Announcement

**Travis L. Knodel** · 3 March 2000, 10:03

Hey chuck,

I'm going to do a few things this weekend to see if I can get games to work using the combination below. In the meantime, can you load up Quake 3 or UT and see if it runs for EXTENDED amounts of time? I find that it works fine for me, but after several minutes, it does a hard freeze and I'm forced to reboot.

Some of the stuff I'm going to try (again):
1. new drivers
2. bus mastering (disable/enable)
3. taking out sound card

Some of the stuff that I'm going to try that I haven't tried before:
1. New Abit BP6 QQ-2 bios flash
2. Fixing the USB problem in Win 2000 on BP6
3. replacing the line of code that you mentioned above
4. Trying to get ACPI processor support enabled

The list goes on and on... but if I find that I get something to work, then I'll let you know what I find... so far I think we're pretty much stuck with the CRAPPY drivers from Matrox, until the next release. I know that on several occassions I have asked questions in several threads on the new Matrox forum and haven't had a single reply back from them. It's fixing to become "rattle the cage" time for them

Other than the drivers not working in the high powered games, my apps all run PERFECTLY. In fact, when I put my old banshee card in, all my games run great. Does that scream to you that it's a Matrox driver problem? It does to me !!! Kinda makes you wanna have a Voodoo 3 right? (j/k folks, not really)

------------------
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

**PaulS** · 3 March 2000, 17:23

Travis, Forget the Voodoo 3, they have the same disability as Matrox when it comes to NT drivers. nVidia seems to be the best at the moment, they have SMP capable drivers for W2k that are working very well. 3DLabs also, but you need to part with some serious cash. BTW, I have the same problem with Quake 3, 10 to 20 minutes is the maximum without a total freeze requiring a reboot.

Chucky, did you ever get a reply from your m/b manufacturer about the 40% usage problem?

Paul

**Travis L. Knodel** · 3 March 2000, 18:21

the Voodoo 3 thing was a joke... from what I've heard the voodoo drivers are even worse than the Matrox drivers for windows 2000.

**Palliator** · 3 March 2000, 20:37

Like a lot of you, I am running Win2k on a BP6 board (2 Celerons @ 550 MHz). I cannot complain about stability thus far. Every app I spend a lot of time in (e.g. Photoshop) hasn't crashed. Direct 3D games are a different situation. 3D Mark 2000 and Final Fantasy VIII both freeze after a few minutes of use. This is not a huge issue for me as I didn't migrate to the Win2k platform for game playing. I still hope these get addressed though.

I took a couple of measures before installing the OS. First, I installed the QQ-2 BIOS. This apparently fixes an ACPI issue present in the earlier beta BIOS. Interestingly, the startup splash screen lists it as an "Evaluation ROM." Nonetheless, I haven't had any problems with SMP in Win2k thus far. I will need to monitor processes further and spend more time in Photoshop and Sound Forge to see how effective having two processors is.

I completely NTFS formatted my two drives so I am not dual booting into Win 98. Aside from the issues related to the G400 Max (Direct 3D crashing, broken DualHead support), my switch to Win2k has been without any major incompatibilities / problems (wow!).

**Chucky Cheese** · 3 March 2000, 22:51

Travis

will do, my off days are sunday and monday, plus i work afternoons till midnight so i'll probably install it sunday. i have a large autocad project that i'm involved in that's eating a lot of my time and i can't believe that i'm taking my work home now...i told myself that i would never do that!!!

Palliator,

does your #2 cpu idle at 40%? i can't wait to get out of this dual-boot, but unlike you i like to play games when i can.

here is a very minor g400/smp issue that i'm seeing on my system...the office tool bar in a dual processor boot, when i move it around on my desktop it leaves little pieces of its' self where ever i move it from. when i refresh the desktop, they go away. in a single processor boot this does not happen...to wierd, but no biggie! i keep my 21" monitor at 1280x1024 16 bit.

chucky

**kewlcat** · 4 March 2000, 16:21

Chucky,

The 40% utilization is not something to do with the Matrox drivers, usually anyway. It is due to an ACPI installation on a non-ACPI compliant motherboard, or something else wrong with an ACPI installation. So try a non-ACPI install and see if this fixes your problem.

Meanwhile, SMP and G400 certainly have issues on my machine. Both Q3a and UT lock after a variable amount on time with looping sound. Currently I play Q3A on Linux to get around the problem and UT in software mode (no lockups then). It may also be something to do with my SBLive! drivers, so I am not sure...

Rahul

------------------
Abit BP6, Dual Celeron 366@550, G400 32MB DualHead, 128MB RAM, WD26500 6.4GB, SBLive! Value.
Running Mandrake 6.1 and Windows 2000.

**Travis L. Knodel** · 4 March 2000, 16:21

Hey chuck,

I got it installed last night... with the following specs

beta QQ-2 bios from abit
ACPI on
USB 1.1

The USB adapter finally works in Windows 2000. If you don't know the story behind that here it is...

Abit has been having problems releasing the newest bios that fixes the USB problem because some ATI cards aren't responding to the new bios and the fan on their cards doesn't run (wah!)

But if I enable bus mastering, the system freezes HARD after two minutes of UT.

*******************************************

THE BIG THING THAT SEEMS TO BE CAUSING THE FREEZE IN THE UNREAL GAMES IS THE BUS MASTERING ISSUE.

******************************************

With bus mastering OFF, everything runs, but is VERY VERY VERY VERY SLOW. FPS drop DRAMATICALLY. In win98SE I get 45-50 fps in the flyby on Unreal... with bus mastering off I get somewhere around 15-18. With bus mastering on (before the crash ) I get somewhere between 20-25 fps. This is like mega-ass frame rate (ass in a bad way, not good).

Another thing about Unreal Tournament seems to be that the smoke and fog effects have been taken away... don't ask me why?!?! I'll check in the preferences to see if those have been disabled.

Quake 3 on a fresh install and the newest point release doesn't load up at all... I can't even get it to load the first time when it supposedly would load with the support of one processor (in theory).

I haven't tried enabling 32-bit Z-buffering yet, cause I went to sleep last night before I had the patience to watch 2000 restart. I would imagine that it would make things even slower.

BUT, I am glad to see that it's going to work... now all we have to do is get MATROX to get off their butts and fix the bus mastering problem and tweak the drivers a heck of a lot more... the difference between the new turbogl in 98 and the final drivers in 2000 is like night and day.

Anyways, I'm back on Windows 98 SE with one processor until we see something new from Matrox that will fix the bus mastering problem. Unless I get powerstrip going and figure out something different to do to it?!?!

Just a side thought, has anyone tried Quake 3 with NT4 and an SMP setup? I'd be curious as to how it runs...

------------------
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

**Chucky Cheese** · 4 March 2000, 23:11

kewlcat

i have the non acpi hal installed under win2k, this board won't boot win2k with the acpi multiprocessor hal. when i boot in a single processor mode the #1 cpu doesn't have a problem. i believe that the 40% cpu issue is a powerdesk problem because when i was running that 1st beta driver with no powerdesk, the #2 cpu idled fine.

since i'm in dual boot i've chosen to leave the compatability flag(...acpi aware os yes/no) set to yes. what i don't know is if this board has acpi FULLY implemented.

apmstat.exe says that power management is not supported with multiple processors, at all. i can't decipher the output of acpiview.exe in win98 to know one way or another.

you know whats funny, is that win2k says it doesn't support pm on smp machines in win2k, but it powers down my scsi drives and powers down my 21" and 15" tft monitor perfectly. i call that power management...to some degree.

travis,

congrats!!!

i'm thinking i'm going to have some problems because no matter what win2k says about my irqs', at the bios level my live and the g400 share irq 11. in win98 this doesn't pose a problem, i could pan real fast and shot a high rate of fire weapon in unreal with no latency in sound or video. i'll post more on sunday night and fill you in.

pauls

i opened up a ticket with ami about the 40% cpu anomaly...they had no clue, plus they don't have the combination of hardware at their support center to try and duplicate it. i still think it is powerdesk or a file that comes with it. simply closing it doesn't make the problem go away.

chucky

**Chucky Cheese** · 5 March 2000, 10:47

travis,

loaded up unreal tourney today. i started a session in a dual-processor boot, before it got to the game setup screen it "messed up" my screen...it put up vertical lines and turned my mouse pointer into a black paint brush. i shutdown and booted back up in a single processor boot and it ran fine for an hour or so. however when i exit the game, it says that the "0x007dc8e memory cannot be read". this seems very minor because win2k runs fine after that.

i set the game up in the following settings

1024x768 16 bit(d3d defaults on everything else)
details - high
full screen
sound - high
textures - high
everything else i left at default except the controls

i run my desktop at 1280x1024 16 bit. if all i have to do is boot in a single processor config to play games, i might get rid of win98 sooner that i expected.

i'll be installing q3 later tonight.

chucky

**Travis L. Knodel** · 5 March 2000, 11:26

Hey chuck,

did you try UT with bus mastering disabled? That *MIGHT* fix the Unreal problems, but it'll make your machine run slower than shit.

Also, did you have ACPI enabled when you formatted and put win2k on? If you didn't the ACPI will cause your computer to boot up improperly if you change it in the device manager ( I know from experience). By this I mean that it would cause my computer to go through the bios stuff and then Windows would freeze. FUN!

------------------
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

**Chucky Cheese** · 5 March 2000, 14:14

travis,

no i didn't turn off bus mastering, i figured that if all i had to do is boot to single processor config then that would not be so bad...i'm lazy.

i'm actually thinking about making a powerquest image of the win98 partition, formatting, and just installing win2k.

one interesting twist in all this is that i installed unreal to fat32 drive...win2k is on an ntfs partition! i wonder if there are any "file system symantecs" going on there, maybe, maybe not.

chucky

**Palliator** · 5 March 2000, 17:59

Chucky:

In response to whether I have a constant 40% CPU utilization with the second processor, the answer is no.

I've been running Photoshop for a few days now, no system lock ups so far. I've been noting processor utilization with both CPUs by rendering with the gaussian blur filter (I was abusive here in image size and pixel radius). I am pleased so far.

Even so, Direct 3D support is obviously broken. In FF VIII, the opening scenes are okay but once you reach the world map where there are a lot of textures, the system locks solid.

I guess the verdict here is that if anyone has a particular use for SMP, by all means it *can* be stable. For gaming, well... Then again, I would think Win 9x would suit that purpose.

**Chucky Cheese** · 5 March 2000, 19:43

Palliator

if gaming is going to work simply by booting in a single processor boot then i'm all for it....i guess i want my cake and eat it too!

not to mention the strength and security of the NT architecture. i use autocad most of the time(r14 sp-1) and i don't think there is an smp module??? i was under the impression that the os "managed" the private bus between the cpus' and that they were load balanced, so it seems to me that whether or not the application "knows" anything about the dual cpus'...the os does. so if your multi-tasking the os would spread the load. i've heard of "modules" for smp optimization, and if i'm not mistaken, photoshop is one of them.

for example; i'm doing autocad on my 21" monitor and using my 17" TFT LCD(just ordered tonight!) panel to surf the net, or be doing some technical writing, or whatever

chucky

[This message has been edited by Chucky Cheese (edited 06 March 2000).]

**Travis L. Knodel** · 6 March 2000, 10:12

Hey Chuck,

have you tried using your games with Bus Mastering disabled yet? I'm kinda interested to see what it does.

------------------
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
Travis L. Knodel
ICQ 5570732

Abit BP6
Dual Celeron 366@523 Mhz
Matrox G400 16MB SH
IBM ATA66 15.2 GB HD w/ 2MB cache
WD UDMA33 4.3 GB POS HD
Acer 40X CD Rom
Memorex 1622 2x2x6 CD-RW
Internal NEC Zip100
Netgear 10/100 Ethernet
Diamond Monster Sound MX300
Altec Lansing ACS 295
Proview 17" Monitor
224 MBs generic PC100 RAM

Announcement

The G400 and SMP (Win2k) Thread

The G400 and SMP (Win2k) Thread

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment

Comment