ASUS motherboards and Matrox cards?

[Fred H]

A friend of mine owned for a couple of years ago some older ASUS motherboard (don’t know which model) and a Matrox Mystique G200. He just upgraded one of his computers with a new CPU, MB etc.

Talking about different motherboards, I told him that I just intend to buy an ASUS A7V133 board and that I will run my existing Marvel G400 on it.
No, he said. Don’t buy ASUS because he, and an another person had tons of problems with their ASUS mb. and the Matrox combination. Any other motherboards worked well with the Mystique, he said but not the ASUS.

I am confused. ASUS is one of the best-reviewed cards.

Please, video-guys, out there.
Have you any poor or (hopefully) good experience with the A7V133 and Marvel G400 combo, regardless the VIA chipset and its issues?


Fred H

[This_Idiot]

Fred,

I've been running a G450 eTV on an Asus A7V with little or no problem (nothing yet that I haven't been able to overcome easily) and the main functions seem to be running well. Haven't tried any specially stressfull captures yet, but basic captures and timshifting are OK

Chris
(T_I)

[Fred H]

Thank you, Chris for the encouragement.

You're right. Nothing and nobody functions well under stress and everything here in life is a compromise.

Conscious of the limitations of the HW, I'm sure I'll be satisfied by this board.


Fred H

[Vidgal]

I am running the Asus A7V133 with my G400. I had some initial install/setup issues, but video was never one of those issues. The on board Promise controller gives me great performance on my Maxtor ATA100 video drive. One thing I have learned, at least on my setup with this board, is that the board insists on having the 4 in 1 drivers. I am using the 4.29 right now and everything seems stable.

[Fred H]

Thanks, Vidgal.

Yes it's what I need: a better performance.
At the present I'm using a 400 MHz AMD K6, Via MVP3 to capture analog video, play SVCD, encode MJPEG video with TMPGenc (the time? Night job ) No major problems, so I am sure, as I said, that I'll be satisfied with the increased performance.

Btw, did you try the onboard audio? Of course not for HiQ audio, but anyway?

[Dr Mordrid]

Been running Asus boards for almost 2 years with no problems.

Dr. Mordrid

[Brian Ellis]

I was one of the Asus/Marvel naysayers. I could not get Marvel to work properly on three computers with different Asus boards, the latest one being a P2B. I also had difficulties running speech recognition on the same boards (with different sound cards). In desperation, after months of hard work, I whipped out the P2B, installed a Bravo Baby board, swapped the CPU, memory and cards and I had both applications running fine within an hour or so. Since then, I have shunned Asus-boarded computers and instructed the IT guy in my company to do the same. Why this should have happened, I don't know. I found the Asus technical service, at the time, was about as useless as Microsoft's.

To be fair, it may be that Asus could have sorted out this problem in the meanwhile, but I don't know. Others using apparently the same combo as I had no problems, yet others did, so it will probably remain for ever one of life's mysteries.

------------------
Brian (the terrible)

[droopy]

Just to give my 2 cents on this. I've been running a ASUS P2B with PII-450 and Marvel G400 for over a year now and it performs great. Apart for the usual problems that everybody has when capturing / authoring video with the Marvel all is working well.

[landy]

I think that the whole problem is not with the ASUS motherboards as a whole, but with the non Intel chipset ones, ie. with the VIA and SIS chipsets.
As it happens, I've just upgraded from a 440BX p3 550 to a dual p3 733 with VIA chipset (one 1 CPU at the moment) and other than a VIA 4 in 1 driver problem, it is rock solid, even after fitting a RRG last night.
Most things can be fixed by playing arround with the drivers. I know it's time consuming, but ultimately worth it.
Rich P...

[iokar]

My combination is Marvel G400 and ASUS P3V4X
and if i ever change my motherboard, i will buy again ASUS!

[Vidgal]

Yes, I did try the onboard audio. It sucks and I think it caused many of my intial problems. I'm now using the Santa Cruz and it is the best!

[omega]

hi

I just recently updated my computer as well. I had some problems getting it to work with my G400-tv cap card too. It keept freezing in windows for no apparent reason. I read all sorts of help things and tryed many different hardware ways to see if it was a card issue. Now it turend out it was no hardware issues but the capture card G400-tv. For some reason the asus motherboard doesnt like it and so i updated my bios and everything was fixed. It never froze on me again.

PS: i updated to a Asus mobo pentiumIII 750

[This message has been edited by omega (edited 18 May 2001).]

[Technoid]

Mainboard reviews are often misleading.

Example:

If you have read one of Anands reviews of a motherboard you have read them all.

[Dr Mordrid]

Technoid said:

>>If you have read one of Anands reviews of a motherboard you have read them all.<<

Ain't it the flippin' truth? After reading his Fasttrak "review" I gave up on that guy....

VidGal said:

>>I'm now using the Santa Cruz and it is the best!<<

I know!! I love it when testing some functions the CPU monitor hovers < 1%

Dr. Mordrid

[Dr Mordrid]

I've got G400 Marvels and an eTV in Asus P3B-F's and a G400 Marvel in a P2B. No sweat at all. Any of those systems can capture well over 100,000 frames with no drops at all.

All are PIII or Celeron-II's of over 600mhz, have 128 megs or more and have Fasttrak100 RAID's.

Dr. Mordrid