Eli Brandt wrote:
> 
> A. Archias wrote:
> > A friend at work had a PCI SB clone who said the
> > audio sometimes broke up as his video (PCI) card and clone were competing for
> > resources.
> 
> A badly-behaved PCI card (aggressively-driven video cards are
> notorious for this) will screw anything else on the PCI bus --
> including the ISA bus and everything hanging off it.
Here in Conservatorio "S.Cecilia" we have a new PC (Pentium II 300 MHz)
with an ATI RAGE PCI video card and a Korg 1212 PCI audio card, and we
experienced the same beheving: an interruption of audio data flow with
an "Excessive activity on PCI bus" message. Some video card allow a
different configuration (i.e. Matrox Mystique), but this is a known
problem. May be an AGP video card will do better?

Riccardo

-- 

Riccardo Bianchini, Professor
Scuola di Musica Elettronica
Conservatorio "S.Cecilia", Roma (Italy)
http://www.geocities.com/Heartland/Acres/4768

Riccardo Bianchini wrote:
> Here in Conservatorio "S.Cecilia" we have a new PC (Pentium II 300 MHz)
> with an ATI RAGE PCI video card and a Korg 1212 PCI audio card, and we
> experienced the same beheving: an interruption of audio data flow with
> an "Excessive activity on PCI bus" message. Some video card allow a
> different configuration (i.e. Matrox Mystique), but this is a known
> problem. May be an AGP video card will do better?

Probably not -- AGP is the same as PCI as far as bus protocol is
concerned.  More-polite drivers are the key.

If your card is doing this and the manufacturer is of no help, talk to
Greg Hanssen, who has done a lot to bring this problem to light.
At the least, he can document the problem:
http://www.zefiro.com/vgakills.txt

-- 
     Eli Brandt  |  eli+@cs.cmu.edu  |  http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~eli/