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**Dr Mordrid** · 7 July 2001, 09:15

Free form thoughts;

1. the P3B-F should be put into permanent production for video editors alone

That said, if you're not using BIOS version 1006 get it and use it. It has important changes for Win2K.

2. Overclocking is NO-NO with the Marvel etc. They may work for now, but......

3. the base 600mhz is fine for MJPeg but barely adequate for full frame HuffYUV & PICVideo.

4. The stutters may be the Marvel choking on the overclock at high datarates.

5. get yourself a PIII/850 & a slotkey. It'll work better/smoother than the overclock. Been there, done that.

6. move your TEMP files off the boot drive and onto a TEMP folder in the root of the video drive. Trust me.

SET TMP=E:\TEMP
SET TEMP=E:\TEMP

with E = the video dirves letter.

7. Install Win9x first to one partiton and Win2K to another partition after. Win2K will make the dualboot automatically and set up the boot menu.

8. When installing Win2K turn OFF the ALL the Power Management settings in the BIOS of the P3B-F.

9. When the Win2K installer first starts a blue screen will appear prompting to press a key. Press F5 instead...repeatedly. When the next screen appears (1-2 minutes) there will be a menu. Select "Standard PC" and continue with the installation.

This will turn OFF the ACPI management. This will prevent Win2K from putting everything on ONE IRQ. It may work OK for most things but my experience is that it screws up editing systems.

10. get a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. It cuts your audio cards CPU use to almost nothing because it uses an onboard DSP instead of the system CPU to do its work.

I used to use an AWE64 myself beause the PCI cards sucked in that regard, but the TBSC is so much better. With good speakers it's like having an orchestra pit under the desk.

Any questions?

Dr. Mordrid

**wkulecz** · 7 July 2001, 14:23

I 've got to contradict Doc's advice about disabling ACPI in the P3B-F and installing "Standard PC" kernel. Unless the P3B-F is "quirky" compared to the older P2B and newer CuBX-E, you want ACPI enabled, otherwise you end up fighting the same IRQ sharing battles in W2K that make Win9x such a pain!

I've a P2B, P2B-D (dual) and a CuBX all setup of NLE Premier6 and MSP6 works great with just about everything on the same IRQ on all three systems

Once you've installed W2K its probably a good idea to go to the power management control panel and set computer to "always on" and monitor and hard drive power saving to "never". As ACPI certainly has not fixed all the power management bugs.

Basically you want ACPI enabled for W2K. The installer has a "blacklist" of buggy ACPI boards and will automatically install Standard PC kernel for these. I'd say only try Standard PC kernel as a last resort after all else has failed, and only then if you can't return the motherboard for one with working ACPI!

--wally.

**Dr Mordrid** · 7 July 2001, 15:08

Au contrare' my man. With the P3B-F its better to do it the old way.

Remember: this particluar board came out quite a while ago. As such it wasn't really designed for ACPI management as done in Win2K. Granted the BIOS has been updated, but it still works better without ACPI management.

I've been through this already with several setups on the P3B-F ranging from the RT-2000 to eTV to 2 G400-TV's and an audio workstation (Gina24 audio, OHCI video). All 5 work better with Standard PC.

As for "IRQ sharing battles", what battles? If the drivers are properly designed IRQ sharing works just fine. Example;

RT-2000 system;

0=system timer
1=keyboard
2=open
3=COM1 (COM2 disabled, unused)
4=RT-2000 IEEE-1394, TB Santa Cruz audio & Fasttrak100 RAID
5=USB
6=floppy
7=open
8=system CMOS/RTClock
9=open
10=RT-2000 codec card & Linksys LNE100TX Network
11=G400 Flex
12=busmouse
13=numeric data processor
14=Primary IDE
15=Secondary IDE

Nothing trips over anything else, regardless of their shared status. NO drops, no playback issues etc.

Dr. Modrdid

**dchip** · 7 July 2001, 20:26

Rob, hope your new setup goes well. Doc is right about how to implement the changes on your P3B-F, and Doc, I agree with you: Long live the P3B-F. I want P3B-F hats, t-shirt and mugs, ASAP,

and (as you suggest) permanent production of it just for us video editors.

**Rob100** · 8 July 2001, 01:44

Thanks to all who replied.

Doc,

Bios is flashed to 1006.

I will try unclocking the Celery 600, but I've been running this chip at 900 for a year now and it seems very stable, even during MPEG encoding or a heavy games session.

I know the Celery 600 is a little "weak". I have a couple of other more powerful systems (BX133 with PIII 866 and KK266 with TB 1.3) - but I have so many issues with these systems and the Marvel, that's why I decided to buy a 2nd hand P3B-F.

I have thought of getting a PIII 850, but all I seem to do is keep spending (on PC's) at the moment... Wife has other priorities ;-)

So assuming my RAID array is on E: I should set TMP, TEMP and the MSPPreviewFiles folders all to this drive?

I have already disabled all PM and now tend to always install 2K as "standard PC"

I have a Santa Cruz in my KK266/TB1.3 system, but decided to stick my trusty AWE64 gold on the P3B-F as the one I have has 5 PCI's and 2 ISA's (1 x shared) rather than it being a 6 PCI version :-(

Thanks for the advise.

**Rob100** · 8 July 2001, 02:16

Doc,

It would appear that setting TEMP and TMP onto the video drive has solved my slight stutters playing back from the timeline using PicVideo captures ;-)))

You mentioned about the swap file not being able to expand etc, etc and that's why the TEMP and TMP files should be on the video drive, but according to Matrox's NLE tips the size should be fixed anyway?

Thanks again....

Rob.

**wkulecz** · 8 July 2001, 06:48

Since I have no experience with P3B series I'm not claiming it works with ACPI, I'm claiming that in general you want ACPI. If a given motherboard works ACPI or not can depend on an obscure rev XX.z model number on nominally the same board. Such is the sorry state of quality control in the PC biz these days.

Here's what msinfo32 says about my P2B-D:
IRQ Number Device
20 Microsoft ACPI-Compliant System
8 System CMOS/real time clock
13 Numeric data processor
6 Standard floppy disk controller
7 ECP Printer Port (LPT1)
4 Communications Port (COM1)
3 Communications Port (COM2)
1 Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
12 Microsoft PS/2 Port Mouse (IntelliPoint)
14 Primary IDE Channel
15 Secondary IDE Channel
19 Intel 82371AB/EB PCI to USB Universal Host Controller
19 Texas Instruments OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
18 NETGEAR FA310TX Fast Ethernet Adapter (NGRPCI) #2
17 Adaptec AHA-294X/AIC-78XX PCI SCSI Controller
16 3dfx Interactive, Inc. Voodoo Series Driver
5 Sound Blaster 16 or AWE32 or compatible (WDM)

There is also an AGP G200 as the secondary display.
Not a lot of sharing here, but my other P2B and CuBX systems and Dell notebook have a very short list with most everything on IRQ9.

I have a Sandisk CF reader and Hauppauge WinTV-USB filling up the USB and a 1394 hard drive. I can play DV back form the 1394 drive to the camcorder, while the WinTV is playing TV in a window and dump a jpeg from the flash RAM without a glitch. OTOH my Dell notebook with nominally the same USB controller chip cannot output DV from the 1394 drive (using a TI chipset PCMCIA 1394 controller) if anything is connected to the USB port (doesn't matter if its being used or not!). So its really hard to make general statements in this business!

The benefits of ACPI are such that IMHO you should try it first and return any new motherboard that doesn't work correctly with it enabled. If you've an older motherboard I'd still suggest trying it first with ACPI -- unfortunately its a reinstall to switch.

Rob100,
W2K pretty much either works straight out of the box with the default settings or you're in for a very rough ride and doesn't need or really benefit from win9x "tweaking" voodoo. Since you've a P3B-F I suggest you try Doc's advice first, but if you have problems don't waste a lot of time "tweaking", re-install with ACPI enabled (or vice-versa). You really have to pay attension to hit the F5 key at the right time to force Standard PC install as the time window is pretty short.

--wally.

**Dr Mordrid** · 8 July 2001, 08:50

Yes, freezing the size of the swapfile is a good thing to do as long as you don't get too nuts with it.

What it's intended to do is not so much to save disk space but to stop the constant resizing of the swapfile that is very time consuming. By fixing the size swapfile accesses are faster and less likely to interfere with other operations taking place on the boot drive.

I tend to use either 256 or 384 megs on my systems because anything smaller can make DVD players & other software that need large swapfiles choke.

Dr. Mordrid

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