StarTech PCI express to PCI adapter works in my X1000

[ddni]

Can I ask what the official Amigakit warranty position is on making these changes to the X1000?

[AmigaDave]

calgor,

Glad you found success! I also have my Catweasel working (with SID chips) in my X1000 now, with a 3.5" floppy.

I have my StarTech adapter in the upper PCIe 1X slot (closest to CPU) and that is the only one I tried it in. It worked straight away on first bootup afterward, so no futher fiddling on my part. I've got my slots pretty well loaded right now, with little room for adding anything else except maybe something in the Xorro slot.

Here's what I have in order from top to bottom:

PowerColor RadeonHD 6850 (single-slot card, same as written about by Trevor)

StarTech PCIe to PCI adapter with ethernet card

GigaByte RadeonHD 5770 (takes up two slots of space, so blocks next PCIe 1X slot)

Xorro slot empty (so there's antoher PCIe 1X socket inline here???)

Catweasel MkIV in PCI slot

SoundBlaster in PCI slot

Everything works. I have two displays going so right now I am looking at DOpus on one screen and MUIOWB on this one.

What I couldn't get going is three screens (with 9250 in PCI slot) though I followed Hans' suggestions when I tried. Not sure I will pursue this given that speed of Blender interface with wazp on the 6850 seems comparable to me to speed of Blender interface using warp on the 9250. In other words it's not as fast as I would like on either, but I expect we will get there eventually. Favoring warp on the 9250 is that I can see particles in my animations with that, and I cannot see particles without rendering on the RadeonHD card. Besides, the Catweasel is happy. Always good to keep your catweasels content.

Great work Mike in finding a solution to freeing up a PCI slot.

I thought you wanted a free slot so you could use a video card that has 3D support within OS4.x, more than wanting to use your Catweasel card, but it is nice to read that you are having success with the current Catweasel drivers.

I hope A-Eon and/or Hyperion will soon be able to finish the drivers for the onboard sound and Ethernet components to free up both of those PCI slots, so I can use my Catweasel Mk4 card and a second video card which has 3D support in OS4.x to play some games that are currently unplayable on a stock X1000 computer.

I have to make a trip North for my younger Son the first week of August, but getting one of these adapters you mentioned and a 3D supported video card will both be high on my priority list when I get back. I will be calling you on Skype then and picking your brain on all of the progress you have made with your X1000 in the last couple of weeks, plus more progress I am sure you will make in the next 10 days to two weeks.

Thanks for figuring out this solution for all X1000 owners.

[mbrantley]

Hey, David.... still happy to confab with you on this stuff via Skype whenever you are ready. I may pull out the Catweasel and do some more testing with the 9250 video card in its place. I don't play games at all, so my only interest in 3D support at the present is for Blender. And early testing in my system showed the Blender interface to be just about as responsive with the 9250 card and real 3D in my X1000 as running the program on my Radeon HD 6850 card and relying on wazp. In other words, it's not as fast as I want in any case, so a bit of a wash. Major difference is that with the 9250 I can see little things like particles animated in the wireframe as I work, but with Wazp they do not show up in the wireframe at all. Of course they are there at render time in either case.

[musa]

I bought a StarTech PCI Express to PCI adapter from Amazon and I'm happy to report it works well in my X1000. I am using it for the small PCI ethernet card (large PCI cards won't work with this adapter probably just because of their size), and the ethernet card is totally functional with no additional drivers required.

This frees a legacy PCI slot in my X1000 so that I may install either my CatWeasel Mark IV or my ATI Radeon 9250 graphics card and still have sound and ethernet under the present arrangement.

Was your network card online after reboot without changing anything in your netvorks configuration ?
Have just tested the same pci adapter card as yours unsuccessfully.
Have tested all the slots that were possible, without being able to get my network card online.
Have for a time given up trying to put my extra graphics card in because I do not want to do without sound or network cards.
Peter

[mbrantley]

musa, I am so sorry you are having trouble. Yes, I rebooted after installing the adapter with the ethernet card in it and changed no settings whatsoever. I was simply online as if I had not moved the ethernet card at all. The adapter is in the 1X PCIe slot closest to the CPU. I have not tried it in another since it worked in this first place. Did your adapter have a molex power connector attached? Did you connect this to power?

[trevordick]

My adapter (unmarked generic model) also holds the Ethernet card and I have mine in the lowest PCIe 1x slot (furthest away from the CPU). It also has a PSU connector (which I have connected). It also worked out of the box for me. Ahem... once I gathered courage to actually install it.

TrevorD

[musa]

musa, I am so sorry you are having trouble. Yes, I rebooted after installing the adapter with the ethernet card in it and changed no settings whatsoever. I was simply online as if I had not moved the ethernet card at all. The adapter is in the 1X PCIe slot closest to the CPU. I have not tried it in another since it worked in this first place. Did your adapter have a molex power connector attached? Did you connect this to power?

@mbrantley
@trevordick
Thanks for the reply.
i just try ones more.
It is very strange. When my network card is in the pci adapter, I can see my network card in Ranger but my network remains down. So I move the network card back to the pci slot and after the boot is my network up again. I think there's a bug in pci adapter. : (
yes i have connect the power connector.

[musa]

Hi
After replacing my PCI Express PCI adapter with a new one, I got it to work. Network card started up in the fly and a ping showed that there was a hole through my network to my router.
So I began to follow the setup wizard for 2 graphics cards. Everything went fine apart from that my radeon 9250 does corrupt graphics.
Is there someone there has an idea of ​​what could be wrong? See attached photo.
I certainly not have luck with this project

screen1.jpg (37.65 KiB) Viewed 13251 times

[Calgor]

Hi
After replacing my PCI Express PCI adapter with a new one, I got it to work. Network card started up in the fly and a ping showed that there was a hole through my network to my router.
So I began to follow the setup wizard for 2 graphics cards. Everything went fine apart from that my radeon 9250 does corrupt graphics.

musa,

Sorry to hear your troubles. As I stated in my earlier post, these cards are notorious for incompatibilties with many (PC) motherboards. Interesting that your first one didn't work but the second one did. I have 2 of these StarTech cards and they both worked the same for me in the slots that I tried. To give you the exact model network card I used in the PCIe slot 1 removed from the PCI slots, it is a TP-LINK TG-3239DL PCI (Realtek RTL8139D) which I picked up brand new for only $10 and the build quality looks quite good. I am not aware if these PCIe-PCI adapters are all created identical (I would have thought so), or whether it is our different PCI network cards, or the different configurations/cards of our X1000s.

I do not have a Radeon 9250 in my X1000 config to test, but my catweasel and sound card in the 2 PCI slots both worked fine in OS4 with no problems I could find. Hopefully someone with a config more similar to yours can suggest.

I hope you can confirm whether the Radeon 9250 works perfectly if the adapter with network card is not installed in the machine - if this is the case, then the adapter is doing something resulting in a problem with the Radeon card.