a8n-sli premium and Intel NIC

[Lynn McGuire]

OK, I got the Intel gigabit NIC to work in PCI slot #2 on my A8N-SLI
premium motherboard by disabling the Marvell LAN in the BIOS.

Duh !

Hopefully, this is a more stable situation than the Marvell LAN.

Thanks,
Lynn

 

[Paul]

OK, I got the Intel gigabit NIC to work in PCI slot #2 on my A8N-SLI
premium motherboard by disabling the Marvell LAN in the BIOS.

Duh !

Hopefully, this is a more stable situation than the Marvell LAN.

Thanks,
Lynn

If you look in the IRQ table in the manual (section 2.5.3), I
would extrapolate from what has happened to you, that PCI slot 3
could be used without disabling anything. If you ever put a
PCI sound card in that computer, slot 3 looks like the
place to be.

As for the new NIC, yes, I await your results, to see if this
is a "Marvell problem" or a problem with your X2 processor.

Paul

 

[Lynn]

OK, I got the Intel gigabit NIC to work in PCI slot #2 on my A8N-SLI

If you look in the IRQ table in the manual (section 2.5.3), I
would extrapolate from what has happened to you, that PCI slot 3
could be used without disabling anything. If you ever put a
PCI sound card in that computer, slot 3 looks like the
place to be.

As for the new NIC, yes, I await your results, to see if this
is a "Marvell problem" or a problem with your X2 processor.

Failed already. I had three "networking" sessions running on my PC
and I got another message from Win XP SP2 that a delayed write to
the 2nd hard drive on my file server failed. I am interpreting that to
be that the networking is still having problems with the Intel NIC
when intensive network traffic is going in multiple sessions on my PC.

I put the NIC in PCI slot #2 because that is away from the ATI video
board. Even though that board has a fan on it, I worry about heat.
I could also try PCI slot #1.

BTW, the cpu load at this time was 70 to 80%.

Lynn

 

[Paul]

Failed already. I had three "networking" sessions running on my PC
and I got another message from Win XP SP2 that a delayed write to
the 2nd hard drive on my file server failed. I am interpreting that to
be that the networking is still having problems with the Intel NIC
when intensive network traffic is going in multiple sessions on my PC.

I put the NIC in PCI slot #2 because that is away from the ATI video
board. Even though that board has a fan on it, I worry about heat.
I could also try PCI slot #1.

BTW, the cpu load at this time was 70 to 80%.

Lynn

These are new symptoms. Your computer didn't freeze or reboot.

A delayed write failure could be an actual hardware problem
at the other end. Check the Event Viewer on the server
device, to see if it logged a problem with the disk.

It could be that your computer sends traffic so fast to
the server, as to expose a problem on the server side.

If you use the ping command from your computer, and the
other computer answers, that means the network interfaces
are working. It'll be tougher to debug what is happening
to the rest of your session with the server.

Paul

 

[milleron]

OK, I got the Intel gigabit NIC to work in PCI slot #2 on my A8N-SLI
premium motherboard by disabling the Marvell LAN in the BIOS.

Duh !

Hopefully, this is a more stable situation than the Marvell LAN.

Thanks,
Lynn

What were the problems with the Marvell LAN? (I don't see the first
part of the thread for some reason. Sorry.) A lot of people are
using the Marvell adapter with no problems at all.


Ron

 

[Lynn McGuire]

These are new symptoms. Your computer didn't freeze or reboot.

A delayed write failure could be an actual hardware problem
at the other end. Check the Event Viewer on the server
device, to see if it logged a problem with the disk.

Nope. Nothing on my file server which is a dual AMD opteron 250
on a Tyan motherboard with an Intel Gigabit NOC on the motherboard.

It could be that your computer sends traffic so fast to
the server, as to expose a problem on the server side.

If you use the ping command from your computer, and the
other computer answers, that means the network interfaces
are working. It'll be tougher to debug what is happening
to the rest of your session with the server.

No joke, this is very difficult to debug. I do not have clue what to do
now.

Thanks,
Lynn

 

[Paul]

Nope. Nothing on my file server which is a dual AMD opteron 250
on a Tyan motherboard with an Intel Gigabit NOC on the motherboard.


No joke, this is very difficult to debug. I do not have clue what to do
now.

Thanks,
Lynn

A post someone just made, pointed to this thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=1664899

There is some interesting reading in that thread, concerning how
to run dual cores and get the best from (badly written) apps.

1) Control Affinity for tasks that don't play nice on your machine.
Another option, is to use a shortcut that uses "RunFirst", to
restrict execution to just one core. This option leaves both
cores running.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040528/task-assignment-01.html

2) Disable a core. There is some kind of boot option, like /onecpu ,
or perhaps there would be a BIOS option to disable a core.
This is the first example I could find in a search, and maybe
WinXP does it this way also. Disabling a core is a more extreme
form of playing with affinity. Use this if the whole system isn't
behaving the way you'd like (i.e. to prove the problem is caused
by having dual cores).

http://www.weberdev.com/PrintExample.php?count=488&mode=color

3) If you are using Cool N' Quiet, there is a hotfix from Microsoft,
that will correct "negative time" errors in games.

http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?...=article&sid=3951&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

Since you are using dual core, here is an MS hotfix for performance.
Apparently a lot of games won't run properly on X2 - in some cases
it can be fixed with affinity. In other cases, where the games
fail due to some kind of "negative time" problem, it could be
due to this:

Microsoft hotfix KB 896256 for "demand-based switching"
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=896256

Who said X2 wasn't high tech

Paul

 

[Lynn McGuire]

A post someone just made, pointed to this thread:

http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview.aspx?catid=27&threadid=1664899

Yes, that is a good amount of text on a serious problem that was
unknown to me before. Looks like time to go back to the dual
Zeons (I tried dual Opterons, they are noisy !).

There is some interesting reading in that thread, concerning how
to run dual cores and get the best from (badly written) apps.

1) Control Affinity for tasks that don't play nice on your machine.
Another option, is to use a shortcut that uses "RunFirst", to
restrict execution to just one core. This option leaves both
cores running.

http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20040528/task-assignment-01.html

Hmmm. Might should try this.

2) Disable a core. There is some kind of boot option, like /onecpu ,
or perhaps there would be a BIOS option to disable a core.
This is the first example I could find in a search, and maybe
WinXP does it this way also. Disabling a core is a more extreme
form of playing with affinity. Use this if the whole system isn't
behaving the way you'd like (i.e. to prove the problem is caused
by having dual cores).

http://www.weberdev.com/PrintExample.php?count=488&mode=color

Yuck !

3) If you are using Cool N' Quiet, there is a hotfix from Microsoft,
that will correct "negative time" errors in games.

http://www.amdzone.com/modules.php?...=article&sid=3951&mode=thread&order=0&thold=0

I have Cool N' Quiet turned off in my BIOS. Funny, this was the default
in my BIOS.

Since you are using dual core, here is an MS hotfix for performance.
Apparently a lot of games won't run properly on X2 - in some cases
it can be fixed with affinity. In other cases, where the games
fail due to some kind of "negative time" problem, it could be
due to this:

Microsoft hotfix KB 896256 for "demand-based switching"
http://support.microsoft.com/?id=896256

Bummer. A "need to know" hot fix. That really sucks. Since it is need
to know, that means that it is buggy also. You get to trade one bug for
another. I think that I will pass for now.

Who said X2 wasn't high tech

No joke !

Thanks for all the research,
Lynn