Motherboard survey (P3/4/Athlon)

[Brian Ellis]

Ted

Can you please explain what you mean about your problems with Live!? Was this on capture, playback or recording? I have no problems getting into the "red" zone on any of these operations, and I have to wick the sound level down to keep the peaks into "yellow", possibly with an occasional momentary incursion into "red", using a camcorder or anything else as source. Just curious ...

[Flying dutchman]

@FredH: Be careful, most motherboards with the AMD 761 still have the dreaded VIA 686B southbridge....

[Fred H]

@Flying dutchman and anybody
which alternative is best?
Compromise?

Fred H

[Ted222]

Brian,

With the SB Live card I was unable to get the playback sound at a high enough volume, to please me, when outputting video to tape. I got around this by circumventing the M450eTV card and hooking up the capture and playback directly to the sound card.
The Santa Cruz completely resolved this problem for me, giving me volume to spare with all default setups on all the audio cables.

(Note: I had plenty of volume adjustment on the computer - the only problem was printing to tape)

Hope this answers your question.

Ted

[Dr Mordrid]

See below....

P3B-F should be put into permanent production just for editing.

The Santa Cruz is just flat great. Otherwise the Echo GINA24 is in my audio workstation and is an outstanding 24 bit/96khz card.

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

The WinXP RC1 readme has warnings about the ASUS P2B-F and P3B-F with respect to Photoshop 6 and other "high memory bandwidth" applications. They also mention certain Dell models by name, but otherwise are pretty vague. The "fix" is to remove some photoshop components that make it run slow :-(

I've been using photoshop6 MSP6 and Premiere6 quite a bit on my old P2B-D and a P2B without any problems.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

The only problem I have with Photoshop 6 is in Win98SE. In Win2K it runs fine.

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

I was very surprised to see the warning in the XP RC1 readme. I'll be installing it on the old P2B PIII-500 this weekend, I wasn't planning to test photoshop on it, perhaps if things go well and I have some free time ....

May be a specific chipset revision level thing and all MBs in the series get tarred. Via is clearly suffering this now -- they don't want to own up to the defective versions, the vendors won't clarify what versions they use (some are even gluing heatsinks and labels on any chip with a Via logo!) -- net result is people who've been paying attension are avoiding Via based boards.

I did set up a friend who bought a Via based EpoX board (against my advice) and 1G Athelon , initially got a defective DIMM from Fry's so I wasted lots of time *bacause* it was a Via before swaping in a known good DIMM, but other than that, the board has been solid, but she doesn't do video editing.

--wally.

[Flying dutchman]

@FredH and others:

I've just ordered an ASUS CUSL-2. I'm planning to use it with the new Celeron 900. It's not as much bang for the buck as an Athlon board, but it seems a dead-safe combination.

[Andy W]

I've been using an abit kt7 (non raid)
2x 18gb scsi stripe w2k 2940uw
and the dreaded sblive value

the board is slightly cooked (37 Mhz PCI)

I have no problem capturing full frame analog yuy2

30 minutes 0 frames dropped

intrestingly hardware mjpeg 15 minutes 352x288 5 frames droped

I have never seen any of the issues people complain about via for
but maybe my late rev 686a is clean.

By the way my cpu is a lowly duron 800 clocked to 901.

All these result were with the leaked drivers on a g200

[Flying dutchman]

@andyW: Was this under win98 or 2000? Are you actually using the leaked G200 drivers under win2K?

[Andy W]

Yes this is in windows 2000 using the leaked drivers on a marvel g200.

I think I need an extra disk in my raid as mt hard disk performance is about 21Mb/s and yuy2 needs 20Mb/s .

further tests have shown that I dod start dropping frames if the machine does anythin whilst capturing.

The matrox benchtest smokes drugs as it doesn't seem to switch off w2ks disk caching it reports maximun speed 13Mb/s but capturing does disable it I don't know thanks Matrox.

But in the leaked drivers it only causes a warning and still allows you to do it.