< Back to OSY 1.0 thread list

OSY 1.0 Thread Viewer

Thread #: 1208

What the hell is a DMA or an IRQ???

Madan

Tue Nov 27 23:16:30 2001

Eh?
AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Wed Nov 28 00:05:12 2001

DMA, Direct Memory Access.

IRQ, Interrupt Request.

DMA allows disks to be accessed without the direct control of the CPU ( I believe, It's been awhile ) DMA allows for better disk/system performance.

An interrupt request is a list of numbers you can see in the device manager in windows.  These numbers have to do with arbitrating priority on the various busses (PCI, Greyhound, etc)

someone correct me if I'm full of shite, as it's been a looooooooooooooong time.

Madan

Wed Nov 28 01:39:25 2001

Oh mighty hardware badass, is either something I need to know in order to fiddle wi computer innards
on a regular basis?

M.

DeAthe

Wed Nov 28 01:41:18 2001

Mad: If your using Dos, Yea, you'll need to know them. But most modern OS's have ACPI built into them, really lowering the needs to manually twiddle around with them.

Don't sweat it, until you need to know, then ask the geeks.

pauli

Wed Nov 28 02:06:28 2001

if all your hardware is fully compliant with the current pci spec, irq's are 100% irrelevant (if you've got acpi turned on). as for dma, it should be on by default, but often isn't.
AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Wed Nov 28 04:25:22 2001

indeed.
Imitation Gruel

Wed Nov 28 04:33:08 2001

In my experience, DMA is most often disabled in Via's POSD* chipsets. You can get out of this by sticking with Intel chipsets, but this means you will be limited to Intel processors.

Normally this is fine, but for now AMD makes the highest performance PC microprocessors around. This may or may not change with the evolution of the P7 uarch. and the eventual release of K8 (Hammer).

(Edited by Imitation Gruel at 8:33 pm on Nov. 27, 2001)

Imitation Gruel

Wed Nov 28 04:34:42 2001

*: Pile Of Steaming Dogshit
Imitation Gruel

Wed Nov 28 04:35:06 2001

Consider yourselves informed.
pauli

Wed Nov 28 04:36:57 2001

You can get out of this by sticking with Intel chipsets, but this means you will be limited to Intel processors.

you seem to have ignored the powerhouse via c3! surely you will correct this slight ;)

Imitation Gruel

Wed Nov 28 04:41:21 2001

you seem to have ignored the powerhouse via c3! surely you will correct this slight

Oh yes, the almighty C3 :rolleyes: :oyvey: :rolleyes:. We musn't forget it.

Please. The only reason to use a C3 is if you're setting up a fileserver or something you don't want to hear; and even then an underclocked Celeron with a heatsink will do fine. Anything else and it's fucking useless because it's performance isn't worth the stained toilet paper it's fabbed on.

(Edited by Imitation Gruel at 8:42 pm on Nov. 27, 2001)

Riso

Wed Nov 28 14:49:46 2001

The C3 is quite impressive.

It doesnt need any cooler at all.

OscarWilde

Wed Nov 28 17:28:41 2001

heh! believe me... you don't even know half the hell that most of us 'experienced' pc folks had to deal with a long long long time ago.
The worse is when you have a combination of cards where and you got a limited choice of IRQ's for some of them. Then even worse is getting the drivers to find the fucking device. Even worse is when a game is written to accept drivers with standard IRQ settings.

HOLY SHIT THIS BRINGS BACK MEMORIES!!!!!!!

Macs are TONS EASIER TO SET UP!!!!!

off course PC's are finally getting better with the hardware stuff, but macs are still better at it then PC in my experience. keep in mind that the margin is very slim however, enough that the pc is looking more and more a viable choice for my future home pc.
unless of course the G5 comes out and rapes the x86 offerings!

muhahahahahahahaha!!!

AllYorBaseRBelong2Us

Wed Nov 28 17:30:49 2001

That was the mighty ISA bus.

You couldn't share resources unlike PCI.

OscarWilde

Wed Nov 28 17:56:32 2001

yes but even PCI was a bitch. Some bios's would hog up all the IRQ's and you'd be stuck with nothing for the ISA cards.
off course then you could set some IRQ's aside for the ISA cards.

Heh! off course the stupid shit was when you moved a PCI card to another PCI slot in the same computer and then upon reboot windows tells you that you have new hardware.

ITS THE SAME FUCKING HARDWARE BUT WITH A DIFFERENT ADDRESS!!!!

So off course, re-install the software. Restart.


Actually my worse experiences were with Sound Blaster cards. Man did I hate those cards. Such a fucking bitch.

I found it ironical that the other sound cards worked better via sound blaster compatible drivers then the SB cards themselves did.

ha ha ha!!!!

The best sound cards at the time were the Ultrasound cards from Gravis. My last PC sound card was a Ultrasound Gravix Max with 8megs of memory... man i was cruising the future while fucktard lemmings were being raped up the ass from Creative.

hence also why i hate the lemming mentality. Creative got to big and rich for the worse of the audio industry. Especially in terms of MIDI.

Man i hated FM synthesis. Thats why i got the Ultrasound cards with the wavetables that were on the harddrive which were then uploaded to the onboard memory. 512k for the original ultrasound card (IIRC). Wavetable KICKED ASS!!! playing games were a completely different experience.

Even when Wavetables become more mainstream it took the rest of the audio industry, along with creative to even come close to the quality that i had with my Gravis cards.

Then again the Gravis cards were expensive.

Thats why i feel sorry when mac users were happy that they were finally getting the Sound Blaster, when they have no idea that the SB is a crappy card.