I seem to recall reading somewhere (a review of one of the first
Intel 440BX-based motherboards designed with more than 4 PCI
slots; I don't remember which one) where the reviewer mentioned
that due to limitations in the chipset, only 4 IRQs were
available among the 5 PCI slots. This meant that unless the
designers added more hardware, any board using this chipset that
had more than 4 PCI slots would have to end up with some of the
slots sharing IRQs.
Unfortunately, I don't have my BP6 v1.0 manual handy right now,
but I seem to recall that it does mention that it was an
"experimental" board due to the implementation of dual PGA-370
CPU sockets; if I'm not mistaken, at the time only Celerons were
available in the PGA-370 format, and Intel told everybody that
Celerons were not capable of operating in anything other than a
single-processor environment.
I'm also reasonably sure that there was mention of the shared
IRQ situation for the PCI slots (AGP/PCI-1, HPT366/PCI-3, and
PCI-4/PCI-5 all share IRQs), although I could certainly be
mistaken.
All in all, I ended up less than pleased with my BP6; just
recently, it appears that the keyboard controller flaked out on
it. I had it on a KVM switch, and it was locking the switch up
on an increasingly frequent basis. I finally figured out it
was the BP6 and not the switch by plugging in a keyboard; the
LEDs on the keyboard were pulsing when I did, and nothing I
could do would make a difference. I've been thinking about
getting a USB keyboard; I might try that just to see if it was
simply the keyboard controller chip that went rather than the
board itself.
In any case, the BP6 has been the least reliable of the Abit
products I've owned, and I've had several of their boards
(IT5H, AX5, BH6, BP6, and finally the BX133). All of the
other boards have run both Windows and Linux just fine, so for
the moment I'm willing to put the BP6 down as a failed (or, at
the very least, a less-than-successful) attempt to push the
envelope for low-cost SMP solutions.
Vidiot wrote:
>
> >My message was warning about a design "feature" of the board that
> >limits the total number of bus mastering boards in PCI slots 4 and 5
> >to one. This was not explained at all in my manual, and needs to be
> >made very clear to all who might try to sonfigure a BP6 system.
> >
> >Hugh Redelmeier
>
> It is plain as day on page 1-4 of the BP6 manual. My version is Rev 1.01.
> It is the 2nd bulleted item on the page.
>
> MB
> --
> e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Bart: Hey, why is it destroying other toys? Lisa: They must have
> programmed it to eliminate the competition. Bart: You mean like
> Microsoft? Lisa: Exactly. [The Simpsons - 12/18/99]
> Visit - URL:http://www.vidiot.com/ (Your link to Star Trek and UPN)
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