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UAD Compatibility
UAD Motherboard Compatibility Issues

Listed below are all currently known PC motherboard compatibility issues with the UAD. No other hardware issues are known at this time. For information on PC software issues, please review:



Specific Motherboard Information

Dell Inspiron 530 systems with UAD cards

Symptom: System won't boot (blue screen) when UAD card is installed.

  • The Dell Inspiron 530 delivers a blue screen with an error and will not boot with any UAD card installed. The error occurs regardless of the slot used. The motherboard bios cannot be updated due to the OEM arrangement with Dell.


Intel 925 based chipset with UAD-1e PCI Express card

Symptom: System won't boot when UAD-1e is installed, or Plug-and-Play driver installation fails.

  • No known workaround
  • Use any newer motherboard as an alternative
  • Issues do not exist with UAD-1 PCI card


AMD Dual-Core CPU (Athlon X2/Opteron) with NVIDIA nForce4 / nForce3 based chipset

Symptom: Choppy Audio, CPU spiking.

  • Systems may work fine with PCIe audio I/O device
    (or FireWire device connected to PCIe>FireWire adapter)
  • UAD-1 works via Magma expansion chassis
  • Use Asus A8V series as a possible alternative (Via K8T800/K8T890 chipset)
  • Issues do not exist with single core systems
  • Issues do not exist with UAD-1e


AMD Dual Opteron / Dual-Core CPU (Athlon X2/Opteron) with NVIDIA nForce Pro (2xxx-series) based chipset

Symptom: Choppy Audio, CPU spiking.

  • Systems may work fine with PCIe audio I/O device
    (or FireWire device connected to PCIe>FireWire adapter)
  • UAD-1 works via Magma expansion chassis
  • Use Tyan Thunder K8WE (S2895) as a possible alternative
  • Issues do not exist with UAD-1e


Tyan 2875 Tiger

Version 1.x and 2.x, released September 22, 2003

Symptom: Choppy Audio, CPU spiking.

  • No known workaround.
  • Use MSI Master 2 FAR as a possible alternative.


MSI K7T266 Pro

Version 1.x, released February 12, 2001

Symptom: System won't boot with UAD-1 inserted.

  • Manually configure all IRQ settings in BIOS prior to installing UAD-1.
  • Use any newer motherboard as an alternative.


MSI Master 2 FAR

Version 1.x, released August 20, 2003

Symptom: Booting problems if over 2 Gigabytes of RAM is installed.

  • The UAD-1 is completely compatible with this motherboard when 2 GB's of RAM or less is installed.


Note: If you already have one of the above motherboards, we recommend trying the latest BIOS update to find out if any incompatibility issues have recently been fixed.



AMD-8131 Chipset Compatibility Information

Motherboards which make use of the AMD 8131 PCI-X controller (such as the Tyan 2885 Thunder K8W) may have some degradation of performance when the UAD-1 is used in the PCI-X slots of these systems. If you use a motherboard with this chipset, you will need to make some adjustments to the system to get better performance from the UAD-1 card if it is inserted in a PCI-X slot on this motherboard.

The UAD-1 is generally compatible with PCI-X and works well in these slots. The issue is due to a specific conflict with this particular PCI-X controller (the AMD 8131).

We recommend avoiding the AMD 8131 chipset. Instead, consider some alternative motherboards with similar performance specifications. For example, motherboards which use the Via K8T800 chipset can run UAD-1 cards in the PCI-X slots without any performance issues.

For users of the popular Tyan 2885 Thunder K8W motherboard, we recommend trying these adjustments:

  1. If you have one or two UAD-1 cards, try using them in slots three and four on this motherboard before using other slots, and also configure the motherboard jumper settings that control the speed of these slots to use 66MHz instead of 100MHz.
  2. Use the latest BIOS and chipset updates.
  3. Try different sound card ASIO buffer settings after making the above adjustments.

Contact UA Technical Support if you have any questions or would like to look into further adjustments to your system.

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