FastTrack, SBLIVE

[Enrico Ng]

Eversince i installed a fasttrack66 raid, I hear cracling sounds whenever I capture and save to a drive on that controller.
They are both sharing IRQ11.
I dont think that can change.
It tried a different PCI slot, but then it wouldnt boot.

[Sciascia]

I think that this is a documented problem on the Promise site or maybe somewhere on here. I know fo a fact that you are not the first to experience this.

[Dr Mordrid]

The problem is that the SBLive is a major league PCI bus hawg and having it on the same IRQ as the FT66 makes for real trouble.

Keep trying to move the cards around to get them on different IRQ's. You could also try turning down the FT66's bus utilization.

Dr. Mordrid

[Enrico Ng]

even when I move the card, the IRQ is the same. is there a way I can change the sblive IRQ?

[Enrico Ng]

I changed it so that all my devices are on separate IRQs, but I still have the same prob.

[Dr Mordrid]

Are you using a VIA chipped mainboard? If so read on....

I did some research on this and found that the SBLive combined with a VIA chipped mainboard often causes this symptom. The SBLive newsgroup was the source of info.

The problem is that the VIA mainboards have poor PCI bus performance. Combined with the bus hogging nature of the SBLive this causes a bus contention and audio artifacts. It can also cause dropped frames.

The fixes noted basically came down to lowering the PCI bus loading. Some updated their BIOS's and installed newer VIA drivers, others disabled the DMA on their drives to lessen the bus load from that. The DMA trick would not work on the Fasttrak but turning down its PCI utilization in the UltraTune utility would serve the same purpose.

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 23 June 2000).]

[Enrico Ng]

No, i have a MSI-6167 MB
I was thinking of setting up my main drive to the the RAID. I'm not sure if I will have to reinstall and I'm not sure what to do about my IDE CDROM. and I dont know if it will help.

[Dr Mordrid]

FYI the AMD Northbridge chip on that mainboard is virtually identical to the VIA Northbridge. The only differences are the support for 133 mhz and AGP-4x on the VIA labled version.

Now for the SBLive-ism's.

First you should be aware that crackling in the audio is a very common SBLive issue. It's a regular item on in all the SBLive forums and fan support pages. Tracking it down can be interesting as it seems to have many causes depending on the system.

My guess is that in your case the PCI bus is overloading when the capture card, SBLive and FT66 are all pumping full tilt. This is one major reason I gave up on PCI audio cards, particularly the SBLive, on editing systems.

Another SBLive problem is that its drivers continually hit the system timer interupt, as in thousands of times a second, which really helps video performance a lot (NOT). Very weird.

I tried the SBLive with both the Marvel and the RT-2000 and in both cases it was more trouble that it was worth. Bus contentions all over the place. I then decided an ISA card would be better as it wouldn't hit the PCI bus during captures & playback. I settled on a SB AWE-64 Gold. Works great day in and day out.

Sometimes fancier isn't better. Just more complicated and easier to screw up. And you know what they say about keeping it simple...right?

Dr. Mordrid



[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 23 June 2000).]

[TommyS]

I remember that problem....i got it more than one year ago....
Ok, how many PCI board do you have?
May be try to disconnect some board, or disable from bios the secondary ide controller(also the primary if you don't use it).
My problem was the VIA chipset and i solved changing Cpu and Mobo with Asus P2B-F. Now i have SB-Live, Adaptec AHA2940, Pinnacle DV500, Matrox Marvel G200 AGP, Fasttrak66 (irq not shared), Hollywood+ (irq not shared), Intel 10+ (ISA, no more pci slots!).
As you can see, i have all slots full of board, but i can assure that i can acquire at full resolution with Marvel without any problem, and also with DV500.
Ciao

[Enrico Ng]

IDE1: main HD
IDE2: CDROM
AGP: Marvel G400-TV
PCI
1:3com 3C905-combo
3:Fast Trak
4:Advansys SCSI
5:Sblive

I tried pulling the network and SCSI card, but no change.
I dont think the SCSI card affects anything as it is only used for my CDR

I dont want to give up my SBLIVE because of its two line outs, that way I can have one for my output to TV, and the other for my headphones. (and there are other reasons)

I was thinking of placing my main HD onto the fasttrak, but I heard that its better to make them separate for video capture


[This message has been edited by Enrico Ng (edited 23 June 2000).]

[Dr Mordrid]

Yes, definitely keep the boot and capture drives on separate controllers.

Even though you only have the CD-ROM on that SCSI controller you might still be getting some bus load from it. This happens if you have autoinsert notification turned on. If this is the case, and it usually is, the OS will check the CD drive every few seconds no matter what. For this reason I turned off autoinsert notification on all my CD drives.

Also don't forget to disable the ISA emulation on that SBLive. That alone should save a bunch of clock cycles.

One other thing that can help is something I first ran into on the Adobe Premiere Win98 optimization page. They recommended setting up an editing-only user profile with all but the essential video hardware disabled. NIC's, PCI modems, USB, unused controllers etc. etc. That way the PCI bus traffic is minimized, even the little bit caused by drivers polling it.

Dr. Mordrid







[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 23 June 2000).]

[Enrico Ng]

How do I disable ISA emulation.
I dont think creating a separate HW profile will work, because I tried un plugging all my PCI cards that I dont need, and it didnt help.
are rhere any items in "system items" that i should disable

I have to do something.
I cant even capture regular MJPEG video like I could before.

will getting a ISA sound card work? will I be able to install two sound cards?

[Enrico Ng]

I just noticed that in w98, my IRQs will change to match the the display of the irqs just before the os starts, but in w2k, the IRQs do not change. It still says that most of my devices are on IRQ11.

[CrazyBee]

You'll eed to play around in your BIOS. Enable/disable auto IRQ assignement, etc.

I had to do that 3 times before I got my G400 on its own IRQ.

[Dr Mordrid]

You turn off the SBLive's ISA Emulation by disabling it in the System Properties/Device Manager.

Don't remove it as it'll just reinstall itself. Check off the disable box.

Dr. Mordrid


[This message has been edited by Dr Mordrid (edited 27 June 2000).]