The bad news about Gigabyte P35-DS3R

Neutron · Post by **Neutron** » Fri May 02, 2008 6:43 pm

Well i thought i was lucky to get this board with 3 PCI slots, its nice and fast, really nicely made (in Taiwan not china) has the solid capacitors, cool power section etc etc.

well i was getting a few crashes when i was using USB, only for midi not audio, blue screens about evenly divided between scope.sys and usbhub.sys or other usb drivers. when there is no critical USB going on its totally stable with scope. but i have so much stuff with USB now, theres no escape really if you have outboard gear.

editors, vst helper apps MIDI interfaces etc etc.

So i thought i would be clever and disable all the USB ports and get a PCI-E USB adapter.
Nope, PCI-E shares all the IRQs as well only 1 of the PCI slots is free from all the other motherboard stuff, besides the USB, they also share with the SATA controllers. just like the boards native USB ports.

I had previously had a Supermicro C2SBE which was good, but Ii accidentally killed it

Thing is the supermicro has the SAME chipset (ICH9 but without "R") and they managed to build the BIOS so ALL the PCI slots are apart from everything on the board. so the way it works must be a decision of someone at Gigabyte.

Anyways im off to ebay, unfortunately im going to have to run 2 machines again. 1 for scope (supermicro) and the gigabyte for sequencer and about a zillion USB ports!

Can anyone reccomend a PCI card with an ADAT port?

Post by **garyb** » Fri May 02, 2008 6:59 pm

rme.

is it a bad motherboard, or a bad design?

if you only need 3 pci slots, the intel dp35dp works.

Neutron · Post by **Neutron** » Fri May 02, 2008 7:06 pm

its a great motherboard just not for scope. does the dp35dp show all 3 slots The same IRQ, or at leas on IRQ nothing else uses?

Post by **garyb** » Fri May 02, 2008 7:09 pm

if you only need 3 pci slots, the intel dp35dp works.

you would have to disable a few things, of course...

pollux · Post by **pollux** » Sat May 03, 2008 4:33 am

Must be something on the bloody "R" chipset.. Probably the RAID functions.

Just got a DFI Lanparty X38 with the ICH9R chip too, and I have the same IRQ sharing issues.. even after disabling all the USB ports I can only get two SCOPE cards to work, the third one with a "cannot start device (code 10)" message..

I found the supermicros in some stores.. will give them a try...

edit: Maybe disabling the ICH9R's RAID and using an adaptec RAID card instead could help?? I'll try that this weekend

dbmac · Post by **dbmac** » Sat May 03, 2008 4:51 am

Neutron, I'm using intel dp35dp with 3 cards - 2 scope & a pulsar srb.
2 of the PCI slots share IRQs and one is unshared. I put my main I/O Scope in the unshared (middle) slot, set it as "board 0" in cset.ini and left the other 2 cards sharing IRQs.
I've got 5 USB devices including CME UF keyboard, 2 other midi controllers and 2 dongles.
Scope 4.5 is working beautifully in this setup at lowest ulli, no midi glitches.

/dave

Post by **garyb** » Sat May 03, 2008 12:40 pm

dbmac wrote:Neutron, I'm using intel dp35dp with 3 cards - 2 scope & a pulsar srb.
2 of the PCI slots share IRQs and one is unshared. I put my main I/O Scope in the unshared (middle) slot, set it as "board 0" in cset.ini and left the other 2 cards sharing IRQs.
I've got 5 USB devices including CME UF keyboard, 2 other midi controllers and 2 dongles.
Scope 4.5 is working beautifully in this setup at lowest ulli, no midi glitches.

/dave

as i said, this board works(as intel boards alomost ALWAYS do).