Advice

[Leslie Davidson]

Hi, I have been having alot of trouble with stuttering playback and have rebuilt my system all but for the Power supply. Matrox has been fabulous and replaced the G400 card which felt like my last hope. But the problem persists. The stuttering is minimal on the first playback and gets worse with subsequent playbacks. The stutters are in different locations each time and the audio is not affected at all.
I have work to get out and have been down for about 2 mos. now so I'm starting to seriously consider my options.
My 2 questions are:
1- Anyone have ideas on Power supplies to try? I have a 300W HIPRO now.
My system currently includes:
ABIT BX133 Raid Mother board (I'm not using the Highpoint 370 as I read it had pblms)
C= 40 Gig Maxtor 7,200rpm running on IDE at DMA 33
D= 2 40 Gig Maxtors 7,200rpm Raided together with a promise fast track Raid 0+2 stripe
512 RAM corsair 133
W98se
PIII 850
G400-TV card on IRQ 10 alone
All FAQ #33's done
vcache set min and max to 8192

I have enjoyed the G400-TV and would like to continue to use it especially as I don't want to loose the support of Haig & Co.

If I wind up upgrading to an RT2000 I think I would go with some turnkey which contained it as I can't spend the time on set up at this point. (and it may stutter anyway)

So question # 2 is. I hope this question isn't a no no on this forum. I am just feeling so defeated and sooooo dumb. Whose turnkey RT2000's are good? I found a site called 123DV which has what looks to be a good price, but they don't elucidate on which MB they use etc. Probably propriatary info. Does anyone know of such things? I'm starting to feel a little panicked over my work deadlines and could easily make a foolish decision. HELP! Please.. Thanks Leslie

[wkulecz]

Dump the Abit motherboard IMHO.

Power supply problems are usually non-repeatable "random" lockups and crashes or data corruption. Go ahead and swap it out as its one of the easiest things to do, but I'll be really surprised if that's your problem. I had to replace my powersupply when I went from dual PII-400 to Dual PIII-500 in my P2BD as the 3.3V line couldn't supply the extra required current. As I said, symptom was non-repeatable lockups. I looked at the specs of the PIII and my power supply -- saw the problem immediately.

You don't mention your sound card -- see the thread on SB Live! cards -- likely to be another problem if that's what you have.

--wally.

[Leslie Davidson]

Hi What Mother board should I use? I do have a sound Blaster Live MP3 but no via chipset so I thought I was ok there. Tahnks Leslie

[wkulecz]

Dump the SB Live! Read Doc's thread about Creative finally owning up to SB Live problems and I think you'll see he has had good results with Turtle Beach Santa Cruz cards.

I use old SB16 ISA. Meets my needs, but I get an annoying "render" whenever I import a DV clip, presumably because these old cards don't do 48K audio.

I've an Athelon 700 system based on the AMD 750 northbridge with Via "superIO" and it appears to work fine for DV editing using the builtin Via sound chip. Not all Via chips are bad, just the northbridge chips and anything combined with highpoint IDE controllers.

--wally.

[Leslie Davidson]

Good Morining, I picked up what seems to be the last ISA SB16 in a 5 county area. I figured I'd try it if it works I'll invest in the Santa Cruz. I also rand the Promise Utility, can't quite figure out what it would tell me or more accurately, what I should look for. Any thoughts on that? Thanks Leslie.

[Dr Mordrid]

Turtle Beach update;

The Santa Cruz mixer has problems with some other devicves that install an additional mixer of their own (RT-2000 for one).

This is NOT a deal breaker though as Turtle Beach has responded with a patch for their mixer so it can coesist in such environments.

Here's the FTP link;

ftp://ftp.voyetra.com/pub/tbs/santacru/scruz405.zip

This patch is for all OS's including Win2K.

Dr. Mordrid

[John Wray]

I recently tried a Santa Cruz. Unfortunately, it didn't like running in my system. It refuses to share IRQs, and this is a problem in my system. I'm suprised that this doesn't seem to be a problem for other video-minded people - I don't think my system is that unusual.

All the cards and devices I currently have in the system share IQRs OK (even my Marvel). But put a Santa Cruz in any PCI slot and the system locks up as soon as the drivers load.

I've only seen passing mention of this need for an unshared IRQ in a couple of reviews of the Santa Cruz (although the manual is explicit about it - it says that attempting to have the Santa Cruz share an IRQ will lock up the system, and that was exactly my experience). I'm just suprised this doesn't seem to be considered much of a problem.

John