good ram advice to BURN an old slot A Athlon TB

[Jose]

Hi. Be amazed!

Just runned Quick Bench...

Sequential Speed: Read- 39.2 MB/s
        Write- 33.8 MB/s
...
...
Average CPU- 2%  !!!!!!!

The average CPu was a bit higher when I first launched the program (>10%), lowering right after if I kept idle, but I think that was due to other task having just been terminated. If I kept idle and stoped the test in the middle and restarted again the CPU load would be 2% in the very beginning.

Now what it could be? The DVDROm drive, it's drivers, or the cable...?

[Jose]

BTW, [stupid joke]... seems like I won't need an April fix on this system after all :roll:

I'll check the cable next...

[Jose]

Just a thought before I go out and get an 80 wire cable, even if this cable is not appropriate or it's f**ked up, that wouldn't make CPU load go higher or would it ?

[billchase]

The reason I suggested to try the 80 wire cable is that some
machines that I have worked on will not enable UltraATA modes
with just a 40 wire cable, though I haven't tested this with
the K7M.  The BIOS on these machines will spit out an error
code disabling UltraATA transfers.  It certainly won't hurt
anything to try it since they can be found pretty cheap at
most local computer shops.  Since many DVD and CD drives now
support ATA33 and ATA66, it is a good idea to just retire the
40 wire variety altogether.  Any luck with swapping GFX cards?

C Snyder

[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?

[Floid]

Jose wrote:
@Floid

Oddly enouph, I'm using the latest beta BIOS and ACPI seems to work fine, but I'm using Win2K wich seems to have a way better implementation than Win98.
I remember when I was running Win98 the system wouldn't even be able to shut down ALOT of times :lol: That disappeared when I got Win2K.

Windows will tolerate certain 'out of spec' conditions.  The BIOS authors test with Windows.

By all means switch to 80-wire cables -- it's an ATA66 controller, and many drives will not gracefully fallback when they're attached to such.  (Try Knoppix or something similar, and watch for bus retries that might be bogging things down?)

[Jose]

Ok, I'll get a new cable tomorrow and try it out.

Haven't tried a new Gfx card yet, got outbid for a Radeon 9700 right in the end.

"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?"

It's supposed to, but didn't pass the PowerDVD tests. I tried getting the more recent drivers I could get from nVidia's site but they seemed to be the same ones on Win2K CD. DirectX 9.x here!

[Terminills]

I'd put my money on the drivers not enabling overlay properly under windows 2000... find a cheap radeon card... or if can borrow one to try ... but even the 600 should be able to play dvd's no problem with proper overlay support.