Matrox, ATI, Hauppauge? It's so confusing!

[tomselina]

Don't know if you have your system put together yet, but I have a new 1.2ghz Athlon, 512mb, 30g & 80g HDs, SBlive, and a troublesome ATI AIW Radeon for $1500. I'm going to try the new Matrox 450eTV because my Radeon has been very troublesome with frequent lockups. Could be a conflict with SBLive, but I'll change cards simply because Tech support has no (800) #, and they're in Canada! Found this out the hard way with my last phone bill. Another thing too. The Radeon pumps you up with MPEG2 capture, yada, yada, but in reality you'll loose about 50% of the frames trying to capture at anything better than VCD quality (not suitable for archiving anything of value). The Matrox uses MJPEG which "should" be better. I'll find out soon.

[next]

tomselina- You've got other problems besides your Radeon. It is probably a resource issue. I can capture with advanced bit rates and advanced frame rates well above the VCD standard with my AIW 128 Pro without a problem. I start to see some frames dropped at 740x480 (8% to 10%) but that's fine because I don't capture at that frame rate anyways. (900 TBird, 512 megs)

You say your Radeon is not suitable for archiving anything of value but I have archived a ton and the quality is excellent. Using another capture device may solve your problem because the resources may load in a different order with the change but that's kind of like using a cannon to kill a fly. Plus it may not work if it doesn't solve what I think is simply a resource issue.

Have you checked what IRQ your Radeon is using? Is it sharing it with anything else. Also your SBlive could be a problem. I heard of alot of issues with them. Getting another capture device to solve a potential SBlive issue is not the most efficient approach.

Have you installed the latest VIA 4in1 drivers? Something is draining your CPU (it's not the Radeon). The newest drivers may help.

Have you tweaked your memory settings in your Bios? With your system you should be able to max them out and you'll see a significant increase in memory bandwidth which may help your problem as well.

Good luck, I think your problem can be fixed with a few simple adjustments. Your system must be fairly new based on its components. Tweeak it and you should be fine.