Final discussion ? :) BX or i815?

[Riddek]

Like Jkun, I, too am finding it difficult to track down a P3B-F way up here in Canada. Would a CUBX perform similarly for NLE if I disable the UDMA66 controller chip and installed a FastTrak 100 RAID array? Or should I keep looking for a P3B-F?

[A_BIT]

It's sad, but doesn't the acronym CUBX sound like....

See you, BX.

As in this may be the last BX mobo ASUS will make.

[Pertti]

Anybody know a friend of a friend who could drop a little goodbye present at Rampuss HQ ?

(No your honour, I had no way of knowing, what they were up to )

[Riddek]

Hey Grigory,
Have you had a chance to try uncompressed captures with the CUBX yet? I'm having trouble finding a P3B-F so I'm wondering if the CUBX is a viable alternative for NLE if I disable the cmd onboard controller and added a FastTrak RAID array. What kind of configuration are you running yours in?

[Jkun]

Why disable the CMD controller? I have a CUBX in a PC here at work (not for NLE, but for work ) and the CMD controller performs OK in Win98SE, and from what I hear, in W2K there's a driver on the Asus website.

Fasttrak ... I'd rather wait for the new generation of RAID controller based on that Intel DSP chip. Doc has one in betatest but he's tightlipped about it. Should be out sopon, and from what he says it's worth the wait

J-kun

[Grigory]

Well,

CUBX itself is very stable, except the cmd controller.
I am using Win2000 for myself and have no problems until... my son said that suddenly his "own" win98 (I use triple boot) began to start in 5 minutes and then did not work at all.
Investigations shown:
1. Old WD drive I have used as system drive for 5 years began to show SMART failure warning on BX controller. The warning was "critical" and non-repairable with WD utility. CUBX forced me to hit f1 every boot. I decided to move the drive as slave to cmd channel. Everything was fine in 2000, but cmd controller failed in 98SE in pair with Fujitsu MPD drive. Had to move WD back to BX channel. The drive is still working as it can (slow). BTW it had the least amount of lost chains and similar troubles among my hard drives.
2. As I said before, cmd controller was unable to detect Fujitsu drive if it was used in pair with Creative DVD ROM, and failed to work in DMA66 with single Fujitsu
and two tested ata66 cables - one from Asus, another from Abit boards.

Good.
Very stable and easy configures my:
a) ATI rage fury pro AGP (sorry, I am not Matrox user anymore)
b) Canopus DV raptor in the first PCI slot
c) Hollywood+ MPEG decoder in the second
d) 3com 100 mbit network card in the third slot
e) SB 128 PCI in 5-th slot
f) USR ISA intenal modem card

I also tried to add TV tuner card without troubles, but later decided to stay with Canopus DV Raptor analog capture ability.

In win2000, everything works very stable and fast. I am using DV editing, so the hardware requirements, like drive speed, are not very high.
Abit bp6 constantly gave me problems with manual setting of IRQ, strange locks when I coould not power down or reset PC except taking the power cord out from the wall, ...

CUBX uses internal thermal sensor inside CPU, so the temperature shown is realistic.

I also tried to capture analog video with datarate up to 10 mbytes/sec. Everything works fine. My hard drives are able to work only up to 12 mbytes/sec.

As for performance, single PIII 933 is definitely better than dual 500 celerons.

Benchmarks show good values for CPU and RAM speed, although they actually not important and differ by 1-2% from vendor to vendor.

If I start from zero, I probably would like to build dual PIII on via 133 pro motherboard from Micro Star. I am not sure that this will work for all possible configurations, but since I am not using Gxx video and use DV raptor,...

Unfortunately, I am serious.
Last trouble went away after I killed G400 DH OEM "made in China" trying to update its bios. The program displayed strange error message and then the card died after power-off.
I used G200 "made in Canada" for few days as temporal replacement and that made Abit BP6 working more stable, and, to my surprise, gave me better picture on monitor with "only"
230 MHz RAMDAC compared with G400 300 MHz. Strange, isn't it? Finally, I went to ATI card and have much less problems with avi and mpeg playback, overlay video in DV raptor, mpeg4 playback, overall stability.
I also like the crispness of ATI card picture.


Maybe this year is not too good for me, G400 trouble is only minor problem.

Grigory

[Riddek]

Jkun,
Fasttrak ... I'd rather wait for the new generation of RAID controller based on that Intel DSP chip. Doc has one in betatest but he's tightlipped about it.

Huh? I haven't seen any posts on this. Doc, can you (unofficially) comment? Is it worth the wait?

[Patrick]

Maybe this year is not too good for me, G400 trouble is only minor problem.

Grigory, I hope you're Ok. There's a lot of us who certainly appreciate your input at this forum. As someone who also has an Asus CUBX board, I'm reading your posts in this thread with much interest. Keep up the good work!

[Grigory]

Hi Patric

I got several troubles similar to yours that year: two times criminal people helped me to reduce the money amount in my pocket. First time in march, next time 10 days ago.
These were selling me a car that appeared to be stolen somewhere in Europe.
Then thiefs were happy to take by bag with documents and a lot of money from my car: one is asking questions how to drive to some place, another taking the bag from passenger seat through the window, very common trick in Moscow. I was going to bank, so the cash amount was very big.

In front of multithousand USD loss, 190 USD for faulty G400 seems as joke.
Unfortunately, nothing was covered by insurance, so nobody will buy me new 3CCD camcoder

Returning to CUBX, it is still very stable in overclocked mode. My decision to move to Asus again was based on very good stability of Asus boards at my company. I was involved in simultaneous using a set of more then 10 computers recently, all with asus boards, and all of them are working for up to 3 years without any stability problems.
Grigory
Grigory

[Patrick]

Grigory, sorry to hear that you're having problems with the criminal element in Moscow. It's unfortunate that these scumbags exist everywhere in the world.

If the situation continues to get out of hand there, I'll see what I can do about sending over a detachment of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

[Grigory]

Patric,

Everything is under control in Moscow. Thiefs are also under control, I suppose. That is why ALL documents were returned next day by some person without noticeable extra charge. Interesting is that credit cards were returned too.
This happened after I had some very strange conversation in police station and then with upper policeman who controlled them.
Now I know what the phrase CRIMINAL POLICE means. Just a subdivision of more powerful organization .

Finally I am happy that I will be able to use my driver licence in Colorado next two weeks, otherwise I would get trouble with transportation.

I seriously doubt that metro is already built in Denver area
Grigory

[cjyo~]

Just a note...

I finally got my CUBX (replacement for a CUSL2). It installed perfectly in my RT2000 system and is working great the first time! I haven't been able to test captures yet, but playback and editing are fine.

Of course, I did use all the installation tips I learned from a week of wrestling with the CUSL2. Thanks for your help everyone!

AGP-G400Flex
PCI:
1-empty
2-Fasttrack 100
3-Diamond MX300 soundcard
4-RT2000
5-empty
6-D-LINK 530TX NIC

[cjyo~]

oops, forgot to mention...

I disabled the onboard CMD Ultra66 controller and didn't even bother with it, since I read a lot of bad things about it (and I have the Promise Fasttrack).

I also read somewhere that one of the new CUBX models has a built in Promise Ultra100 controller - that could be very nice.

[Jkun]

The new CUBX-L and CUBX-E are quite different from the old CUBX.

The CUBX-L (for Light) has no onboard extra IDE controller; the CUBX-E (Enhanced) has a ATA100 controller instead of the 66 on the old CUBX. Don't know if it's Promise.

However, the new CUBX-L and E have a 5-2 configuration of PCI-ISA slots, and I am not sure if they bothered including a PCI arbiter for this configuration. I.e. in the owrst case you have only 4 PCI slots available (5th is slave slot and therefor not much use).

The old CUBX is already hard to find. But worth looking for as it has 6 master PCI slots.

J-kun

[ScoobyDoo]

Hmm, some interesting information here.

I've been researching an editing machine for work - ensuring compatability seems to be key. So having read the tested mobo list, I've got a CUSL2 arriving tomorrow (and now I find this thread!).

The rest of the system I've spec'd up is:

P3 733
256MB Crucial PC133 RAM
IBM 15GB 75GXP Boot
2 x IBM 45GB 75GXP (RAID 0) on a
Promise FastTrack 100
RT 2000
SB Live! 1024
NetGear 10/100 NIC
Plextor 12 / 10 / 4 CD-R
Pioneer IDE DVD-ROM
Supermicro SC-760 Full Tower Case

Hopefully all the bits should be in by the end of the week, so I'll report back how I get on with this lot.

However, one question!

I can use the CUS in another system if need's be. Would I have a) a better box (performance, stability etc) and b) less hassle setting it up if I went for a P3B-F (which my distributor is still listing)? I don't really want to OC this box, so the downside is having to move to a 100Mhz FSB CPU.

This is going to be a dedicated video editing box.

Cheers,

Scooby.

[This message has been edited by ScoobyDoo (edited 17 October 2000).]