First post, by Boohyaka
- Rank
- Oldbie
Hi all,
I now have a cool flat AT case I really like, that includes an ISA riser for horizontal setup of cards.
My understanding of ISA risers was that they were pretty simple and straightforward - just adds new slots sharing the existing ISA bus. The ISA riser card has 3x 16 bits slots on one side and 2x 16 bits slot on the other.
My problem is I'm facing a lot of instability when using the riser, compared to exactly the same setup without the riser and the cards directly in the motherboard's ISA slots. I used some contact cleaner then IPA on all slots and pins, tested continuity on all pins, etc.. and everything seems in order.
By instability I mean:
- VGA card regularly boots in black&white on a good known working CRT. For some reason, does not happen on a Dell LCD on my test bench or at least I wasn't able to reproduce it. Maybe an issue with the card itself, but I doubt it as it doesn't seem to happen if I plug the card directly to the mobo. Seems random, and will work again after rebooting, sometimes several times.
- FastTracker2 crashes with a "General protection fault" a couple of seconds after the interface is loaded, every single time when using the riser.
- Games either do not load, or have garbled graphics or other issues, and/or crash a few seconds after loading.
Again, everything works fine and none of these symptoms happen at all when all the same cards are in the mobo directly instead of the ISA riser...
Any hints or tips on using these ISA riser cards? Some "rules" I may have overlooked, or suggestions to troubleshoot?