good ram advice to BURN an old slot A Athlon TB

[Zac67]

Dunno what freq the Irongate is capable of - RAM should pose no trouble if you take PC133 and play with timing parameters a bit (CL etc).

Beware that o'cing the board will o'c the PCI and AGP as well - not all cards handle that well, and the Riva's probably not one of them.

The TBird most probably could handle 1300-1400 MHz with proper cooling - but does it run on the K7M? The reason AMD did not release the Slot TBird was lacking compatibility with existing boards...

O'cing the CPU w/o running the board beyond specs means changing the multiplier, so look for a goldfinger device or try to do it yourself (should be somewhere in the web).

But - is it really worth it? Much higher clocked Semprons are available cheaply and you can get cheap mbs, too.

[Zac67]

Guess the mobo's making UDMA33 at best, the DVD's probably limited to MWDMA16, but that'd be fine unless you're using both at full load at the same time. I'd use the sec IDE for DVD though.

I can't think of why an Athlon600 should'nt play DVD flawlessly. Years ago I had a K6-III/400 on an old Socket7 mobo (T2P4) w/ a Voodoo Banshee and it was working AOK - maybe half the speed of your 600. I guess you're missing something... What OS is that on?

[Zac67]

Have you tried reading a DVD-ROM? Should be a lot faster than 6 MB/s, otherwise the drive is the problem...

[Zac67]

Jose wrote:

Yeah, but 6MB/s should be more than enouph anyway, MPEG2 is around 3.5MBits/s IIRC, unless the machine is unstable.

Don't have the specs at hand right now, but afaik a DVD peaks at about 8.5 Mbps and may use a sustained rate of at least 6 Mbps. Since you've got Nero, use CD-DVD Speed to check the transfer rate of a data or video DVD - it should never drop below 1x. If the graph isn't smooth, there's something wrong with the DVD or the drive.
If it's OK the bottle neck is somewhere else: some process eating up CPU power, graphics driver problems, AGP trouble, DirectX, ...

[Zac67]

Jose wrote:
Speed: Cpu Usage:
4x     98%:-o

8x    100% :-o  :-o

Seems like a DMA problem after all - try disabling UDMA in BIOS/DMATool, so hopefully Multiword DMA is used which might even work (and is fast enough for DVD).

[Zac67]

For UDMA33 you don't need 80pin cables, UDMA66 and up requires them - but it doesn't hurt. I've had cables doing PIO4 and MWDMA2 (16 MB/s) reliably but no UDMA33.
Looking at the price of 80pin cables, I replace 40pins whenever I put my hand on them.

Lacking YUV overlays explains the problems you're having as DIB DRAW incl. conversion is a pain in the a** for the CPU.
The Riva128 should be able to do YUV overlays, but I'm not 100% sure. Maybe I'll check it in a couple of days as we're just revamping an old RC440BX system, it's got a Riva onboard. ;-)
What drivers are you using? DirectX in good shape?