Just reformatted, flashed mobo bios and installed new Radeon 8500LE -- now system has intermitent "lags" -- please help

[Endarkened]

I just bought a new Radeon 8500LE from Newegg.com to replace my broken Radeon 64MB VIVO (broken because it would lock up and give strange, colored, vertical lines whenever I tried to play a game or video). So before I installed it, I decided it was time for a reformat and reinstallation of Windows 2000 -- and while I was at it, an update of my Via 4in1s and a flash to the latest motherboard BIOS. After doing all this, however, my system now "lags" for a few seconds, every 30 seconds to a minute (i.e. the mouse cursor slows way down, if I'm playing music, it "sticks" emitting an "Errrrrrr!!!!" sound -- basically anything I'm doing lags and slows way down for a few seconds). I've tried flashing it back to the 2nd newest bios and even the original version of the bios and also installing the Via 4in1s that had worked for me before -- but I still have the same problem. Here are pretty much the steps I went through when installing/flashing:

-Shutdown the ststem, removed all my PCI cards and old vid card (also blowing off some of the dust that had built up on them) and disconnected all my drives except for one CD drive and my main hdd
-Installed the new Radeon (not any of the PCI cards) and booted with the flash disk in (8kha2325.bin for my EPoX 8KHA) and proceeded to flash the bios using the Alt+F2 method and then loaded the optimized defaults.
-Rebooted with my Windows 2000 system disks, deleted the partition on my main drive, formatted in NTFS, and installed Win2k from CD.
-(with all the follwing installations, I reboot between each one)
-Installed latest Via 4in1s (version 4.43) and also the USB filter patch
-installed windows service pack 3 (had previously been running 2)
-installed directx 8.1
-installed latest Radeon Catalyst drivers version 2.3
-individually installed each pci card that I had removed (sound card, NIC, and ATA100 controller card -- with latest drivers in each case)
-moved main drive and secondary drive to controller card (each on their own cable) and tertiary drive plus dvd, cd drive, and cd-rw drive to mobo controller
-installed latest mouse drives
-installed tweakui, startup control, and RegClean
-installed and ran Norton SystemWorks 2002
-defragged main hdd

It was around this time that I started taking more notice of the fact that my mouse cursor would frequently lag -- I then tried playing music and was greeted with the same slow down. I then tried uninstalling the Via 4in1s and USB filter patch -- installing the ones I had used before (version 4.38) instead. That didn't help, so I tried flashing the the motherboard bios to the 2nd newest version, and then the 2nd oldest version (what I had been running previously) -- still the same problems. I've noticed that when the lag occurs, my CPU usage jumps from ~1% to ~10%. I'm really worried now and am thinking about reformatting again and going through the installation process again, to see if that might make a difference. If you have any ideas or advice about what might be causing this and what I could do to fix it, that would be greatly appreciated. Here's my system as it stands right now -- nothing overclocked:

Black 19" IBM G96 monitor @ 1280x1024x32
Black Fong Kai FK-320 Super Mid-Tower case
1.33 GHz AMD Athlon processor
EPoX 8KHA (Via KT266 chipset) motherboard
512MB Crucial DDR memory
ATI Radeon 8500LE 64MB DDR video card
IBM 60GXP Deskstar 40GB hard drive
Maxtor 7200 RPM 60GB hard drive
Seagate 8GB hard Drive
Black EPO 54x CD-ROM drive
Black Samsung SD-616 16x/48x DVD drive
Silver Philips PCRW1208 12x8x36 CD writer
Hercules Fortissimo II sound card
Logitech Z-560 THX 4.1 400W speakers
Windows 2000 Pro

Thank you for your time,

~EnDarkEnd


*edit* -- also just noticed that my vid card, sound card, controller card, usb controller, and NIC are all on IRQ 11... That seems very odd, as they didn't share like that on my system before (and they are in the same slots as before). Could this cause the problem I'm describing? Does this mean I need to play hopscotch with my pci cards, or is there an easy way to change them either through windows or the bios?

 

[boyRacer]

It's a setting in your BIOS... i remember a thread about this "lag" thing... just don't remember who and what they did about it... i know it's something about the PCI bus getting oversaturated or something like that... sorry not that much help here.

 

[bacillus]

also just noticed that my vid card, sound card, controller card, usb controller, and NIC are all on IRQ 11

that normal for win2k & xp.
you can install without ACPI by hitting F5 at start of install when you're asked for any raid or scsi drivers & choose standard pc!
don't know if it would help in your case or not!

 

[BennyD]

i had the some problem a while ago, turns out it was my hard drive

when i booted and checked it would be at ata mode 5 but when i played a game it would slowly get more and more error and would be reverted back to PIO mode

try running hdTach and seeing if it's a hd problem

maybe try something like "load failsafe settings" in bios?

 

[Endarkened]

Through some testing I found that it is an IRQ conflict after all. Basically, my controller card needs to be on an IRQ of it's own (the lag occurs whenever it's sharing with anything). How would I go about manually setting the IRQ for it? No matter what PCI slot I install it in, it is always placed on IRQ 11. Can I set this through Win2k, or would it be in my bios? Thanks for the ideas, they are appreciated.

~EnDarkEnd