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 Post subject: RE: kt133 et al..
PostPosted: Thu Mar 17, 2005 9:42 am 
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Posts: 7
adrianbc wrote:
I have a KT133 board. I have run into some trouble trying to get a new PVR250 to work on KnoppMyth but before buying that card I was able to record with an Osprey 200. btaudio is what gave me the trouble with that setup . Could these issues be related to PVR + VIA hardware conflicts?


I've had almost 10 kt133 and several kt266 era boards pass by and noticed a few trends:

1. The Asus boards were fairly good at not having the DMA problem.
2. A few Abit bords had it bad. One (my favorite, since it was the first system I build) was completely useless in win2k past sp3, but with a good linux kernel with two tweaks would run for a year at a time.
3. My experience with Sis boards is horrible. I've built or troubleshooted/maintained more than a hundred systems and will never trust a SiS board. The're just plain buggy and unstable. (Of the 15 or so SiS boards, not a single one of them made it past burn in without some wacko problem. )

I'm now split between nvidia and via boards, usually only a few manufacturers. I've yet to have any machine I've built in the past year with this formula come back to me.
(Nvidia usually for less expensive, performance intensive needs, Via for stable./critical needs/linux)

Tier 1: Asus(workstations), Tyan(servers)
Tier 2: Soyo, Gigabyte, Aopen, Abit (also reservations now.)
Tier 3: MSI, biostar.
Anything else I don't even consider. (FSI may make it's way into tier 2 soon.)

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PostPosted: Fri May 06, 2005 9:18 am 
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Posts: 263
Location: Toronto, Canada
Hi all:

I'm posting this reply from a box based on an Asus A7V266-E, which is a KT266 -based board. It's been rock solid for over 3 1/2 years in Windows 2000. I used some patches and useful technical info. about VIA-based boards to get my board stable. While the patches were designed to be applied in Windows, I'm pretty sure the info. (chip registers etc.) could be applied easily in Linux.

The best place to start is at George Breese's homepage, which has some downloads to get you started in Windows. There used to be included in the downloads, explanations as to what was wrong, and which BIOS settings and registers were used to fix the problems, or work around them. So I think the "Windows" downloads could be very useful to Linux users as well. George was also friendly when I corresponded with him years ago, so you could also try contacting him for help.

http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software


Hope this helps some of you.

Shplad



mcdrama wrote:
yes this is a broad statement, but should be helpful to others building new boxes.
My shuttle SK41G uses the VIA KM266 chipset and due to a bug in the northbridge, high bandwidth DMA operations cause recordings to crash when you begin watching another recording.
This behavior has been seen with the KT133 chipset, as well as VIA based chipsets for Intel processors as well.

At this point you may try to apply a BIOS upgrade to see if the bug has been worked around in the BIOS.

For anyone building a KnoppMyth or MythTV box, avoid using VIA chipsets. They are full of bugs.

For AMD based systems, get a SiS, nVidia, or AMD based motherboard. :D
For Intel based systems, you can't go wrong with an Intel chipset. :D

Please do not take this thread as a flame starter, I am just very dissappointed that I had to waste $160 on this barebone box and I can't do something very basic due to a crappy bug that VIA has neglected to fix.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Sun Jun 05, 2005 4:45 pm 
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Joined: Mon Dec 13, 2004 1:12 pm
Posts: 33
Location: Orlando, FL (U.S.A.)
I have not only a VIA based board... but a VIA built board :P

VIA P4PB400

and the only thing I had to do to make it solid was to not let the BIOS control IRQ resources and diable all power management.

has been quite solid with MythTV for quite some now.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 8:10 am 
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Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:04 am
Posts: 39
Location: Madison, WI
Hi I did a google search and this came up.
What is the status of the KT400 chipset? I am working on rebuilding my system right now on a KT400 chipset.
Can you expand on exactly what you disabled? thanks


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 8:24 am 
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Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:04 am
Posts: 39
Location: Madison, WI
is this required in the grub config file?
noapic nolapic pci=noacpi acpi=off

if so, can someone help explain exactly how to add it?
here is my grub.conf file right now.


# Sample boot menu configuration file
#

# Boot automatically after 30 secs.
timeout 30

# By default, boot the first entry.
default 0

# Fallback to the second entry.
fallback 1

splashimage=(hd0,0)/grub/splash.xpm.gz
# For booting GNU/Linux
title GNU/Linux
root (hd0,0)
kernel /kernel-2.6.13-gentoo root=/dev/hda2
#initrd /initrd.img


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 11:30 am 
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Joined: Fri Sep 19, 2003 7:05 pm
Posts: 5088
Location: Fontana, Ca
What do bootloader configuration questions have to do with tier 3 hardware?

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:16 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:04 am
Posts: 39
Location: Madison, WI
cesman wrote:
What do bootloader configuration questions have to do with tier 3 hardware?

I don't understand?
I found this thread having to do with VIA chipsets not working correctly with DMA transfers.
It seemed that by passing certain boot parameters you could make a system handle DMA transfers correctly so that people wouldn't have to turn off DMA on their drives.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:58 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2003 10:38 am
Posts: 4978
Location: Nashville, TN
the problem is a bug in the via chipset, I don't think boot params are going to help. It's not specific to knoppmyth or mythtv, it's just that these programs use massive amounts of dma. Any linux with the older via chipsets using any program with lots of dma traffic will have the same problems.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 12:59 pm 
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Joined: Tue Aug 30, 2005 6:04 am
Posts: 39
Location: Madison, WI
Xsecrets wrote:
the problem is a bug in the via chipset, I don't think boot params are going to help. It's not specific to knoppmyth or mythtv, it's just that these programs use massive amounts of dma. Any linux with the older via chipsets using any program with lots of dma traffic will have the same problems.

that seems contrary to everything I have found regarding this.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Mon Oct 10, 2005 1:01 pm 
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Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2003 10:38 am
Posts: 4978
Location: Nashville, TN
well believe me I did about two to three weeks of research on this when I was trying to use a KT133 chipset many moons ago and that's exactly what I came up with over and over again. may be different for anything newer than a 266 chipset, but diffinately for the older chipsets that's what I found back then.

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 Post subject: msi k8t master 2 far
PostPosted: Wed Dec 14, 2005 6:57 am 
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Posts: 1
Hi, Ive used hundreds of motherboards as part of my work, and Id have to agree with the statements about via chipsets. Ive had kt133 through to 266, then I took a break and went to amd and nvidia chipsets. Never had a problem. With my most recent system I was forced to look at a via chipset once again.

I have a msi k8t master 2 far with dual opterons. Im going to use this in my myth box, and it has been running fine for over a year now without any stability issues. Does anyone know if the dma bug (and all theother silly ones that usually accompany via chipsets) accompany the via k8t800 chipset on this motherboard?


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 Post subject: Abit Kr7A-RAID KT266A
PostPosted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:33 am 
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:25 am
Posts: 30
Hi all, please let me know if this is the wrong forum.

I have an older mobo laying around , a Abit Kr7A-RAID KT266A, I also picked up a WinTV 878 chip tuner card a year ago for like $20. I have about 512MB RAM and a Duron 1ghz CPU laying around also, with a WD 80GB 7800RPM 8MB cache drive, sound/network cards, vid cards laying around etc.

So I figured, build a KnoppMyth PVR! The 878 based card works half-way decent with Win2000 on another XP box I have, but the video quality (live and playback) does NOT impress me, anyway I'll post a question about that elsewhere.

So I am about to build a KnoppMyth PVR and I start to research. I see this thread. It scares me.

Should I even bother with my spare mobo ? Should I try it anyway and build a "record only" system ? It seems that with a slow CPU and no hardware decoder, I may have to record only anyway (so this VIA bug wouldn't affect this system much anyway?) ?

Did anyone use my MOBO with sucess? Maybe by changing the BIOS settings mentioned above ?

Any advice/direction appreciated.


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:58 am 
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Joined: Mon Oct 06, 2003 10:38 am
Posts: 4978
Location: Nashville, TN
The problem with the via k?133/266 chips was a dma issue that caused the motherboard to lock up under very high dma usage. the pvrx50 cards put this much stress on the system, however I was able to run fine with a bt878 chip tuner. it doesn't seem to use as much dma traffic, so as long as you are using that software tuner I would say go ahead and give it a shot.

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Have a question search the forum and have a look at the KnoppMythWiki.

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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Wed Jan 11, 2006 12:42 pm 
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Joined: Wed Jan 11, 2006 10:25 am
Posts: 30
Thanks for the reply Xsecrets. I think I understand now, the issue was the data being sent, after it was decoded on the PVR-x50 card, to the mobo. In my proposed setup, my card just sends the data to the CPU, its already passed the mobo.

Either way, it sounds like I may be able to get a half-way decent prototype up and running. I'll half to switch mobos, maybe, when I upgrade to a real PVR card (hopefully soon!).

Hey..nothing better than an actual real reason to upgrade my mobo..I have to!...while I'm at it..why not a new CPU? :D


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 Post subject:
PostPosted: Fri Feb 24, 2006 11:14 pm 
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Joined: Sun Jun 12, 2005 10:55 pm
Posts: 3161
Location: Warwick, RI
Hi,
I got to say my VIA chips have to be odd balls.. I have had no issues, E-Machine W1640 has been running for months with PVR-350 and doing a varity of things. Or maybe these are the wrong chips? Audio mixer supports more than one source at a time also.

lspci say this about that:
Host bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8375 [KM266/KL266] Host Bridge
PCI bridge: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT8633 [Apollo Pro266 AGP]

Not a good board to use is the ASRock K7S41 & GX. Works with "sis" for the x driver, and performance is good with a Sempron BUT the big problem is the physical issue of connectors and caps blocking the installing cards that have remote control jack. Also audio has no F10 - F11 control.

Mike


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