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**Dr Mordrid** · 8 March 2001, 19:18

Tbird is OK, just beware of VIA chipsets. IF you're going to use a TBird or Duron use a board with an AMD chipset. They are far less troublesome.

An interesting article on Athlons & editing was published in the WWUG forums. Learn what you can from it;

http://www.wwug.com/articles/lindebo...ideo/index.htm

The best part of this article is this summary of AMD users;

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THERE ARE ALWAYS TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY

It has been my personal conviction that the AMD market is made up of two mindsets and they basically fall into these two categories:

POWERFUL: One group buys an Athlon because they are "powerful" and so they build everything around that fact. They overbuild, maximize, prod, squeeze, cajole and otherwise milk every last ounce of performance out of the machine. They buy the best of everything. They buy the biggest and baddest CPU that AMD makes on a genuine AMD motherboard with genuine AMD chipset. Everything they buy is like this and builds on this foundation ... and they rarely have issues that later pop up because of this. These users subscribe to Boomer's Law which basically states: "If buying a machine doesn't make you go 'Ouch!' now, it most certainly will later."

ECONOMICAL: The second group buys them because they can "save" money with an AMD. They start from that mindset and they usually buy the cheapest of everything... Given the choice of two competing products, they will almost always opt for the lesser cost option. When their machines are done, they will be a "hodge podge" of parts -- and usually they won't work. But still, they'll have spent a chunk of change building it and manufacturers like Pinnacle, Ulead, Adobe, ADS Technologies and others will bare the brunt of their ire when their machine doesn't perform as expected.

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As far as SSE goes both the TBird and the Intel chips have that so it's a non-issue. What SSE offers are advanced matrix math operations that often speed SSE enabled codecs and graphics software.

I recently heard that the JVC 7800 SVHS deck is going for ~ $280 now. This would be a better choice of SVHS deck as it has a built-in time base corrector (TBC), a major feature for the production of high quality tapes.

SBLive can be problematic due to the PCI bushawging it does. On an AMD/VIA system this would present a higher risk as the VIA chipsets have slower PCI and memory busses. Other PCI boards, particularl the Turtle Beach cards, are better.

In any case disable the ISA emulation modes a PCI card uses and any special effects that the card activates by default (reverb, spatial, 3D etc.) when editing. This applies to both PCI and ISA cards. These features add a lot of system overhead.

Dr. Mordrid

[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 09 March 2001).]

**IM_Riktar** · 9 March 2001, 06:06

From my own personal experience with onboard RAID I can plainly state several things:

1. Highpoint controllers don't impress me based on their performance with NLE. However to be fair read point 2.

2. ANY onboard raid chip that has it's IRQ hardwired to share with the AGP slot is going to have all kinds of problems when capturing video since the AGP card (Marvel G400) and the RAID controller have to share the IRQ. This results in dropped frames. I had this problem with a Iwill VD 133 Pro motherboard. Good motherboard from a any standpoint but NLE. I still use it as my Server/dialout computer to the internet.

3. The onboard RAID controller in my present motherboard (MSI 694D-AR Pro) which has a Promise RAID controller works just fine. My old drives which were hooked to a Fasttrak 33 were recognised just fine by the onboard Fasttrak and that saved me alot of headaches reformatting. By the way this motherboard does NOT make the RAID controller share its IRQ with the AGP slot.

My experience with this setup has pretty much sworn me to only look at motherboards that have a Promise controller as the RAID solution. Of course if I already had a motherboard that I was happy with I would probably just go for the Fasttrak 100 by itself.

But for the money this combination has worked without any problems. I have NO regrets with this purchase.

[This message has been edited by IM_Riktar (edited 09 March 2001).]

**AndrewDV** · 14 March 2001, 06:31

Hi,

I just finished an upgrade to the IWill 266-R paired with an AMD 1.1GHz processor. Simply put, it works great!

I had many conflicts with my older FIC AZ-11. All of which are gone. The Marvel G400 is working better as well.

The only drawback is that I had to re-install the OS for the new chipset. That's ok, since I've had plenty of practice from experimenting with the Marvel and Win2K ;-{>

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IWiLL 266-R AMI raid controller -new NLE box

IWiLL 266-R AMI raid controller -new NLE box

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