RTX.100 + P4 Recommended Chipsets

[Mark J Hanna]

I recently installed an upgrade to Premiere Pro on my system but it doesn’t open at all. Now this is on a Athlon XP 2700+ 2.17GHz processor and an Asus A7V8X motherboard with 512Mb Corsair 3500DDR Ram, IBM 120Gb hard drive, Creative Audigy 2 soundcard & Matrox Parhelia 128Mb graphics card.

This system I specifically set up after buying the Matrox RT.X100 card last December and I checked the Matrox website first to install a recommended motherboard, which the Asus A7V8X was at the time.



So I am understandably surprised to find that whereas Premiere 6.5 worked perfectly as far as I know on the above system, Premiere Pro doesn’t.

After downloading the Matrox RTX.100 Extreme drivers and the 5078 Matrox Xtools for Premiere Pro and doing various installs I find it is still not working.

Reviews have indicated that Premiere Pro is very system dependent and after discussion with the Matrox RTX.100 suppliers, I see that the VIA chipset on the AMD processor is now on the list of non-recommended chipsets : “These VIA chipsets for Intel and AMD processors are not recommended for use with a Matrox RT.X system because they do not work well when editing or playing back segments on the Timeline that contain two video layers, one graphics layer, and a 3D effect. These chipsets have all demonstrated a PCI bandwidth limitation when reading from host memory (RAM). This is seen when heavy PCI bandwidth (such as for video, graphics, and effects) is required by several PCI devices at the same time.”



Now whether this was made clear in the information given by Matrox in the upgrading to the “Extreme” version or something that I missed in the downloading of these drivers, I am now in a position of rather than going back to Premiere 6.5 etc of having to rethink the host system – motherboard and processor.



It would seem apart from for example Computer Video’s January 2004 re-review of the RTX.100 as the best video card where they use a dual Athlon system with the Asus A7M266-D recommended motherboard, and one Athlon system that Red Sub do, ALL the other systems from the usual UK DV Companies e.g. Planet DV, MMD Direct, Red Sub, Siren Technology, Creative Video & Zen are Pentium 4 Systems.



With the Athlon 64 and SATA drives, PCI Express etc on the market now and soon, there are evidently changes that will make these current PCI bandwidth limitations less or irrelevant. So my question is this : Change the system as it is now for the Pentium 4 with the proven 875 Chipset or for example go for an Opteron dual system with more power and expandability ready for when 64 bit systems come in. What to do?

[bsdgeek]

Have you considered simply replacing the VIA based motherboard for one with, say, the SiS 748 or nForce2?

I'm not sure about the nForce2, but I know that SiS motherboards have a very nice PCI implementation, and should (as stated by other members of the board, like Dr. Mordrid) work with your equipment.

[Chrono_Wanderer]

Are you sure that they put in "A7V8X" and not "A7N8X"? I remembered checking their recommended site for RT2500 (1 generation before RTX) that VIA chipsets are never competible. This has been a known issue for a long time, the problem is VIA has problems implementing the PCI bus as well as the link between Southbridge and Northbridge)

I won't go for nVIDIA for your purpose, because although its better than VIA, its not the best.

AMD chipsets should run well though.

SiS should also be good. If you plan to get an Athlon 64 system, wait for SiS to make their move.

[Marshmallowman]

Yeah, I don't think via have ever had a chipset on matrox's recomended list.

I think a sis 748 chipset baord would be an excellent "stop gap:" system while you wait for opteron gear to drop in price..

With the HT links for IO and independent memory contollers, opteron/athlon 64 systems have bandwidth comming out of there proverbial..

[Dr Mordrid]

I've been running my RT.X100 on SiS chipped Athlon systems since it came out with no problems at all. Their 1 GB/s northbridge/southbridge interconnect is a big part of why this works so well with boards that need as much bandwith as the RT.X100.

In my memory VIA hasn't ever been an approved chipset for the RT.X100 because of the PCI bandwidth issue. A big part of this is that they transfer quite a bit fewer bytes/packet in PCI burst mode than Intel, SiS or AMD, but other things are also at work and this has been the case since the KT-133.

The nForce2 hasn't made the RT.X100 approved list either, but for a different reason: its AGP implementation is messed up and with some AGP display boards falling back to PCI mode. Not good. It's nb/sb interconnect also runs about 20% slower than SiS's.

100% AMD (both nb and sb by AMD) is a bit less capable than SiS because they use the PCI bus at the nb/sb interconnect instead of having a dedicated connection. Unfortunately most AMD chipped mainboards don't use both an AMD nb and sb, instead using the very weak VIA 686a or 686b southbridges.

The AMD MPX dualie chipset works well for Athlon dualie systems..

Dr. Mordrid