what mainboard is recomended for video capturing?

[Wiken]

Is there anyone who can recomend me a mainboard that is good in use for video capturing?

i have a pIII 667mhz 133mhzbus
and 256 megs of 133 mhz ram
+ matrox marvel g400 4xagp

the reason is that i have a asus p3c2000
that has been pretty ****ed up because of some memmory translation failure

Fredrik

[Dr Mordrid]

I'm running the Asus P3B-F 6/1/1, which is a very good mainboard for editing. It has excellent performance and is very stable.

I use 3 P3B-F's; one with an RT-2000 editing card, which is very demanding of the mainboard, and a couple with Marvels. No problems at all.

PIII/600
256 megs PC-100
8.4g/120g RAID0/20g

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 04 July 2000).]

[Brian Ellis]

This subject has been dealt with at frequent intervals, but old postings are no longer valid because motherboards evolve at a prodigious rate (expected lifetime of a model is about 6 months).

Speaking only for PIII driven machines, avoid m/bs with Via chipsets like poison is the best general advice I can give: they are much slower than those with Intel chipsets, for some reason (possibly translation of data into the busses). I do not know whether this is true for other CPUs, whether Intel or others.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[CrispuloV]

Hello,
I don't know if your processor is Slot1 or FCPGA. For Slot1, may I recommend the AOpen AX64. I just built a PC with a P3/667 slot1 processor with this motherboard and it was very stable. Now for S370, I have also good experience with the Soyo 7VCA.
Now it may have been true as late as 3 months ago that VIA based boards were a lot slower than Intel boards but this is not true anymore. Enhancements have been made. They compare quite favorably now, maybe not as fast but fast enough to be not noticeable.
Also, only the Intel BX chipset has good performance and it does not have PCI divider of 4 which you need as your processor is 133Mhz. Your PCI bus will be overclocked if you use a BX based board. (The P3BF is a very good board but may not be the right one for you for this reason)
Hope this helps.

[Dr Mordrid]

CrispuloV;

You underestimate the P3B-F.

When you set DIP switches 6-10 all to the off position it gives a CPU/DRAM speed of 133mhz and a PCI bus clock of 33.3 mhz, right on spec. It's in the manual on page 18....

Also you can use an FCPGA CPU in a Slot1 board like the P3B-F by use of a slotkey adapter. This causes NO performance hit at all. Just get a good one like the MSI MS-6905 Master or Abit SlotKET. Avoid the MSI MS-6905 Dual as it's made for PPGA Celerons in a dualie setup and doesn't support the proper voltages.

This is the setup Toms Hardware used in their infamous tests that showed a BX chipped board with 133mhz SDRAM's was much faster than a dual channel RAMBUS setup.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 04 July 2000).]

[dchip]

I can also vouch for the P3B-F.. I have the 5/2/1 model (I blindly thought I would need the 2 ISA slots).. Anyway, it's "JumperFree" and has been pretty much trouble-free for me. I can vouch for that setting Doc mentioned. It is on page 18 as stated. I used the jumper-free process on mine and made all the clock settings etc. in the bios. Works perfectly. Maybe I will fiddle with the jumpers one day and get even more out of my CPU which by the way is only a P-III 450.

As for video capture the board has also been just great. Throughput with my Matrox G200 and hard drives has been flawless. I put a Promise Ultra 66 HDD controller on it but I probably never needed it.

[Driver]

It was mentioned that a P3 FC-PGA could be used in a slot1 connection via a key adaptor, now is there anyway to do the reverse, put a slot1 processor in a FC-PGA connector? I like the new Intel 815E chipset but it seems that all the motherboards that i have seen with it have a FC-PGA connection whereas I have a P3 500Mhz with a slot1 connection that I would like to use. Does anyone now if any motherboard manufacturer plans on releasing a slot1 i815E motherboard? Thanks for any info.

[IM_Riktar]

Let me throw a warning in about the Iwill VD133Pro motherboard with onboard raid. I picked one up and while I can say that the motherboard is quite fast and very stable it has one flaw regarding NLE work: The IRQ assignment is shared with the AGP/PCI 1 slot and can't be changed! The bios does offer assignable IRQ's but when you get to the onboard raid it is in the same option line as the AGP/ PCI 1 slot. The result is dropped frames when doing extended captures since the Marvel and the RAID are both contending for the same IRQ.

It really is a shame they didn't put the IRQ assignment for the RAID controller on any other PCI slot since the board is quite solid running Win 9x as well as NT 4.0

I talked to Iwill about it and was told they would get back to me about a possible bios revision to resolve the problem. Until then,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,

I guess it's back to my Soyo 7VCA.

[This message has been edited by IM_Riktar (edited 04 July 2000).]

[This message has been edited by IM_Riktar (edited 04 July 2000).]

[Dr Mordrid]

Driver;

No, you can't put a Slot1 into a PPGA or FCPPGA board.

Slot1 and even SlotA (the Athlon slot) are both on the way out. In a short time you won't see them on new boards at all.

The slots were only used to place the CPU cache closer to the CPU die. Now that the caches are moving onto the die itself there is no longer a need for the curcuit board.

Dr. Mordrid

[Driver]

Dr. Mordrid,
Thanks for the info. I was hoping for better news but I guess I should have expected something like this would happen.

Now, is the VIA Apollo Pro133A chipset anygood? I had really preferred the i815e but seeing that that isn't going to happen I'm going to have to consider going elsewhere.

[CrispuloV]

Dear Dr. Mordrid,

[CrispuloV]

Dear Dr. Mordrid,
I'm sorry to be so late in replying. We have a very bad storm where we are and power was down for a while.
Anyway, please accept my apologies on the P3BF. I stand corrected. I assumed, wrongly, that it being a BX board, it did not have the proper PCI divider. Apologies to Wiken, too, for having volunteered wrong info.
regards,
BG

[Dave Lawton]

I know from previous threads that early Abit boards have given problems in the past.

Has anyone any comment on recent Abit BE6-II

Dave

[kefoo]

I've been using a BE6-II for a couple of months now. It seems to be doing pretty well, although I haven't been able to accomplish much capturing since my WD hard disk keeps crashing and the replacement they sent me was defective. What capturing I have done has gone off without a hitch. I've heard some complaints about Abit boards, but I haven't had any problems with it. The two on board ultra 33 AND two onboard ultra 66 connectors were a big selling point for me. It's a great board for overclocking. The BIOS lets you set the FSB speed in 1 MHz increments over much of its range, it supports speeds between 66 (I think) and 200 MHz, the AGP and PCI clock dividers are user settable, and the cpu voltage can be adjusted in the BIOS.

Kevin

[CrispuloV]

I, too, have heard good things about this board, and it is an ASUS. One site I have seen which has a lot about this board is http://www.overclockers.com/ Maybe you could read up on it before you decide. It is a slot 1 board. Tom's Hardware has done a VIA 694X motherboard roundup with lots of boards. Try that out also.