Video card sharing an IRQ, problem?

[V-ism]

I've been having a nagging problem of 3d games crashing on me, I tried so many things to fix it, but I can't figure it out. I just noticed that the video card (Geforce 6600GT) is sharing an IRQ with my network adapter (onboard). Could this be the source of the problem?

 

[SynthDude2001]

Usually in Windows 2000/XP there will be several IRQ sharing situations in a computer - this has never caused a problem for me before, although it's not outside of the realm of possibility I suppose. The easy thing to try if you want to test that, assuming the onboard NIC is the only thing sharing an IRQ with the video card, is to just disable the NIC temporarily in the BIOS, and seeing if you still get the problems/crashing.

 

[tungtung]

In most cases this should not pose any problem ... however do as SynthDude2001 says ... disable your onboard NIC and give it a try ... then again in most cases this should make no difference ... on my system the video card, network card and USB shares the same IRQ and so far I have not experience any serious problem at all ...

 

[V-ism]

Yeah, I thought it shouldn't really be a problem. The other thing is the games that have crashed/freezed on me are all online games. MMORPGs actually. My board has another onboard NIC so I'l enable that and see which IRQ it takes.

 

[tungtung]

V-ism ... well if only MMORPGs that crashes your machine, then I would say the problem is most likely that IRQ sharing ... just for your information those games really generate a lot of network activities

So if you have another onboard NIC try that one then ... the other option, in the BIOS there is usually an option to force the system to reallocate IRQ's ... unfortunately, I just can't remember what it was called though ... something like force DPMI update or something, but it's usually located in the PnP setting in the BIOS ... might want to give that a try ... the drawback is that this could actually cause your NIC or video card sharing IRQ with some other part of your system ... though in most cases this will only change the IRQ that is used (ie. not resolve the IRQ sharing problem)

Another option you might want to try is updating the driver for both the NIC and video card ...

In worst case scenario, you can always just bite the bullet and get a PCI NIC

 

[V-ism]

Welp, did the IRQ thing and games still crash. I don't know what else it could be. I guess my last resort is to format and see if it fixes anything.