# Howto stop interrupt storms on IRQ 21 on Asus p7f-e mobo, and get sound



## carlton_draught (Mar 18, 2010)

Hi, I thought I'd post something here that took me days of effort to solve, it might help someone out. This is the first time I've used FreeBSD, coming from an Ubuntu background.

I bought an Asus p7f-e motherboard, which kept on giving me interrupt storms on IRQ 21. I traced that the interrupt storm was coming from ATAPCI0, which is the onboard SATA controller for the motherboard. (Intel IBEX)

The way I finally fixed it (or so I believe) was to go into the BIOS, Main -> Storage Configuration -> Configure SATA as -> AHCI (instead of default IDE).

Another thing I have learned with this motherboard is that if you buy the proprietary Asus MIO-Audio 888 sound card (as the board does not have integrated sound, it has a proprietary slot for their own (cheap) sound card, which otherwise would go to waste), the sound driver is the intel hda one. There is virtually no documentation I can find for this sound card, but if you follow the sound guide in the handbook, it's not that hard. Long story short - add the following line to /boot/loader.conf


```
snd_hda_load="YES"
```


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