an important article for all you via chipset owners

[hippie91]

http://www.tecchannel.de/hardware/817/index.html

[Dr Mordrid]

And this is a suprise? I've been preaching that sermon for years based just on experience alone

Seriously now....even though the article focusses mainly on HDD/RAID controllers this will also apply to other hardware as well; add devices to a VIA mainboard that hit the PCI bus hard (SBLive etc.) and you have a recipe for trouble.

In terms of editing: take a VIA chipped board and use multiple PCI cards that will have to work in synch at the same time (HDD/RAID controller + analog capture card + sound card) and you have a major cause of the dropped frames, playback glitches and sound issues posted here.

Dr. Mordrid

[DrP]

well, dont know what other people are doing, but I have a AOpen AK73pro + 1GHz Tbird, Intel PCI NIC, Santa Cruz audio, sep Seagate Barra IV 75Gb hdd for capture, 384Mb RAM, XP (amazing it works huh?) using AVI_IO + huffyuv, via 4-in-1 4.37 + George's VIA patch 0.19. Nil drops from a clean source (I'm actually capturing the cricket as I type PAL CIF).

I'm happy.


Oh drat. just dropped 1 frame. Anyone know how to cure dropping 1 frame in 54351? ;-)

[KuroNeko]

Intel also flawed

I concur with both.

VIA chipsets have a history with PCI troubles.

The 686B bug being the most publicized, I think that the fix they produced is one of the causes of low performance - as the article states, a patch from a third party, which messes with PCI latency, produces better performance. But the fix VIA made, was exactly to change PCI latency to avoid problems with multiple devices at the same time on the PCI bus.

So I would like to see multiple devices at the same time tested - more likely, they will all have lower bandwidth than on Intel, but will have less problems working together. A comparison of this kind with Intel would be nice (non BX - nothing beats a BX, but since this chipset is rapidly getting extinct, there'd better be a good replacement waiting)

On the other hand, Intel's latest chipsets are also plagued by problems, all I815 and I845 series are affected and cause problems with capture devices in some configurations. A company in Germany which designed its cards with Athlon (so AMD and VIA chipsets) in mind, found that their card had recording glitches on i815 and i845 boards. Since it didn't happen on i850 boards, most likely the MTH is the cause of the problem. If you recall, Intel had to recall a large batch of mainboards and chipsets a while back, because of the faulty MTH in the i820 chipset. (the caminogate 'scandal')

I specifically bought an Asus TUV4X to run this card - since I couldn't find any Asus CUBX series boards anymore - and it's working nicely side by side with a raid controller, network card and Terratec soundcard. I avoided the plagued ALI and SiS chipsets - PCI bandwidth isn't everything.

Looks to me that once the BX is finally gone, we're in for a hell of a puzzle getting things to work together.

Neko

[AndrewDV]

Hi Folks,

I may not have ATA133 drives, but I thought I would pass along my VIA config.

Hardware
--------
IWill KK266-R
AMD 1.1 GHz
786MB RAM
1-20GB WD HDD (non-RAID)
1-20GB Maxtor (non-RAID)
2-45GB IBM 75gxp (RAID-0)
Matrox G400-TV
Hauppage WinTV-Radio
Promise FastTrack ATA100
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz
Linksys Ethernet
DataVideo TBC-100
ATI DV Wonder / Dazzle Hollywood DV-Bridge (soon to be returned ) / Canopus ADVC-100

I'd say that's a fair amount of PCI cards (maxed out). Good thing I have that ISA slot left .

Capturing either through the WinTV or G400-TV with YUY2+PIC MJPEG (Q=20), I have no dropped frames at all. The same can be said with Huffyuv + YUY2. Playback is also great as well. No stuters or anything.

To get everything working, it was more of a learning curve than anything. I just had to read http://www.viahardware.com about ACPI, on-board RAID, and stuff like that. I also use the 4.32 4in1 drivers.

Oddly enough, the more I use DV, the better I like it. For file size alone, it is great. The ADVC-100 is great!

[Dr Mordrid]

I've got a couple of new systems in the lab .... 1.7 ghz P4 and a 1700+ XP Athlon, both running Win2K SP-2 .... but I'm not impressed with their stability, though their MPEG rendering times and Instant Preview's with MSPro 6.5 are very fast.

Neither system is as good for long editing sessions as any of the P3B-F systems I have (6 at this time).

Guess what systems get the nod when I have a long project and can't afford a hiccup?

I don't think the P3B-F's will lose their jobs until something as stable comes along or if MSPro7 makes it worthwhile (that's a likely one (G) )....

Dr. Mordrid

[Elie]

Well after seeing that review, I'm backing off from any VIA based motherboards for now, untill they find a successor to the BX chipset.

I'm happily editing on my Asus P2B-D dual PIII 600 machine, though I wish I can bring it up to a pair of 1 gig's but apperantly I have an older rev MB so I cannot.

My other machine is based on the intel 815, Asus CUSL2 YUKK!!
Nothing but problems with that board, I was thinking of going AMD, but don't want to be stuck with VIA, so any idea's more than welcome.


Cheers,
Elie

[dchip]

ASUS P4B266

Along this subject line, I see ASUS has a new board, P4B266, Slot 478 and i845D and ICH2 chipset. This one supports DDR memory up to PC2100 and FSB up to 800Mhz. Anybody heard any scoop on this board? I think its been in the pipeline about 3 or 4 weeks now.

[dchip]

ASUS P4B266

Found a review on this on Toms Hardware and it is nothing new. Same Intel i845 chipset relabeled as i845D (because of the DDR memory support) but same lackluster performance. Definately not a good step up for us video editors.

http://www.tomshardware.com/mainboard/01q4/011217/index.html

[hippie91]

well i am (by far) not knocking using AMD over intel. but it does seem that in use, my old Athlon classic 650 on an all AMD chipset had far lower latency than my new 1.4 on the KG7-raid. even with the patch it goes pretty slow when doing a lot of pci options (i have about 40-50k/s getting read off one of the drives then going out the networkcard. I just thought i would pass on the info, and i suppose that in the future i will be looking for non Via chipsets until they get that problem fixed.

[dchip]

Thanks hippie91, and I'm with you Doc. It comes down to speed versus stability. Because I work with video on my computer, (asking my computer to process literally millions of 720x480 pictures, in succession) then stability is what I must have. I know there are many with blazing hot, superfast CPU's who also do video, and quite well, but, it will be interesting to see how these chips perform over the long haul.