Originally Posted by pkdhar
I have the infamous Soyo SYK7V Dragon+ Mboard. And added Belkin USB2.0/IEEE 1394 Firewire PCI card to use a external Harddisk (lacie 200GB D2) through the firewire interface.
I am intermittent reboots while trying to edit some video content residing on the external disk.Other than that WindowsXP keeps on rebooting before it even reaches the login screen while the external disk is turned on.
My first suspicion was the Firewire Card which uses the infamous NEC IEEE 1394 chipset
http://thetechnozone.com/videobuyersguide/capturecards/IEEE1394card...

Then it is pointing to the VIA motherboard chipsets it is not compatible with. Can anyone with greater knowledge in hardware say that PCI latency issues can affect disk I/O through IEE1394 interface - PCI 2.2 interface - Via chipsets.

Pranab

I have the infamous Soyo SYK7V Dragon+ Mboard. And added Belkin USB2.0/IEEE 1394 Firewire PCI card to use a external Harddisk (lacie 200GB D2) through the firewire interface.
I am intermittent reboots while trying to edit some video content residing on the external disk.Other than that WindowsXP keeps on rebooting before it even reaches the login screen while the external disk is turned on.
My first suspicion was the Firewire Card which uses the infamous NEC IEEE 1394 chipset
http://thetechnozone.com/videobuyersguide/capturecards/IEEE1394card...

Then it is pointing to the VIA motherboard chipsets it is not compatible with. Can anyone with greater knowledge in hardware say that PCI latency issues can affect disk I/O through IEE1394 interface - PCI 2.2 interface - Via chipsets.

Pranab

can anyone tell me how to disable the onboard graphix card on the K7S6A mobo

I'll be jumping on the first decent mainboard manufacturer to prove themselves capable of making a stable, fast Athlon platform from a good chipset (ie. NOT VIA). Might be nVidia, might be SiS.

SiS 745 will be the first Athlon chipset I'll feel comfortable recommending.

Let's have a voting poll for favoured chipsets!!!

VIA = evil :)

48 Ryu this is 44.

So I'm "irrational" am I?
I suspected that, for a long time. (Ever since I fell off roof).

http://bbs.pcstats.com/viahardware/emailthread.cfm?catid=19&threadi...

George Breese:

[q]Quick update:

The Promise patch is for KT266A and P4X266 only. If a Promise PCI device is detected, the Promise device's latency register is set to F0 and the VIA PCI arbitration timer is set to 0F.

[b]The patch also contains all of VIA's previous PCI patches.[/b][/q]

Bold emphasis mine.

[q]The Promise patch is for KT266A and P4X266 only.[/q]

So why is this the only patch that fixes my SBLive crackling on disk access, and I don't have one of the above chipsets? I haven't checked RAID performance yet, but nothing seems to be broken so far with my KT133A setup.

http://www.tech-report.com/news_reply.x/9/0/

http://bbs.pcstats.com/viahardware/emailthread.cfm?catid=19&threadi...

George Breese:

[q][i]Quick update:

The Promise patch is for KT266A and P4X266 only. If a Promise PCI device is detected, the Promise device's latency register is set to F0 and the VIA PCI arbitration timer is set to 0F.

The patch also contains all of VIA's previous PCI patches.[/i][/q]

[q]Ryu, when I read that, I went to www.gamepc.com[/q]

And so you are going to base your views upon the opinion of a single reviewer?

Why not check out XBit, Digit-Life, Ace's, Hard|OCP, or even AMDZone for that matter.

So long as the word integrated components doesn't cause your body to go into [irrationall/i] induced siezures, the platform is a solid competitor against the KT266A. And it's integrated components a match for any mainstream third party product you could buy off the shelf. Once again, check out the above sites. Digit-Life and XBit in particular delve into the nuts and bolts of all the various parts of the IGP and MCP effectively.

As for the Asus A7N266, it is a bastard child product with all the cost and none of the goods, but I didn't recommend the A7N. I recommended the MSI K7N.

Danke and you're welcome as apropos, LiamC and MadMO.

LiamC - I'll have to check out Magik1 again. Last I dealt with it, it was dog slow and riddled with quirks, though that may very well have been specific to the board or model I worked with.

MadManOriginal - Glad you like your prize. I think there's a free forum registration for all our winners as well, as a bonus this month. Look forward to seeing you around.

[q]Dammit!
Huh? What's a 745?[/q]

ROFLMAO. check my post #38 for a PREview of a SiS745 board, then look at http://www.ocworkbench.com/index.stm this to see who will be having a SiS745 board. Ought to be schweet!

Dammit!
#41 has just tossed a new 'variable' into the equation, err, the question ("What AMD mainboard would be a Best Buy?").
Here's what the dude says
<<<<<<<<I myself will wait for some major-brand SiS745 boards to roll out, so maybe 6-8 weeks or so and all reviews will be in, >>>>>>>>

Huh? What's a 745?

37 Ryu Connor said
"The MSI Nforce is worth consideration."

Ryu, when I read that, I went to www.gamepc.com
and read a remark about the MSI Nforce mobo.
The remark is buried in "Conclusions" (a Review of the Asus K7N266 mobo).
Here it is verbatim.....
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
".......Nonetheless, there is one thing the board (Asus A7N266) does have going for it; stability.
"In typical Asus fashion, the board is pretty much bulletproof, especially with nVidia's new unified nForce driver package installed.
"It's certainly been a much more reliable platform compared to MSI's K7N420, which has been riddled with minor quirks and annoyances since launch."
------------------------------------------
The GamePC Reviewer, having dumped on MSI Nforce board, now ends Review, by dumping on Asus Nforce board.....
-------------------------------------------
"Our recommendation:
"If you want a powerful system without a whole lot of integrated components, stick with VIA's KT-266A motherboard. It performs better, is cheaper, and has been proven to be an incredibly stable platform.
"...If you want a fully integrated nForce, stick with the MSI K7N420."
"....if you want a barebones Athlon board, go with the Asus A7V266-E."
"....While the (Asus) A7N266 is a fantastic performing Athlon platform, there are simply better alternatives out there on both ends of the spectrum."
END REVIEW.

AG #40,

I wouldn't be too hasty in dissing the ALi chipset. Forge, you say some very clever things mostly, but sometimes you just spin FUD - and I mean that in the nicest possible way because I do respect your opinion. What issues with the ALi exactly?

I have been using an Iwill KA266 rev 1.3 for almost a year now and it rocks. Not as fast as my EPoX 8K7A+ mind, but there is only a couple of percentage points in it and I defy anybody to pick that small a margin "blind".

Want to know how it performs?

http://www.realworldtech.com/page.cfm?ArticleID=RWT091001233055

BTW I am the author of the article. Everything you need to know including the actual BIOS settings used is in the article.

Against the ALi - it is slower, marginally!

For the ALi (over the AMD 760) - I can use 3 DIMM's rather than 2. It is not VIA. The on-board sound is better than AC '97 and isn't a SoundBlaster Live! - ie no bugs.

I have never run into a problem with the Iwill, though there is a documented problem with the Radeon - but it is documented and their is a workaround (check the Iwill site). This is much better than VIA I think.

The ALi MAGiK1 has a new stepping which is much faster, but as Forge said it runs slower when used asynchronously, but then again, the SiS735 does exactly the same thing. I would like to see both chipsets run synchronously at 166 DDR (333), I suspect that particular problem would disappear.

Neither have the IDE bug that causes problem with RAID or or other devices saturating the PCI bus like VIA have.

Memory performacne isn't everything - that's the only thing that VIA are bringing to the table. Cache satisfies 90~95% of data requests - that's it's purpose! But VIA have some other problems that outweigh it's performance in this area. But then again, if you aren't going to use a SoundBlaster or RAID, you probably aren't going to run into the VIA problems so it shouldn't influence your buying decision.

Buy on features based on what you are going to use the board for. If you end up with a few choices, buy whichever is cheapest and save yourself some cash, or eliminate some of the choices based on percieved bugs and pick from whatever's left.

I use an EPoX 8K7A+ for my own use, but the Iwill sits in my home server and I've never had a problem with it. It just runs. The overclocking options aren't as polished as the EPoX (or the Abit KT7A), and I can't tweak it as far but the newer Iwill ALI based boards fix this.

The ALi got a bad rep mainly because of the ASUS A7A - which supported both SDRAM and DDR. Compromises usually perform badly because of the different timing requirements. The A7A was also one of the first DDR boards on the market so it was a learning curve for ASUS. As time goes on, the engineers learn the performacne tricks and boards get faster - this happens with all technologies.

0.05 - because the Aussie dollar isn't worth jack! :)

er, AG 41 is me :) LOL I pressed the wrong "Post" button, damn alcobahol...

AG#40:
As far as I can tell, the ECS SiS735 board is far from the POS's ECS used to put out. No personal experience, but every person that says they have one also says they love it. Ask around in some forums maybe? It's main attraction is price, but fewer OC features. The "big mfg's" have SiS735 boards too, but it is hard to find reviews on them.

I myself will wait for some major-brand SiS745 boards to roll out, so maybe 6-8 weeks or so and all reviews will be in, then, it's computer buyin' time! Will see then how the ECS745 stacks up to other mobo co.'s. Hehe, considering how well they did with the 735, can't wait to see what Abit et al. can do with the 745...

Thanks guys for all the recomendations n' links.
From what Forge, etc. say---I'll forget ALI (and of course, Via). SIS sounds good.

But for me and a friend, ECS is a curse. We each got a diff. model ECS mobo (""Wow, man, look at those great prices!!!"). The Result was, "we got what we paid for" <g>).

Both mobo's were dogs from Day One. Won't bore you with the endless gory details except to say "Never Again".

We shoulda known better, the Price shoulda tipped us off.
You can't pay workers a bowl-of-rice-per-day to build a 3 Rupee mobo----and then gripe if it blows up.
Of course you might luck-out, and it might not blow up.
IMO the name ECS, stands for "Russian Roullette".

Originally Posted by iris
Has anyone else tried the RAID patch from Viaarena? We blue screened and cannot boot into safe mode.
The download corrupted the following file windows\\system32\\config\\software

Running: soyo dragon+ (KT266A)
AMD XP1700+
WinXP pro
2 40GB IBM 60GXP running RAID 0
512MB 2100 DDR

Looks like the SiS745 is going to be the shiznit. Linkage:

http://translate.google.com/translate?u=http%3A%2F%2Fk7jo.de%2F&lan... Rough translation but easy enough to figure out. SiS 745 mobo's are supposed to be out from all the major manufacturers (Abit, ASUS, MSI, etc etc.) in mid to late January. Perfect timing for me :)

The MSI nForce is worth consideration as well.

Get an 761 hybrid.

They work like gangbusters..

I dumped my KT7 Raid to go with an Epox 8k7a+.

$99 from Frys and it comes with IDE raid too..

dammit no HTML here. Oh well...links below are still good ones :)

Forge, my friend, I am the AG who got bonus points in the "budget CPU shootout" thread for pointing out the proper Celeron Vcore. I did in fact turn in my bonus points for an account name. <G>

I also made the AG#14 comment here, and yes I did mean no more AMD engineered/manufactured chipsets (ie 760.)

Anyway, I was looking around myself for a non-VIA Athlon mobo as I am about to donate parts of my current system to my parents. hmmm...SiS745 looks neato, but I also found the [url=http://www.leadtek.com/motherboards/7350kda/7350kda.htm]LeadTek 7350kda[/url] which is VERY OC friendly, with Vcore, Vdimm,VAGP adjustments, unlike the ECS, AND it has 1/5 and 1/6 PCI dividers! It does run about $100, so it is more than the ECS, and it has a crap manual, so it is not a "first-timers" board.

See reviews [url=http://www.amdworld.co.uk/leadtek.htm]her/url] and
[url=http://amdboard.com/leadtek7350kda.html]here.[/url] All the bigdogs are also supposed to be having a [url=http://www.ocworkbench.com/index.stm]SiS745 mobo'/url], so it may be worth a bit of a wait and get the 745.

Regards,
MadMan

Er, not quite Forge, K7S5A is a SiS 735 chipset, all of their 6 series are for Intel

17,26,27- The ECS board is a lot of fun for little moolah. I built two CAD systems on that board this week, Athlon 1800+ 512 MB DDR Matrox G550 (not [i]mi] first choice) Gotta agree with the ALi sentiment, just don't see the value there. I am personally waiting for a next rev nForce, or one that the mobo mfr didn't eff up in development...

My advice: Buy the ECS 735 board. For $65 shipped you could do FAR worse. If you hate it, sell it on ebay... ;-) Probably even make a profit!

I've an ECS K7S5A + Duron 800. Works OK for the things I do (surf, e-mail, watching DiVX & DVD).

Visit amdmb.com forums and you'll get an idea what the different quirks of the available mobos are.

Whoops. K7S6A only has 5 PCI. Not sure where I got the 6 PCI idea.

K7S6A - SiS 745 chipset - has AC97 audio, 3 DDR DIMMs, and support for running DDR333, but only with two DIMMs.

K7S5A - SiS 645 chipset - has onboard LAN (I can vouch for SiS LAN quality first hand, my page is served off one.), AC97 audio, 2+2 DIMM, 1 AGP4/5 PCI/1 AMR.