help me figure out what's wrong

[schmosef]

I recently helped a friend build a new DV system to house his Matrox RT.2500.

The system specs are as follows:

Asus P4P 800 SE
P4 3.2GHz 1MB Cache 800MHz FSB
2GB DDR400 Corsair RAM
Matrox P650 AGP 64MB
Creative Labs Audigy 2 ZS
OS Drive: Western Digital EIDE 120GB
Resource Drive: Western Digital Raptor SATA 150GB
Export Drive: Western Digital Raptor SATA 150GB
LG 16/16 DVD+/-RW
SPI 400W PSU

Thanks to great advice from Doc and Haig (both recent and past) setup was a snap and Adobe Premiere is working just fine.

There is a problem though. There's interference on the video signal whenever the hard drives are being accessed (which is pretty much always).

I had a similar problem once and Haig recommended I try a new power supply. It worked that time, it didn't work this time.

I'm going to try a different AGP card tomorrow, just to see if it's the P650 that's at fault.

If it's not the P650, what else could it be? I guess the next thing to try replacing is the motherboard. Is it likely that the motherboard is at fault? This one is baffling me. I hope it's the P650 because at least I'd have an answer.

[schmosef]

Ok, well I found an old G450 AGP card and used it to confirm that the problem was with the new P650 AGP card that we bought for the system.

Go figure...

Side note:
I knew a guy use worked as some sort of manager at Celestica and at the time they were manufacturing cards for Matrox (Millenium PCI days). He said that they didn't get the contract for the Mystique (he told me that the internal name was twister or tornado or something like that) because of all the quality problems that were Celestica's fault. He told me a story once of a big batch of cards that got rejected (I don't remember if they got shipped or were caught earlier) because the cards were oriented the wrong way when they were put into the machine that did the surface mounting of the ICs and chips ended up being soldiered in completely the wrong place.