Marvel G200-TV and Promise Ultra66

[Brent]

I think there is a Bios upgrade from Promise. Try that out.

[tony]

I have made some changes to my system configuration that have allowed me to record at highest quality MJPEG with CD quality (44 kHz 16-bit stereo) sound:

Moved my 18 GB drive to IDE2 of the Promise Ultra66 controller and added a 10GB Maxtor 7200RPM ATA66 2MB cache drive connected to IDE1 of the Promise controller. My system drive (with 256 MB fixed Win95 swap file) is located on the 10GB drive (C and I have dedicated the 18GB Western digital drive (D for video capture.

Since I use my Western Digital drive (IDE2 on the Promise Controller) for video capture only, I changed the mode of the drive to ATA33 (UDMA Mode 2). This fixed the sound problem. ATA33 has the same continuous write performance as ATA66, so I did not compromise video recording quality. My C: drive (IDE1 on the Promise controller) is still set at ATA66 (UDMA Mode 4).

I switched sound cards to a SoundBlaster PCI 512 (just because I prefer the card, not because it fixed the problem).

Changed Award BIOS settings to Manual PCI bus settings with IRQ 3,4,5 set as legacy ISA. This forces the Matrox Marvel to IRQ 9 on my system with no IRQ conflicts. IRQ 3 and 4 are for ISA cards in my system and IRQ 5 is used by my SoundBlaster PCI 512 sound card for SoundBlaster 16 Compatibility (even thought I have it set to Legacy ISA in my BIOS).

I disabled the Boot Sector Virus protection setting in the Award BIOS, since I noticed that this actually performs periodic checking that reduces continuous write disk performance (To see this for yourself, try running scandisk with the virus protection on and watch scan disk restart numerous times as the drive contents change. Then run scandisk without the boot sector virus checking enabled. It runs fine without restarting).

I still have not figured out how to enable ATA66 on my video capture drive without causing the sound distortion. I have Promise and FIC stumped as they are still trying to figure it out. Until they do, I am running fine with this system configuration.

My IRQs are as follows:

IRQ0: System Timer
IRQ1: Keyboard
IRQ2: Interrupt Controller
IRQ3: Ethernet
IRQ4: Modem
IRQ5: SoundBlaster 16 Compatibility
IRQ6: Floppy Controller
IRQ7: LPT1
IRQ8: Clock
IRQ9: Marvel G200-TV AGP
IRQ10: SoundBlaster PCI 512
IRQ11: Promise Ultra66
IRQ12: Mouse
IRQ13: Numeric Data Processor
IRQ14: Mainboard Primary IDE
IRQ15: Mainboard Primary IDE

Note that I have disabled USB, Serial Port 1, and Serial Port 2 in the Award BIOS.

[tony]

One other configuration change: I bumped my AMD K6-2 400 clock up to 450 by changing the CPU voltage to 2.4 (from 2.2) and changing the clock multiplier to 4.5x. After changing the clock, I reinstalled the AMD Windows 95B patch.

I successfully ran the K6-2 400 at 500MHz (reported as 506 by the motherboard) by changing the CPU voltage to 2.7 and the clock multiplier to 5x, but I backed off from this until I get a better cooling fan (one of those peltier (sp?) effect coolers).

[TnT]

The updated BIOS does not solve the audio problem.