KT400 chipset - very good AMD & PCI-bus performance

Thalamus · Post by **Thalamus** » Mon Sep 16, 2002 5:15 pm

Hi all,

I just bought the ASUS A7V8X motherboard (VIA KT400 CHIPSET), with onboard USB 2.0, E1394 (firewire), SERIAL ATA, IDE RAID and 1 Gbps LAN.

I was able to drag 13 masterverbs before getting pci-overflow. Thats nice for an AMD system, not? I haven't even started tweaking yet.

CONFIG:
ASUS A7V8X MB
AMD ATHLON 2200+
512 MB SAMSUNG PC2700 DDR-RAM (One)
MATROX G550
UAD-1
SCOPE/SP
PULSAR II

WINDOWS XP (SP 1)
SFP 3.1c (FINAL)
CUBASE SX 1.03

_________________
Yours truely

Noah Laux

[ This Message was edited by: Thalamus on 2002-09-16 18:18 ]

Marc de Ruiter · Post by **Marc de Ruiter** » Tue Sep 17, 2002 8:04 am

Sounds great, how is overall stability?

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Tue Sep 17, 2002 11:07 am

Very nice ... about time for VIA!

Please mention any sort of issues that may pop up, I'll be keeping my eye on this one to see if I want to play with a VIA system again at some point. Thanks for the comments.

Mercury1 · Post by **Mercury1** » Tue Sep 17, 2002 9:29 pm

Great, thanks for the report Thalamus.

I just got a Gigabyte GA-7VAXP board (KT400) that I will be running some tests on also. Unfortunately some parts for my new PC are still in the mail so I have to wait for them.

Mercury1 · Post by **Mercury1** » Tue Sep 17, 2002 10:23 pm

I was looking at the manual for the asus board and found something interesting. It says that the serial ATA controller provides the raid functionality. Then it says, "For RAID 0, you may choose two connectors of Parallel and Serial ATA connectors. For RAID1, you may choose any two or three connectors of Parallel ATA and Serial ATA connectors." From looking at the picture there is one parallel connector near the 2 Serial connectors and the chip. The parallel connector is single channel only. This means that to do RAID 1 or 0 you must have at least 1 SATA drive. ASUS doesn't make this very clear.

A guy who posted a review at newegg.com RMA'ed his board because of this. Here is his comment:

"If you are planning on using this with dual ATA133 IDE drives in a RAID configuration think again. The RAID controller has ONE ATA 133 connection and TWO SATA connections. So you need at least one SATA drive for RAID. This is difficult as SATA drives aren't even on the market yet, and the adapters are all but impossible to find. So for the time being the RAID feature is useless. I'm going back to 333 version for this reason. Newegg did RMA the product so they get the thumbs up. I think the manufacturer should be more precise about the spec."

If your not going to run RAID then it really doesn't matter but I thought this was kinda strange.

Can you confirm this is true thalamus?

spoimala · Post by **spoimala** » Wed Sep 18, 2002 2:30 am

Thalamus,
A few questions.
1) There's been talk that Cubase SX doesn't work well with Pulsars. Have you had any problems?

2) UAD-1. How does it work with Pulsar? Any latency problems (or anything)?

Everybody,
13 masterverbs, is it much? What is the biggest amount you guys have got masterverbs? Using what configuration?

Thalamus · Post by **Thalamus** » Wed Sep 18, 2002 4:59 am

Hi again,

I must say this motherboard is a solid performer. I have never seen my folders appear so quickly when I dbclick them. Everything I do gets a very quick response.

I can tax my system really hard, without getting clicks or ticks in SX (50+ tracks, loads of plugz).

I have no problem using my USB keyboard, mouse, dongles, printer, AMT-8 midi, while SX is playing.

When I use the Firewire, though, overall system performance is lowered (like fx window updates). But maybe it's an IRQ thing.

I have worked now for three days, almost none stop, without any crash or problem.

You should be aware that PCI 1 & 6 and PCI 2 & 5 are shared in series.

Well, it defently seems as VIA finally have done it. I've had kt133, kt266, kt266a, kt333, and KT400 is hands down way beyond all theese. Especially PCI-performance. And it has MANY features. I was actually going to wait for Nforce2, but I saw that S-ATA wasn't in the chipset, so I took a chance. Maybe when Nforce2 hits the street I'll give it a try, but for now I feel like I'm running a pentium system, just much cheaper and with more FPU power (subtle though).

Mercury :
RAID 0 support by two to three Parallel ATA or Serial ATA connectors. RAID 1 support by two Parallel or Serial ATA connectors. There are 3 Parallel connectors, and 2 Serial connectors. I don't understand why you want ATA133 so badly? For now HD's are not at all quick enough to use ATA100, not even in RAID. And the only HD manufactor doing ATA133 is maxtor, all the other is going to S-ATA. That's suspisious, don't you think? S-ATA is the future, so wait 1 month and S-ATA drives should appear.

Anyway, how many tracks do you plan to do at once? A normal 7500rpm IDE HD can do around 40 - 60 tracks. You shouldn't have need for RAID unless doing Videoediting. And if you use windows 2000 or XP, you can choose to stripe your drives and get almost the same performance. Too, RAID seems to tax your PCI-bus alot, so you would have less space for your pulsar stuff.

spoimala : 
question 1 : I don't know who said this, but it's absolutly not true. Pulsar performance is exelent with SX. And why the hell should the problem be with SX only? If there where a problem with ASIO, WDM or the other drivers, any other program should have the problem too.

question 2 : The UAD and Pulsar combination works like a charm for me. Never had any issues. You're talking about latency? Well, the uad-1 plugs works in the same way as your XTC plugz, so the two systems (and TC POWERCORE) share the same problems. That is that SX (and Nuendo) only compensates for latency on audio channels, not GROUP or Instrument channels. And the workaround is the same as for XTC... You insert a plugin which compensates the latency.


_________________
Yours truely

Noah Laux

[ This Message was edited by: Thalamus on 2002-09-18 06:23 ]

Mercury1 · Post by **Mercury1** » Wed Sep 18, 2002 9:10 am

How many tracks do you plan to do at once? Not 40-60 definitely but the main reason I would use RAID is for fault tolerance not for speed. It does tax your PCI bus but it is configurable. The promise utility has a PCI bus utilization slider that I have found helpful. The moment you have a hard drive fail it will be well worth it.

Call me paranoid but I backup to a RAID 5 server also.

“I don't understand why you want ATA133 so badly?”

I'm not just talking about ATA133 I'm talking about any ATA HD 33/66/100/133. I agree that ATA133 performance is overrated, that is why I don't have any of them.

S-ATA is definitely the future. I hate those flat cables. From what I have heard SATA drives will be widely available Q1 2003. I know that a lot of people have extra Parallel ATA drives or drives they want to move to new systems including me.

Now on to the ASUS RAID issue:

Thalamus wrote:
"RAID 0 support by two to three Parallel ATA or Serial ATA connectors. RAID 1 support by two Parallel or Serial ATA connectors. There are 3 Parallel connectors, and 2 Serial connectors."

The actual wording is:
"For RAID 0, you may choose two connectors of Parallel **AND** Serial ATA connectors. For RAID1, you may choose any two or three connectors of Parallel ATA **AND** Serial ATA connectors."

Notice that it says "and" not "or". The two other IDE connectors you are referring to are on the other side of the board and you can see that the traces go straight to the VT8235 Southbridge. They don't go to the SATA promise controller like the 2 SATA connectors and the 1 Parallel single channel connector do. Besides, both of those parallel connectors are dual channel if I'm not mistaken. The VT8235 Southbridge which has an IDE controller built in is not capable of RAID. Basically what I am trying to say is that they are on a totally different IDE controller than the Promise chip so they can not be used together in a RAID setup. The only connectors available for RAID are the 2 Serial connectors and the single channel parallel connector.

Now the upside to this is that there are SATA adapters but they are not included with this board and who knows what kind of availability we will see in the future.

[ This Message was edited by: Mercury1 on 2002-09-18 10:36 ]

Post by **garyb** » Wed Sep 18, 2002 10:59 am

i always hear about the need for the extra safety of raid when recording.i have NEVER had (fingers crossed) a problem with ide.as has been pointed out many times ata66 is MORE than fast enuff for audio.my projects run about 30 tracks on average with heavy plug usage.

even analog recorders are not 100% reliable,so i save myself some headache by not fighting disaster that is unavoidable.instead i try to make sure that everything works right to begin with.....

tape is subjet to dropouts,accidental erasure and failure,big time!you rarely see someone (even michael jackson or the beatles) with redundant slaved 2' machines,just in case...

just my 4cents....

[ This Message was edited by: garyb on 2002-09-18 12:03 ]

Thalamus · Post by **Thalamus** » Thu Sep 19, 2002 5:28 am

To mercury1 : Well, about the RAID: I took my info directly from ASUS site http://www.asus.com/mb/socketa/a7v8x/specification.htm , so I quess you're a little wrong here.

remixme · Post by **remixme** » Thu Sep 19, 2002 8:10 am

I tell you what this board does miss though, a AGP/PCI clock fix, to allow you to overclock without affect the pci/agp bus, ie for my upcoming overclocked, watercooled system.

Not my DAW!

Mercury1 · Post by **Mercury1** » Thu Sep 19, 2002 8:42 am

Ya Thalamus, I wish I was wrong also.

I just had a look at the asus newsgroup alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus and it is plastered with posts about RAID only being possible with the 2 serial and 1 parallel connector as I suspected. I wouldn't be surprised if they get sued over the language on their website and manual. Although they technically are ok in what they say cause there are 3 IDE connectors possible for RAID and they always say "2 or 3" and never 4 (RAID 0+1).

Mercury1 · Post by **Mercury1** » Thu Sep 19, 2002 10:19 am

Ya that would be nice to have a clock fix. To bad.

Once you get the water cooling going all you need then is some colored water, neon lights, and a couple of strobes showing through a Plexiglas side panel. You'll be totally rockin then.

[ This Message was edited by: Mercury1 on 2002-09-19 11:23 ]

remixme · Post by **remixme** » Thu Sep 19, 2002 11:47 am

Theres actually a new SiS648 board from gigabyte that has the option for clock fix, and supports upto 3 (officially 2) dimms of ddr400.
It doesn't have any of the added extras though like SATA, Raid, Firewire

Take a look; http://www.anandtech.com/mb/showdoc.html?i=1708

spoimala · Post by **spoimala** » Fri Sep 20, 2002 1:42 am

How can you say that hard drives are fast enough for audio? God dammit. When I open my logic project with..let's say... 20 audio tracks it takes damn too many seconds to wait until it has loaded everything.
Every bit of performance boost is welcome

Post by **garyb** » Fri Sep 20, 2002 1:54 am

Immanuel · Post by **Immanuel** » Fri Sep 20, 2002 2:34 am

Just wondering how many hours of work you will do to earn money enough to save those seconds?

spoimala · Post by **spoimala** » Fri Sep 20, 2002 7:32 am

Nah, it is not about to earn the money but save my nerves. Nothing is more frustrating than waiting.
If even a tiny bit of my creativity goes away while waiting, I consider it a disastrous matter that has to be eliminated =)
(Which in long run makes me earn better (I hope) )

[ This Message was edited by: spoimala on 2002-09-20 08:32 ]

spoimala · Post by **spoimala** » Mon Sep 23, 2002 5:56 am

Nobody answered my question.
"
Everybody,
13 masterverbs, is it much? What is the biggest amount you guys have got masterverbs? Using what configuration?
"

at0m · Post by **at0m** » Mon Sep 23, 2002 6:40 am

13 is a lot, it's the most I've heard of.

I have 12 on an Acorp 6A815EPD. See Creamware User Setups topic here in the tech forum.

[ This Message was edited by: at0mic on 2002-09-23 07:43 ]