New mother board

[Brian Ellis]

Doc

Don't worry, I'm aware of the chroma problems of DV. To date, I've never felt the need to do anything like this. My professional use of video is limited to very dry reports for the UN with very minimal editing and the rest is "home movies" style souvenirs of all the interesting places my work with the UN has taken me to -- about 35 or 40 countries so far, plus 24 of the 48 contiguous States (more highly edited with a few effects where appropriate, but nothing ultrasophisticated and certainly nothing more complex than titles from CGI).

[Damascus]

Most of the new Intel chipset boards only take 1.5v AGP cards correct? You'd hate to end up with a dead video card...

[Dr Mordrid]

The KT266+ and SiS 735+ chipsets seem to have the multi-standard support.

Dr. Mordrid

[DJ]

Doc

Can you confirm that the ECS 7S5A has onboard audio and that there is no need for any adon module to get sound?

DJ

[Dr Mordrid]

It's my understanding that the early K7S5A came in multiple configurations; some without LAN or AC97 audio and the others with both. The later ones all come with both LAN and AC97.

I'd confirm with the retailer as to the configuration of the board they are selling. It's VERY likely to be the newer board with LAN and AC97.

The K7S6A comes with onboard AC97 audio but no LAN.

The other differences;

K7S5A: SiS 735 chipset, supporting PC100 and DDR266.

K7S6A: SiS 745 chipset, supporting DDR266 and DDR333.

About $20

Choose your weapon

Dr. Mordrid

[DJ]

Thanks. I am just looking to put together some system for a school. If I can get those with onboard sound that would be good.

DJ

[Captain Marvel]

well I guess the bottom line is (correct me if I'm wrong again) the AGP socket will physically exclude the non conforming agp (voltage wise ) card from the socket on the board your talking about .....though I know I've read somewhere you could plug a 1.5 into a 3.3 or vice versa with possible fireworks to follow

I have a MSI 645 ultra P4 1.6 @ 2.24 256mb PC2700 ddr
w/ onboard sound ...I was so impressed with the on board sound I gave my SB Live! away.

[Dr Mordrid]

With cards that have the AGP Universal slots (NO lockout keys) you get the physical ability to plug in anything from AGP-1 to AGP-4.

Part of the AGP Universal spec also calls for BIOS support that can detect what kind of AGP card it is and set the voltage automatically.

NO fireworks at all.....unless someone stupidly sets the BIOS for manual AGP control at 3.3 volts then sticks a 1.5 volt card in there,

There's no guarantees strong enough to cover a dumbass.

Dr. Mordrid

[hippie91]

if it helps at all i have a marvel g200 in a k7s5a
i can't tell you about the 6a though

you might want to look into the ABIT max MBs

(on an afterthought it will only work if i set it to agp 2x in the bios, if i set it to 4x(the default) then it won't boot into windows

[DentyCracker]

At a computer fair last Saturday friend of mine bought a K7S5A for £40, a Duron 1100 for £46, a case for £30, a LiteOn 40X burner for £60 and a Maxtor like mine for £55. It is up and running fine as we speak. He put his existing video card and memory in as well.

[Dr Mordrid]

Recently confirmed K7S5A info;

The K7S5A's SiS735 chipsets PCI throughput is so much higher than the VIA KT266/KT333 that it'll be compatable with (classified) while the VIA KTxxx systems will not.

Yes, this means (classified) is back in the K7S5A system.

The K7S6A/SiS745 should be similar but faster since it can use DDR333 memory.

Sometimes good things do come in value packaging.

Dr. Mordrid

[THE_Editor]

So dump photoshop and use PhotoGenics instead !!

End of Problem

[Dr Mordrid]

Nothing to do with software. A piece of hardware with more than the usual PCI throughput requirements.

Dr. Mordrid

[wkulecz]

SiS had to buy their way back to credability, they made some real crap in the SuperSocket7 days and pretty much dropped out of site -- things with SiS chips were pretty much only sold to the unsuspecting with no mention of SiS on the box.

I'm glad to see them come back as a viable alternative, as Via tries to be leading edge but just can't seem to get it right.

--wally.

[Dr Mordrid]

There is a good reason to keep both the SiS and VIA as options since each can best the other in a specific mode of operation.

VIA is faster when it comes to doing CPU intensive calculations, such as encoding MPEG's etc. Had to benchmark the hell out of this one to confirm it as the difference is relatively minor.

SiS is faster for high bitrate streaming through the PCI bus. This is very useful for things like realtime using multiple layers in the stack. As such it should also do better capturing & playing back uncompressed video streams through a RAID array, especially if you have a bus hogging audio card like Creative makes

Choose your weapon.

Dr. Mordrid