the problem. The back of the card has the via 6307
firewire chip. The underside of the wireless hides the 3com chip. There is
a delta lf9208a ethernet transceiver and nearby is AS007A0 which seems to be
a voltage regulator. The backside has a 93c46s which is an eprom.

There are a lot of blank areas where other options would go. SATA raid,
EIDE raid, "vid in" which would make it a 6-in-1 if populated!