Creative fesses up to SBLive vs. VIA problems

[Dr Mordrid]

Actually most VIA issues are related to memory bandwidth, AGP and PCI bus support, which is Northbridge territory.

These functions have been problematic in VIA Northbridges since the old MVP3/Apollo4 days. Why do you think VIA keeps updating the AGP and IRQ drivers? Why do you think it's the only chipset that has to?

Makes you wonder how much legacy code is in their Athlon Northbridges.

At any rate this snowball rolls downhill bigtime and affects all PCI device bandwidth including the IDE interface and bus. Narrow that bandwidth and a high latency device like the SBLive chokes, or comes close to choking, the system. Add another like an SCSI card and....

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 10 April 2001).]

[paulcs]

<font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size="2">Originally posted by Vidgal:
Although it works great for video editing, my ASUS K7V133a is causing me so much instability and grief in other areas: start-up and shut down, file transfer, unexplained freezes -- I am just about to find a good AMD chipset board and put this thing up on ebay.

Should I give up or go another round? </font>

Vidgal, maybe we can help before you shell out another $200.

I had a bit of a struggle with the K7V133a and large file transfers which would eventually result in lockups. Try moving your soundcard to PCI *3*. Also, if you haven't already, you might want to try flashing to BIO 1004 (final).

PCI 1 shares resources with the AGP slot and PCI 2 with the Promise controller. Problems can arise with a soundcard in PCI 4 and 5 and the Promise controller. (God knows why. I've been told the issue is not necessarily unique to Asus Athlon/VIA-based boards, however.) PCI 3 shares only with onboard audio which, presumably, you are not using.

After flashing to 1004 and moving my soundcard to PCI 3, stability improved greatly. I had a single lockup about a week ago when transfering about a gig of data across a network and on to the RAID array. I've done a number of 500 MB file transfers since then, and all has gone well.

Paul
paulcs@speakeasy.net

[paulcs]

Thanks Dr. Mordrid!

Paul
paulcs@speakeasy.net

[TnT]

Guess I'm lucky cause my audio popping problems mysteriously went away awhile ago, and my file transfers are as fast they should be. Although maybe my AGP isn't up to par.