Does it matter how you arrange your PCI cards?

R

Rob94hawk

2[H]4U
Joined
Jul 20, 2002
Messages
2,222
On my old BX mobo I'm going to add a SATA PCI card. Does it matter which goes in the 1st top PCI slot or is it irrelevant?

From top to bottom I was going to arrange them like this: SATA card, 10/100 Ethernet card, sound card. Thanx
 
Some legacy PCI cards care, but for the most part, IRQ conflicts are a thing of the past.

Try it, and if it you experience problems, change the order.
 
It shouldn't matter with pci cards. Doesn't your motherboard come with onboard lan? Are you adding a second lan card?
 
I'd go with Filter on that one! Paul's FAQ over at Sudian.com has a diagram of the routing of the PCI slots and how they are interconnected, IRQ-wise. The first slot, nest to the AGP may be overloading the buss, and hurt the frame rates.
 
It doesn't really matter what order you put them in, but I build mine with the more critical or bandwidth consuming cards closer to the top of the board, which is the same arrangement you've chosen. I really doubt it matters but I do this so that the traces from the slot to the northbridge/CPU/RAM are shorter. I do leave a slot or two open between them and the AGP video card especially on newer cards so that they have space for air to move around the GPU heatsink.
 
Originally posted by tdg
I do leave a slot or two open between them and the AGP video card especially on newer cards so that they have space for air to move around the GPU heatsink.
Click to expand...

That's the way I have it now although the Radeon 7000 that I have does not have a heatsink.
 
Originally posted by Whatsisname
lol 1/2 of my computers have nothing in any of the slots lololol
Click to expand...

I've got one slot available on my Matrox Machine, I want to keep that open since the editing card gets a bit warm.
matrox.jpg

matrox2.jpg
 
Wow, that's a huge mess of cables you have there.

It seems you have one FDD device, but a cable to hold 7 :p

You need some zip ties and stick-down straps for sure and your temps. should drop some.
 
are those rounded cables any good? I heard something about them not being good. I bought 2 of them used the one you see in the pic to hook up the 160gig drive. I've only had the drive for a day and did a little testing with the Matrox to see if it captures ok, and it worked great.
Also, one of the SCSI hard drives is coming out and going into a SCSI box I borrowed from my little brother, so that should clean it up a little bit.

The floopy cable is coming out since I only use the floppy once in awhile and that's usually to flash a BIOS, which I had to do for the Promise Ultra100 card to read my 160gig drive.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top