Selectadock III + ATI 3D Rage II = SUCCESS!!!

[Lomax]

Just wanted to let those who may be interested know that I've managed to get an ATI PCI graphics card to work perfectly in my Selectadock. At first the laptop (600X) wouldn't detect the external monitor at all although the device manager said the PCI graphics card was working properly. The solution was to diasble "Quick Boot" in the BIOS and it now works very well at 1280x1024x24bits.

HTH,

Lomax

[Lomax]

After some further testing I have noticed that video performance is not very good. Although I wasn't expecting blistering performance thanks to the PCI bridge bottleneck but it's so slow that I cannot play full screen video on the external monitor.

It's good enough for development work though which wil be the main use for the machine but not being able to play videos is annoying. Are there any things I can try to speed things up a little? For instance, it seems the PCI card hasn't been assigned an IRQ?

Lomax

[pkiff]

There does seem to be a bottleneck on the PCI bridge that is especially bad on the SelectaDock III. But having said that, you should still be able to get pretty good graphics and video performance if you have the right video card installed successfully.

I don't know much about the ATI 3D Rage II, but there are other video cards that will work in a 600X/SelectaDock III configuration:
Unofficial Graphics Card Compatibility List

Thanks for letting us know about the successful install of the ATI 3D Rage II. I'll add a note about the compatibility of that specific card to the list above.

For instance, it seems the PCI card hasn't been assigned an IRQ?

This will depend somewhat on your OS.

Under 98SE, I would recommend manually adjusting the IRQs that are assigned to the docking station PCI by using the ThinkPad Configuration utility to assign additional IRQs. These can be tweaked through the "Docking Station" menu by adjusting the order of the assignments until you find a sequence that results in your video card being assigned a separate IRQ without any other devices other than "PCI Steering".

Under XP, all the IRQ assignments are handled through the OS in a standard, ACPI installation. This is normally best left alone though it may appear as though your video card shares the same IRQ as a dozen other devices.

Phil.

[Lomax]

Thanks for your reply Phil! So you think I should get better video performance with another graphics card? I'm not expecting blistering performance and 3D capabilities are irrelevant to me (if I wanted to play 3D games a TP 600X would hardly be the machine of choice!) but it would be nice to be able to watch movies. Has anyone acheived this level of 2D performance with a PCI graphics card in the SelectaDock?

The IRQ issue is interesting, the PCI card currently has no IRQ listed in device manager, only the following resources are in use:

Memory Range A8000000 - A8FFFFFF
Input/Output Range 9000 - 90FF
Memory Range A9000000 - A9000FFF
Input/Output Range 03B0 - 03BB
Input/Output Range 03C0 - 03DF
Memory Range 000A0000 - 000BFFFF

Due to ACPI the "Docking Station" settings are all greyed out? 1st IRQ is set to 11and I cannot assign additional IRQs. Strangely, the green "LED" next to the Docking Station icon in ThinkPad Configuration is not lit. Under Add-on Devices in TP Configuration I see the ATI 3D Rage II and the NIC (which appears twice, both as device 2 and device 3, both with IRQ 9).

Apart from the graphics card the only other device in use in the dock is a PCI NIC and the USB ports - both of which work perfectly. I have disabled the dock's IDE, CardBus and SCSI for the time being.

Also, when I dock the machine the built in NeoMagic graphics are disabled and device manager tells me no resources can be freed up for it. There are no PCMCIA devices installed.

Many thanks for your help and a happy new year to everyone!

Lomax

Edit: I should perhaps add that I'm running Windows 2000 SP4...