Motherboard survey (P3/4/Athlon)

[Flying dutchman]

I would be very interested to learn which motherboard/sound cards are in use by the "power users" on this forum.

I'm talking about currently available models, especially those that are able to capture YUY2/Huffyuv etc on a Marvel without the all-too-common sound problems and dropped frames. It would greatly help me (and others) to decide which hardware to buy (or not!).

Quite a few boards I tested lately capture MJPG OK, but fail miserably on the HuffYuv and Picvideo test.... That makes them unusable with the new Win2k drivers, and probably with WinTV cards also.

Are all VIA boards crap? The one I tested (Gigabyte GA 6VX74x) was!

Are all Athlon boards crap? Or just the ones with VIA chipsets?

[Ted222]

I use an Intel 815E (Dell 4100), and capture PICVID with no dropped frames on the highest setting (20).

P3-1000
384 RAM
45 gig IBM Boot
60 gig Promise 100 Raid (2 Maxtor 30 gig drives)
Win 98SE
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz (very nice card)
Matrox 450 Etv
S-Vid primary capture port

Good Luck,
Ted

[Indiana]

Maybe the VIA problem is triggered by the Marvels?
No problems here capturing full-res MJPEG or HuffYUV (with SBLive!) with a WinTV in Win2k. Although due to the crappy SBLive about 20frames are dropped per movie - take the SBLive out and it works without dropping frames.

Abit KT7 RAID
Duron800@1030-1050 (depending on ambient temp....)
256MB RAM @ 140MHz CAS2
Radeon64MB VIVO
Hauppauge WinTV Radio
SBLive! Platinum (to be replaced as fast as I can find a better solution...)
Initio/Domex 3940 UW-SCSI
AVM Fritz! ISDN
2 * 30 GB IBM DTLA on the HighPoint RAID
1 * 20 GB IBM DTLA on the internal IDE
PlexWriter 4220, Toshiba DVD and an old IBM DTPA 9GB HD on the SCSI.
Note: There's no NIC in this system, maybe this is why I'm not having that much problems...

[gibverse]

Can't speak for the Marvel, since mine will only do RGB under Win2K.... however, I just put a WinTV-radio in yesterday, and so far, the results are good (no long captures yet).

My setup:
InWin Q500 case w/ 300W PS and panaflow fans
Asus A7V133 (rev 1.04)
Athlon 1.2 266 FSB, TaiSol HSF
2x 256 MB Crucial PC133 CAS 2 (512 total)
2x IBM 30 gig 7200 RPM disks, model DTLA307030 (onboard promise, non-raid, 1 drive per channel)
16x Pioneer DVD, IDE
12/10/32 Plextor burner, IDE
SB Live Value
3Com 3c905b-tx-nm NIC
3Com Winmodem, model 3594
Matrox Millenium G400 16 meg dual head
Hauppauge WinTV-radio

I only run Win2K, and have never had any problems with my SB Live... however, my RR-G was never used for capture (thanks for nothing Matrox programmers).

John

[Flying dutchman]

@Indiana:

The dropped-frames problem is more likely caused by the combination VIA chipset <-> SBLIVE than by the Marvel. The rumour goes that the Via southbridges have problems with "isochronous transfers" at high PCI bus loads. Which means that your soundcard must occasionally wait for the PCI bus to be free. It helps (a little bit) to disable the MIDI part of the SBLIVE. Also disable all bells&whistles such as 3-d sound etc.

I found out the hard way that ISA soundcards are also affected by this unpleasant phenomenon on VIA mainboards:

The Gigabyte GA-6VX7-4X also has a VIA chipset, and I tested it under high PCI bus load (huffYuv). It gives VERY choppy sound with an ISA SB16 PNP, and distorted sound with the on-board codec soundchip. Hardware MJPG worked OK, however. Since this is unfortunately dying out, it is not an option anymore. Therefore we must be terribly picky about which mainboard to buy!

[Indiana]

I know, but there are Intel chipset users as well dropping frames as long as they're using a SBUndead! - and exchanging the soundcard helps there as well. So I think one can safely blame the SBLive for this. Maybe VIAs problem make it worse, but the main culprit seems to be the Creative soundcard.
No wonder, constantly transfering null-bytes over the PCI (even when there's no sound played at all) thus taking up to 30% of PCI-bandwidth makes the SBLive series a MAJOR resource-hog on any system.
I know the tip with disabling midi, but unlike Win98 it doesn't work in Win2k, thanks to Creatives "wonderful" drivers you can only use all or none of the cards functionality...

Besides I really don't care about 20 or even 40 dropped frames over a 2 hour movie cause simply noone can see it. So basicly what I wanted to say is the capturing works fine here even though I have the "critical" combo Win2k - VIA - SBLive - HighPoint RAID

[Flying dutchman]

@Indiana:

I am not sure about the SBlive, but here's how you disable the MIDI part on a SB64 and SB128 PCI. I assume it is similar for the SBLIVE.

I have a German version of Windows 2000 (I work for a German company), so I may have some of the translations wrong:

Go to Start-Settings-Control panel.
Double-click the applet "sound and multimedia"
Select the tab sheet "hardware"
Select "Creative Audio PCI"
Press the button "properties"
Select the tab sheet "properties"
In the tree view, unfold the branch "Midi devices" and select "Creative Audio PCI".
Press the button "Properties".

Now a window appears where you can disable the bloody thing.

[AndrewDV]

Hi,

For my main system, I use an IWill KK266-R and a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz. The onboard RAID has some minor issues with capturing. Others have had success with tweaking RAID settings. Instead, a Promise FT100 is used.

Besides that issue, this motherboard is fantastic! Read the different hardware sites for in-depth reviews. I can capture in Win2K (AVI_IO) without a problem using the WinTV card. Under Win98, I can capture Matrox MJPEG with few (if not any) glitches in it.

IWill does sell a non-RAID version of this motherboard as well. If you get it, flash the latest BIOS for performance and stability reasons.

[funsoul]

OK...not what I'd consider a poweruser but guess I'll throw my couple cents in....

I'm using the asus p4t mobo with a Hercules FortissimoII soundcard. Before the move to win2k I was using a TurtleBeach MontegoII+ and would consistently drop a couple frames per minute. I tried to get the montego to run under win2k to no avail. All this time I was also experiencing significant problems with the raid array (promise ft100, raid0, 3x45 maxtors).

I installed the Hercules last night and amazingly the raid performance was very good again (as long as 52meg/s sustained write sounds about right).

Never could get avi-io/huffyuv working but ran some test rgb and yuy2 caps using virtualdub last night (including with huffyuv) and everything seems to be working beautifully.
-funsoul

[Indiana]

Flying Dutchman: Iknow, this is the usual procedure and it work this way with the SBLive in Win98. But in Win2k selecting "don't use midi functions on this device" (don't know how it's exactly called in the english version, I have the geman one) magically does disable mixer and all audio functions as well. Turn on the audio again, select the midi-device properties and see: it's turned on again as well.
So it's either use the damn card with every gimmick or not at all. I'd prefer the latter, but unfortunately it's very hard to get alternatives here in germany.

[Brian Ellis]

Somewhat irrelevant, as my mother board uses 440BX, but SB Live! works a treat. Yesterday I captured almost a couple of hours of video from two mini-DVs, using Marvel (my old Panasonic does not have a DV out port ) at 704 x 576 25 fps. I had a total of 5 drops and these all occurred at a single spot when I had opened the camcorder, taken the tape out, put it back and moved to the end of the shot sequence to restart. Can't complain at that, I guess.

However, many boards with PCI and ISA slots use a PCI<>ISA converter, so that ISA cards are actually using the PCI bus (possibly less efficiently than a PCI card would do), so I would expect no better results with ISA on these boards. I don't know whether there are any boards made today with a true ISA bus as this would take up more real estate on the printed circuit layout than the converter solution, hence would be more expensive. The tendency is to have no ISA.

I suspect, VIA chipset compatibility issues aside, there is a lot of b......t (male bovine excrement) propagated about sound cards. A few weeks ago, I spent about a day looking at Internet sites regarding Live!, Turtle Beach and other PCI sound cards. In particular, I looked at technical reviews. What I did find is that the computer resources used by the various makes are all +/- similar, and that was repeated on many sites. In some cases, reviewers took one card out and put another in to make direct comparisons and generally found very little difference in capture speeds, frame drops etc. One thing that was very marked was that nearly all reviewers did not like the Turtle Beach drivers, although they did like the interface, but it was the other way round with Live! Also, one or two did complain that not all TB functions work under W2k, although I could find nothing specific. The subjective sound from TB (digital source) was better, possibly due to a marginally better s/n ratio but also due to a different frequency weighting curve, giving a higher level at high frequencies, with a "crisper" feel. My view is that a computer is not a hi-fi system, in any case, and compression, even at a 48 kHz sampling rate, will take away any minor advantage. It tickled me to read that one card had -3 dB frequency limits of 20 Hz and 130 kHz when the ear of a youngster has limits of about 30 Hz and 18 kHz respectively, the upper limit dropping to 10 kHz by 45 and 8 kHz by 70, on an average. Not even bats could take advantage of the 130 kHz upper limit if the sampling rate is 48 kHz! This kind of "technical spec" is designed to bamboozle those who look at the figures without understanding what they mean Anyway, the upshot of my little research is that there is no reason on earth why I should consider changing my Live! card.

FWIW

[LvR]

Have to agree with you on that one Brian.

The cooling fans/psu etc on most current rigs are so darn noisy that the promised about 96dB dynamic range on an 16bit soundcard becomes a 65dB range on most systems anyway.

I am happy to use my onboard audio

[wkulecz]

To hell with the reviews and whoever says card XXX sucks,

IF IT WORKS DON"T FIX IT!!

OTOH reports of which cards are having problems on what systems are very useful when planning purchases, troubleshooting, and helping decide when to switch rather than fight.

I've had no problems running MSP6 and Premiere 6 on an Athelon 700 with an ASUS K7M (AMD 75x chipset with Via superIO and sound) using G450 video and the built-in sound with a generic TI 1394 card.

--wally.

[Fred H]

Anybody out there are using/planing Epox 8K7A mobo? (AMD761 chipset, DDR)?


Fred H

[Ted222]

Having recently used both a SB Live Value and a Santa Cruz, I have one interesting observation.

On the SB Live I had to rig cables circumventing the M450eTV to get the volume up to where I wanted it, and on the Santa Cruz I was able to toss the rigged cables and use the default setup and had sound to spare (I even turned it down a little). Also I was able to use the EQ white printing to tape to fine tune the audio as it was recorded - with no drops or hesitation. Very nice...

Dell P3-1000 Dimension 4100
384 RAM
45 gig boot
Promise Fasttrak 100 - 3x30 gigs
Win98SE
Santa Cruz
TBase 10/100 NIC
2 CD Drives

Output to tape using PCVCR
File Size 5 - 2 gig AVI's

Ted