This is my first venture into these waters, so apologies in advance for any infringement of protocols. Try to be nice with your corrections.

Quick system summary: Athlon XP 2500+; Asus A7V8X-X mobo (VT8377,VT8235);PC2700,512Mb;Radeon 9200se,128Mb;Debian 3.1 'sarge'

My problem is that i can't configure much of anything, & i suspect this is because most of the IRQ's are not where they're expected to be. Running lspci, lshw, 'cat /proc/interrupts' &/or hitting pause during POST all show that LAN is where sound should be, sound is where USB should be, USB is where AGP should be, &... well, who needs AGP anyway?

Do i have a faulty board here, or am i fixating on a problem that can be worked around? Similar threads seem to indicate that a workaround should be possible, but not for AGP, as it has no IRQ assigned.

Asus (when i eventually got hold of them!) gave me the Pilate routine - "Oh, you're a Linux user..?".

I'm considering changing the board & chipset (recommendations welcome), one option being the Gigabyte 7S748-L. Googling for 'a7v8x-x problem' generates 7,500 hits; '7s748-l problem', 234 hits... Coincidence, obviously.

Your collective insight would be most appreciated. I have a wealth of data on this subject, although uploading it from my local library might be awkward...

Welcome to LQ, talpan67. After reading your post, I'll apologize but I do not understand exactly what issue you are facing. Is the machine not booting up, are you encountering a video or audio problem, are you having a problem with a USB device, etc. Can you post the specific error messages you get, or describe in more detail exactly what you are trying to do? -- J.W.

Thanks for your diplomacy, J.W. As a newbie, the fear of providing too much unnecessary data is just as great as providing not enough.

Anyway, i seem to have solved my problem, or at least gotten to a workable situation. I'm gonna give a summary of my tale, in case it might provide clues to anyone with similar issues.

What i had was a newly built system which, although working, wasn't doing so to it's design potential. I believed this to be because of incorrect IRQ assignments for the onboard PCI components. They were as follows:-

LAN - should be at 9; was at 3.
Sound - should be at 5; was at 10.
USB - should be at 3 &/or 10; was at 11.
AGP - should be at 11; has no assignment.

As i said, it worked, but video performance was down by about 25%, & i had constant conflict messages at boot - "irq routing conflict for 00:10.0, have irq 11, want irq 3".

Well, it's not very scientific, but i flashed the BIOS, cleared CMOS, & reset ESCD. Now i have:-

LAN - should be at 9; was at 3; now at 5.
Sound - should be at 5; was at 10; now at 3.
USB - should be at 3 &/or 10; was at 11; now at 10.
AGP - should be at 11; was unassigned; now at 11!

I still get the boot-time conflict messages, but i can resolve that by exlicitly pointing to everything. It's not perfect, but it's workable...

On my odyssey to this position, i've learned a great deal about my system, though perhaps not enough. So if anyone has questions about this board, or these problems, feel free to contact me, & if i can help i will.

Congrats on both solving the problem, and also following up on your first post. Thanks -- J.W.