I've a Matsonic MS8308E m/b with AMI bios (correct date according to the Matsonic web-site) which has a 128Mb Crucial PC133 CL2 DIMM and I was wondering if there was a setting the the BIOS to take advantage of the reduced CAS latency (I've set the memory speed to PC133 and tried the Best Performance BIOS setting, but that just set the memory speed back to PC100). Also, I've put a Firewire/IEEE1394 card in the 2nd PCI slot and wondered if I could change it to use IRQ9 (free) rather than IRQ5 (shared). I'm using an old Riva TNT card (AGP) -- also on IRQ5 -- with active cooling (heatsink and fan) so can't use the first PCI slot.

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), August 16, 2001

Answers

A quick update. The Matsonic web site lists 27/2/2001 as the date on the latest BIOS, but mine quotes 8/3/2001. The full BIOS string is: 62-0308-001437-00101111-071595-SiS730S-MS8308E-H The BIOS screens look like the ones in the m/b manual so I guess it's not missing any settings. Perhaps I'll just have to live with whatever it decides to give me.

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), August 17, 2001.

I too have a board which assigns all hardware to irq 5 (siemens d1170) in order to set specific irqs to specific hardware i had to adustt the int# settings in bios from auto to the irq i wanted. this should solve your problem. I have no experience of the board you are using but most bios' have a cas latency setting that is a adjustable

-- Neil Birchall (kameleon@barrysworld.co.uk), September 06, 2001.

I'm fairly sure there is nowhere in the BIOS to alter memory timings or IRQ settings. It's not documented that this can be done either in the manual or on the Matsonic web-site. Given the target market for the board it's possible AMI took out all the useful bits to stop the OEMs getting calls from customers who'd tried tweaking the settings and broken their systems.

-- Andrew Edney (andrew.edney@virgin.net), September 06, 2001.

You should still get along alright sharing the same icq my pc shared every device i had with irq 5 and it works fine

-- neil birchall (kameleon@barrysworld.co.uk), September 07, 2001.