which thunderbird MB to use

[Enrico Ng]

I currently have a MSI-6167 with an athlon 650.
I have a Matrox G400TV with a SBlive value. I also am using a FastTrak66 RAID.

When I capture video, I have bus noise problems. I talked to the people at promise and they say it is probably a MB problem. I also heard that there are many problems with the VIA chipset.
Anyways, I plan on upgrading to a thunderbird so I will be getting another MB.
I wondering if anyone using a G400TV, Fasttrak66, and a sb live can rec. a MB for me to use?

Thanx

[RoGuE]

I personally wouldn't use a Promise FastTrak66 in ANY motherboard that isn't based on the Intel 'BX'.

I've tried a FT66 in several Athlon and PIII Via-based boards, and two different Intel i815 boards - all suffered from bus noise when recording video to the RAID array, sliding the PCI bus utilisation to minimum reduced the problem but did not eliminate it.

[Dr Mordrid]

Problems on the i815's is no suprise. They have lower PCI and memory performance than the BX boards.

AS for the VIA boards, I'd limit agreement on that to the KT133 boards. The KT133a boards are faster, especially if you use 'em with a 266mhz bus & DDR memory. In this case they are very fast.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 18 January 2001).]

[Pooh]

Get an ABIT KT7. Works fine with my Fasttrack 66. It's also the dogs b*****ks when it comes to tewaking your socket A thunderbird.

You could even get the KT7 Raid for an extra £20 and sell your fasttrack as it has trhe hihgpoint raid controller built in.

I've got a Athlon 1G running very happily at 1.1G and the 384Mb of PC133 ram causes it no problems.

From what i can gather an 800 athlon will clock comfortably at 1G provided you have sufficient cooling. All you ned to undo the multiplier lock is an HB pencil and a steady hand.

Happy tweakin'

Regards

Pooh

[Dr Mordrid]

You might not want to get that KT7a-RAID. I've seen several posts recently to the affect that it places the RAID controller on the same IRQ as the AGP slot. Notgood.

At least using a Fasttrak you can change the slot it's in to change IRQ's.

Tip of the day: when you remove a card in an attempt to change it's IRQ with a slot change do not reinstall it until you have rebooted Windows. Otherwise Windows might well "remember" the IRQ it was on and that IRQ will follow it 'round the board.

This won't happen on all boards, but enough to be careful.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 18 January 2001).]

[Enrico Ng]

well I got the fasttrak so that I could get faster data rates so I could capture video better. if there is some other low priced way I can increase my data rate or stripe my drives, I'd be happy to hear it, does that KT7 mb have the ability to stripe drives?

[This message has been edited by Enrico Ng (edited 19 January 2001).]

[KRSESQ]

Enrico:

The Highpoint RAID controller on the Abit KT7-RAID mobo does indeed support striping, but I have to agree with the Doctor.

As far as I know this mobo is relatively new and it could take several generations before all the bugs get worked out.

I'm with Pooh on the KT7 (sans RAID). I'll probably go with this setup when I'm ready to upgrade.

Kevin

[Pooh]

I'm not sure about the KT7A but the KT7 does not share an IRQ with the AGP slot. Of the top of my head I think it is PCI slot 5 that the raid controller shares and IRQ with.

This is a superb source for info about the KT7 / KT7 Raid. http://go.to/kt7faq

Here's some of what it says.

" In the ABIT KT7, IRQs are shared by the following devices:

"INT Pin 1": AGP card and PCI Slot 1
"INT Pin 2": PCI Slot 2 and PCI Slot 3 and ACPI (if enabled)
"INT Pin 3": PCI Slot 5 (and HPT370 controller in KT7-RAID)
"INT Pin 4": PCI Slot 4 and PCI Slot 6 and USB
Note you can force a particular IRQ number to be used by a particular "INT Pin #" using the PNP/PCI Configurations Setup in the BIOS. This allows you to force a certain slot to use a specific IRQ. You should not normally need to do this. A fuller explanation of this process is given in the BIOS section in the question "What on earth is the interrupt pin assignment table on p3-43 of the manual all about?!". Note that if you have ACPI enabled, Windows will ignore the assignments made in the BIOS and allow ACPI to determine this.

This is not a design fault of the KT7! PCI devices are only allocated four programmable interrupt pins by the VT82C686A Southbridge chip used in the KT133 chipset. The same is also true of almost all other motherboard chipsets. The PCI bus must therefore nearly always share IRQs on some or all of its PCI slots. What makes the KT7 slightly unsual is that you get six PCI slots, an AGP slot and an ISA slot, which mean that all the slots may need to share! As I said above, this is not usually a problem and you should be grateful for all those slots!"


Regards

Pooh

[This message has been edited by Pooh (edited 19 January 2001).]

[wkulecz]

In windows 2000 with APCI kernel, interrupt sharing should not be a problem. It has not been for me on seven differnet systems that I've set up for myself and others.

Under win9x having interrupt sharing work correctly is the exception.

--wally.

[bogieman]

I'll second what both Pooh and Wally have written - I am running an Abit KT7-Raid with a 1 GHz Athlon under Win2K without any problems. Per the manual, AGP and PCI #1 share interrupts and the Highpoint Raid controller shares with PCI #5 as Pooh has written. All my slots are filled and are happily sharing one interrupt as assigned by Win2K as follows:
AGP Slot - All-in-Wonder Radeon
PCI #1 - Adaptec SCSI Controller
PCI #2 - Generic Fast Ethernet Controller
PCI #3 - TI IEEE 1394 Firewire
PCI #4 - Matrox Millenium Display Adapter
PCI #5 - Broadway MPEG Capture Card
ISA - Soundblaster AWE64

Device Manager shows the AGP, PCI #1 thru #4, and the Highpoint Raid Controller are all happily sharing IRQ 11, the Broadway and Matrox Millenium do not get Interrupts assigned and the Soundblaster is on IRQ 5. I've got the Parallel Port disabled so IRQ 7 is open as are IRQ's 9 and 10. I don't pretend to understand how Win2K assigns the IRQ's with ACPI but it all works.

I am not using the Highpoint in Raid mode but am using the primary device on each channel for my capture and archive drives and have no problems capturing video.

I did need to upgrade the motherboard Bios to version WW posted on Abit's site to get everything working right, but since then it's run perfectly, even with the FSB at 110 MHz so the processor and memory are overclocked to 1.1 GHz and 143 MHz, respectively.

Based on my experience, I highly recommend this Abit board.