P5SD-B User’s Manual
3:
Reconfiguring Your Mainboard – 3.2
PCI Cards & Slots
With very few exceptions, any PCI expansion card you are
likely to get will be Plug an Play compliant. If you are using an
Operating System that supports PnP, such as Windows 95, you
should be able to follow the installation instructions that come
with the card and have the Operating System automatically rec-
ognize and configure the card.
The four PCI slots on the mainboard all have ‘Bus Master’
capability. For installed PCI cards to use this feature an Operat-
ing System-specific Bus Master software driver that comes with
this mainboard must be installed under your Operating System.
These drivers are located on the Support Disk. There is more
information about them later in this section.
The AGP Slot
This mainboard has one other expansion slot, the AGP or Ac-
celerated Graphics Port slot.
The AGP slot is a high-speed slot for a display card that uses
the AGP interface. The AGP design maximizes the performance
of the display card, especially for 3D operations, by providing a
high-speed interface and access to system memory for 3D ren-
dering. AGP offers a substantial performance enhancement when
compared to an equivalent display card with a PCI interface.
You set the amount of system memory available to the AGP
card in the CMOS Setup Utility’s ChipSet Features Setup section
under AGP Aperture Size.
Configuring Expansion Card Resources In CMOS Setup
The CMOS Setup Utility, which is covered in detail in Section
4: Reference Information, has a section called PNP/PCI Configu-
ration. The default settings in this section allow the Operating
System to automatically configure IRQ resources for PnP com-
pliant ISA and PCI Cards.
If you need to install a non-PnP card, you will need to config-
ure any IRQ and DMA settings manually, both on the card and
in the CMOS Setup Utility. The following three pages show how
to do this.