New mother board

[Brian Ellis]

OK, here is the same question that comes up regularly but such is the speed of progress that the answer changes each time.

I'm toying with getting a new m/b. Which one?
What I would like on it is :
Pentium IV
Intel chipset
AGP slot which will take my Marvel G-200 AGP
Min 4 PCI slots, preferably more
Pref. 4 USB-2 ports
Best performance.

What I do NOT want on it is :
inbuilt sound (not even with hardware disconnect)
inbuilt modem (ditto)
inbuilt RAID (ditto)
inbuilt IEEE-1394 (ditto)

Please, I'd like recommendations from experience: I can look up data sheets myself

Ta much!

[IM_Riktar]

Until I got to the G200 line I was all set to recomend a Asus P4B266-C which can be had without Add-ons. Just Upgrading a box to that and it was very stable and quick. Almost quick enough to make me start thinking about upgrading my Duallie.

I wish you the best of luck in finding a Mobo that will meet your requirements AND support your Marvel G200.

It may be time to find a used G400 Marvel?

[Ted222]

I have an Intel D850MV with a P4 2 gig (norwood) cpu.
The MOBO does have onboard audio, although I use a Turtle Beach Santa Cruz.

So far I have had very good results and virtually no crashes other than Premiere acting finicky from time to time.

Supports up to 7 usb ports, but is the old usb 1.1 standard.

Probably not the MOBO for you, but maybe one to compare to others you might consider.

Good luck in your hunt, please let us know what you find.

Ted

[KuroNeko]

P4? Why?

Why do you want a P4? They are barely more powerful than a P3/Tualatin Celeron, and they burn way too much power, creating heat and noise. And the latest Intel chipsets have come under fire because of lousy PCI performance, like the VIA chipsets of old. Where VIA and AMD progress, Intel seems to be slacking off.

If you need real power, the cheapest way is a dual Athlon XP, at much lower cost than the P4 system. Heat and noise like the P4 though. VIA's latest chipsets are very mature and rival Intel's offerings. And for a dual system, the AMD chipset is exceptionally stable. The Thoroughbred - out next month - should widen the gap with Intel even further.

But all that power just to capture video?

I personally had trouble getting my system together, when I realised my mistake: I wanted a Swiss Knife PC, one that could do all. I quickly found out that's not possible. Now I have several PCs, each devoted to one ore more related tasks.

Capture on my Marvel G400 is handled by a very capable Asus TUSL-2C (Intel i815) mainboard with Celeron 1,2GHz. It's exceptionally stable, and handles its 6 PCI slots superbly, since it offers more than the usual 4 IRQs for expansion cards. This system at one time was loaded with 3 capture cards (Marvel G400, Dazzle MPEG2, Terratec TV card) and didn't even flinch. A very worthy successor to the BX boards that usually get recommended for capture. I added a USB2.0/Firewire combo card, adding 4 USB2.0 and 3 Firewire ports.

Editing, rendering, all the heavy work gets done on another Athlon system, which will soon be tossed for a dual Thoroughbred. This rig will be able to do 3 pass MPEG2 nearly realtime! Pumping over the large HuffYUV files is handled by a Firewire network. It's cheaper than ethernet, only needs a firewirecard and a cable, and beats ethernet 100 by a factor of three (25-30 MB/sec - you need RAID HDs to be able to sustain the Firenet connection at maximum of its potential!). Only Gigabit ethernet is currently faster, and that is so expensive it's only for the pro market.

Excuse my rant. I'm just upset by the lousy price performance ratio that Intel offers, I automatically start preachin'

Since you gave little detail what you need it for, a P4 may be a good choice anyway. I'm sure among the latest mainboards from Asus, MSI or Abit there will be some with onboard USB2.0 expansion, but this usually comes with a package of onboard IDE raid and other stuff. USB2.0 will be integrated into chipsets in the summer, now all that is done is put the NEC host chip on the board (or lately the VIA USB2.0 controller - not very good compared to the NEC). USB2.0 is still having some minor problems, and the current silicon for bridges is not very good. A USB2.0 harddrive will perform 20-30% slower than a firewire one. Sofar, the IDE bridge is the only real application of 2.0 (highspeed). No video stuff on the horizon yet. You may instead want to look at a firewire combo card for now.

If you go the P4 route, a Rambus system may be good idea - rambus is nowadays barely more expensive than DDR, and it's the best P4 chipset PCI-wise. Intel's DDR chipsets are crap, think VIA a few generations ago. VIA's P4 offering is good for a DDR system, but mainboards are hard to find as VIA has no licence and is in court for this with Intel. Big brands don't touch it, but that may change shortly. SiS has a very good P4 chipset, and looks like major brands such as MSI and Asus now support it. Problem is no longer choice of mainboard and memory - plenty of good and equally expensive choices. The problem is Intel's high P4 prices. And the announcement they will go to 566MHz FSB soon, with little to no backward compatibility. Need new mobo, memory and P4 _again_. At least with AMD, upgrading is spread over a few CPU generations, all using socket A. Intel's gone though more socket types than CPU designs in the past years.

Whatever system you choose, P4 or Athlon, get a good case and PSU! Current systems use lots of power. I personally like the latest aluminium cases from Lian-Li or Lepont ("Mg Alloy" cases,sold in the USA by Directron, Wallabie.com sells them throughout Europe). They come with all the necessary stuff: extra fans, fanfilter, removable mainboard tray & cooled harddrive racks. And they look fab. Upgrading a generic steel case to this level usually costs the same as the aluminium one. PSU's... I'm partial to Enermax. Powerful, good quality, silent. I prefer these after noticing the hum in my audio went away by using an Enermax PSU instead of an Antec one. PSU's seem to have influence on the performance of a lot of PC components.

Hope that any small bit of my rant is useful to you If you have USB questions, feel free to ask (it's my job).

Neko

[Hulk]

Another vote for the Asus P4B266-C. I don't have one but have read a lot of good things about that board. I think the big decision is RDRAM or DDR memory. Once you make that decision I would look at boards from the larger manufacturers.

If you want absolute stability but no overclocking features you might want to consider an Intel branded motherboard. I have an Intel p4 mobo with onboard audio (not in use) and LAN (do use) and have not had a single crash in the 5 months I've been using it. And yes, I do A LOT more than word processing!

[dchip]

I recently built a new P4. Motherboard is Asus P4T-E/WOA. Uses Intel 850 chipset. Nice and stable. Has 2 USB's and card to add two more if needed. So far it has been excellent. I don't know about support for your G200. I put a G550 in the new system and Win2K Pro SP2.

[Dr Mordrid]

I've recently built two AthlonXP systems using the 2000+ CPU and they both ROCK.

The low priced one is based on the ECS K7S5A mainboard (abt. $50 USD) and the SiS 735 chipset. It can use either PC100 or DDR266 memory. I have a gig of DDR266 installed. 'tis fast. Quite fast.

It's new big brother is the K7S6A. It uses an updated SiS chipset and can use either DDR266 or DDR333 ram. Haven't had time to try it yet. Runs about $75 USD.

The higher end system is based on the Gigabyte GA-7VRX mainboard and the KT333 chipset. It can use either DDR266 or DDR333 ram. 'tis even faster. Runs about $110-120 USD

How fast are they? Both can easily beat a P4 1.8 PC800 system when rendering MPEG-2's. That's how fast.

The only problem I've found with either is with the more expensive Gigabyte. My Fasttrak TX4 won't work on it under Win2K, but I'm not sure whose fault this is. I suspect the Gigabyte's BIOS might be at fault, but this is only a hunch.

Other than this one problem both the ECS and Gigabyte boards are ROCK SOLID. No stability issues I can find at all, and I've been running the RT-2000 and some "secret hardware" on 'em that would bring most other mainboards, including many Intel based ones to their knees.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Thanks to all responders.

A few points: I prefer Intel because some software (e.g. Photoshop 5) is reported to be very hairy under AMD, creating BSODs. It is generally the case that most software developers use Intel machines and do their testing on AMD almost as an afterthought.

I must admit I'm flummoxed between the various flavours of AGP. I believe my Marvel G-200 is AGP-2 and that -4 and, shortly -8, are the rule. Then there is AGP-Pro and 1.5 and 3.3 V variants. Can anyone point me towards an explanation of these? I no longer have a clue about what will run on what m/b.

However, I must have analogue input: that's for sure.

Anyway, ta a lot for your help.

[Jerry Jones]

Since I can't stand unfounded rumors, I'm going to "call" you on this one, Brian.

Please provide *one* link to a credible report indicating there's a problem with AMD processors and Photoshop.

I scour the net pretty thoroughly and I've never heard anything remotely supporting that contention.

(P.S. I second Terry's comments about the AMD / EliteGroup combos. My home system built around the K7S5A is faster than my work system built around a Pentium 4 where MPEG encoding is concerned.)

Jerry Jones

[Greebe]

I've been running AMD cpu's exclusively for the last 2.5 years and have yet to experience any problems with Photoshop

[Dr Mordrid]

I've run both Photoshop 4.01 and 6.0 using the K7S5A/SiS735 and GA-7VRX/KT333 combos with NO problems at all.

Granted the Gigabyte experience is only about a week long, but with the ECS I have well over a month of use with no problems at all, even when editing filmstrips.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

Jerry,

Call coming up -- no "unfounded" rumour, but reported fact:

PC Pro April 2002 p. 205:

QUOTE
Q. Why does my system lock up when starting Adobe Photoshop 5.x or when running Photoshop 5.x tools and filters?
A. Adobe Photoshop 5.x and older versions only support Intel CPUs. You'll need to upgrade to version 6 or above for AMD CPU support.
UNQUOTE

This was actually quoted from http://www.tyan.com/support/html/f_tg_mp.html

If you read the article, you'll see that this was discovered following crashes with 1/2 Gb files.

I checked also with the Adobe KB 315773 and came across the following:
QUOTE
Support of Non-Intel Processors with Photoshop for Windows
Adobe Photoshop 6.0 is compatible only with Pentium-class Intel or AMD processors. Photoshop 5.x is compatible only with Pentium or faster Intel processors. If you use an incompatible processor with Photoshop, Adobe Technical Support can suggest basic troubleshooting steps but can't guarantee that Photoshop will run correctly.
UNQUOTE

Straight from the horse's mouth, n'est-ce pas?

[wkulecz]

Some revisions of the ASUS P3B BX-based board have problems with Photoshop 6. This shold also be well documentated on the Adobe website. Disabling some memory management feature (at a significant performance hit) is the "fix".

You pays your money and takes your chances!

It sucks! but that's the way it is. Personally I'm fed up, I've a dual P-III 500 BX based system that runs photoshop great and a 1.4GHz Via based Athelon that runs MSP6.5 without problems (after wasting lots of time permuting 4in1 drivers until I found the "right" one). I'll stay with what I have until:

1) evidence of real adherance to standards and some actual software quality control in the PC world -- don't hold your breath.

2) I buy a Mac if the next revs of OS X fixes a few things.

3) Linux gets it together to do DV editing.

At present I see no need to change my photoshop setup as I can handle multiple 4000dpi full-frame 16-bit scans of 35mm film without problems. I can scan, print and edit concurrently -- meaning my artistic input it now the rate limiting step.

--wally.

[Brian Ellis]

Wally

The problem with Adobe generally is that they are not a WIN company. They are a MAC company which tries to export their products to the WIN environment -- and it shows

I believe the Word versions for MAC suffer from similar problems in the opposite direction.

Actually, I try to avoid Adobe products like the plague. The only one I have now is Acrobat. I ditched Premiere, Photoshop and the rest. (I use Corel PhotoPaint in its place: much more WINish). The Photoshop point that I brought up is only one example of many where the apps use Intel instruction sets that AMD doesn't understand. It just happened to be fresh in my memory, as I had read about it a day or two ago!

[Snake-Eyes]

As a recent AMD convert..

Okay, actually it's been a little over a year now since I made the switch, but don't let that ruin my point. I was of the same mind as you Brian, before I bought my T-Bird 1.33 on an Asus A7M motherboard. Recently I upgraded again to an Athlon XP 2100+ on an MSI KT3Ultra-ARU. So far I haven't found one application that won't run properly on the new systems (or at least, haven't tried ANY). You pointed out PS, but I use PS6 all the time with no problems whatsoever. I think that the compatibility issues are seriously overhyped, and that the main problems now are more often to do with motherboard chipsets than anything else (heck, the XP supports SSE too, so..)

To each his own, I guess.