Via chipset issues.

[vigilante]

Where can I dl'd a new motherboard and... lol, n/m
Ok, seriously... This past december I built a workstation to help my editing go a lot smoothly. I ended up going with with the Soyo Dragon since it would allow me to use my four HD's, came with a sound card and ethernet. The board worked fine until I needed to transfer with firewire, things got complicated and after looking through many forums, have concluded that it might be because of the Via chipset it uses, but that is a whole issues on its own, perhaps for another discussion . Well, due to the fact I am currently under a big deadline I don't have anymore time to try and work it outs o I'm looking into a new motherboard. I would appreciate any suggestions on stable dv editing motherboards. It needs to support an Athlon +1600 chip and ddr. should I go for raid again? I'm looking in asus and abit. Thanks for your help.

[leebo]

Stay away from ECS. It uses the SIS 735 chipset, which, I'm not convinced is a problem. But ECS boards appear to have many quality problems (as reported on a private ECS forum). It was the worst nightmare I've experienced with a MB to date!

Can't beat RAID, but stay away from onboard raid. My (little) experience with it is that it's a "reduced functionality" system that only allows you to connect 2 drives for Raid 0.

[magelucid]

"The board worked fine until I needed to transfer with firewire, things got complicated [...] "

Hrmms, as informative as that error is I can't seem to suggest a solution! =P I have a Soyo Dragon+ and it works perfect with a Athlon XP 1600+ firewire advc100, firewire harddrive enclosure, and a firewire compact flash reader. I'm using windows2000 sp2, latest VIA drivers from the website, maxtor 40gb 7200, 256mb ddr ram, and adobe premiere. There have been some complications in certain areas with via chipsets but I have a kt133 board also and it's been running flawless since 1999. Maybe you should try a few things before you totally give up and blame the hardware?

[vigilante]

Maybe you should try a few things before you totally give up and blame the hardware?

Ok, how about over a month of endless hours and sleepless nights trying to fix the problem. I guess you're right when you said I wasn't specific about the complications, but I didn't feel it mattered, notheless here goes. My problem seems to be one quiete a few others share. I can transfer DV from the camera perfectly well, but when it comes time to send it to the camera, I either freeze up, reboot, or don't get a signal sent through at all. Now I have tried just about every trick I have been able to find. I have configured the firewire card to have it's own IRQ, I have dl'd and updated the drivers to just about everything that might need updating, I have tried multible configurations with the hard drives, have defraged them, reinstalled the OS at least 5 times from scratch, reinstalled wink 2k in standard mode, downgraded from win2k to win 98, removed the raid drives, tried every capture program I could get my hands on, upgraded firewire cards, configured and re-configured the bios, and perhaps a dozen other things, and quite frankly have not gotten any results. Now I have tried not blaming the hardware, I believe I have given it a fair chance,maybe it's simply the fact that my motherboard is defective, but after finding post after post of similiar or identical issues, I've decided that I don't have time to play around with it anymore. I have a client is growing more impacient everyday, and need to find a motherboard that has been know to give results without monkeying around to much. I appreciate you trying to help, but unfortunately I have given up on the board. Here is my configuration:

Soyo Dragon Plus board
AMD Athlon XP +1600
512 mb DDR
30gb WD HD
100gb WD HD
on board sound/LAN
DV200 firewire card

[Roadwart]

You don`t say what OS you are using. I connected my DV cam via firewire under win98 & had all sorts of problems. It would work for a while, then stop & the only way to fix it was a reformat & reinstall. I then discovered that win98 doesn`t support firewire correctly & so I installed winME instead. I have since had no probs at all capping from the DV cam.

[vigilante]

Win2k and win 98 had no luck with either.
the previous workstaion ran perfectly under win98 so that is not an issue.
Thank you.

[patrickm]

well, this may sound stupid, but make sure you've got both service pack 2 for win2k and directx 8.0a and the dx8 dv/video capture update (or directx 8.1, which is basically the two put together)

[vigilante]

One of the first things I tried.

[Betamax]

contact your vendor for a bios-upgrade of the motherboard, or go to the homepage of the producer of your motherboard.
My motherboard got a VIA-chipset (don't know the brand of the mb) with AMD 1.2Ghz, and yep, also I got 4 IDE's (which 2 of them are raid).
I've had a lot of probs with this board, although the board was produced at the end of 2000.
Since I did the bios-upgrade last September, I've got no problems at all. Unfortionally I had to reset the entire bios-settings again (so write them down before you start - it's quit a job to find out the correct settings of the bios).
I didn't need to reinstall the system-os again, after the upgrade.
I use 2 ATA100 disks, with w2K and wME (2 seperate partitions for the os's) and it realy works great.

Small tip (?) : if also you have a VIA-chipset, don't install the 4-in-1 drivers, I experianced my hard- and software works worse with these drivers than without it.

[vigilante]

My Bios is already flashed to the latetest version the manufacturer is providing. I also did try running the progs without the via 4 in 1 drivers, but I am beyond the point of trying to repair. I don't have time trying something new only not to have it work later. I am thinking of going with the gigabyte GA-7DXR, what does anybody know about this particular motherboard?