WIndows bus master drivers vs. AMD

4 replies [Last post]
MB
Offline
Joined: Sep 21 2000

I was very interested to read Paul Dutton's article on the Promise ATA100 controller in combination with IBM's 75GXP drive. I am thinking seriously of going down that route but the article highlighted another problem, and that is the performance of AMD's bus drivers under video editing conditions.

My system is fairly similar to the review system that Paul Dutton used (AMD Athlon 650Mhz/MS board/Award BIOS/256Mb RAM/Matrox Millenium G400/Miro DC30+/Maxtor 20+27Gb drives/Hitachi DVD/Philips CDRW) and the problems he encountered while installing the Promise card of having to uninstall the AMD bus master drivers in favour of the Windows 98SE default drivers rang a bell. I have long been dissatisfied with the reported performance of my Maxtor ATA66 drives with the AMD drivers. MiroVideo EXPERT reports a read speed of around 20,000kbs but a very restrained 5,000kbs write speed, even with the latest AMD drivers. I confidently point the finger at the AMD drivers because (a)the older AMD driver that my system was supplied with was even slower (b)every kind of windows configuration tried makes absolutely no difference, and (c)if I do the MiroVideo test in Safe Mode both readings are off the scale!!

Up until now this has not been so much of an issue because I have been working solely in offline quality at about 10:1, but now I have a very big project on the go and I need to capture/edit confidently at 5:1 or above. Hence thoughts of ATA100 and 60Gb IBM drives.

I will have to install a controller card to get more drives on my system so in anticipation of obtaining the Promise card and to get better performance anyway I have been trying to install the Windows default bus mastering drivers. To cut a very long story short (disappearing CDROM drives when no bus master drivers loaded - you get the picture?) my question is: where are they? When windows boots up again after having cleanly got rid of the AMD drivers it cannot find them anywhere. Even on the Windows CD files moved to a hard drive. I can show it all the .inf files under the sun but none of them seem to be the right one.

Surely this should be straightforward? Where am I going wrong?

Any thoughts on this and/or the Promise/IBM ATA100 combination would be very welcome.

MB
Michael Bott

RichardJ
Offline
Joined: May 7 1999

My past experience with add-on bus master drivers of any flavour is that they never work as well as whetever is shipped standard within Windows. I've given up bothering.

For 98SE you should not have to do anything special to install bus-master drivers, the hardware auto-detect should simply set up the correct ones. If device manager identifies the IDE controller by name, and you have a DMA checkbox (not greyed out) for each hard drive, then it's probably working. Just make sure DMA is checked.

Be careful with CD drives though, especially writers. Some will barf if DMA is enabled, but given the much lower speed of CDs it's not much of an issue.

------------------
Richard Jones, http://www.activeservice.co.uk
Home of the MediaStudio Pro Tutorial

Richard Jones, http://www.activeservice.co.uk
Home of the MediaStudio Pro Tutorial - Edition 3 for MSP 7

MB
Offline
Joined: Sep 21 2000

Thanks or your reply, Richard. Yes, I assumed that installing the microsoft drivers should be that simple - but something must be wrong. The New Hardware dialogue on reboot claims it cannot find the drivers for my new hardware - wherever I point it!

However, this problem is not quite as urgent as it was. Naturally, I have been trawling around for information on this problem and I found a thread this morning on the Miro forum that very interestingly refered to a 'known' problem with MiroVideo expert reporting erroneous read/write rates under certain circumstances. I could not find the original source for this bit of information but decided to put my own system to a real test. I went into Safe Mode and ran Miro expert which gave a healthy reading of 19,200kbs for both read and write. I then saved this as the logged rate for the drives and returned to normal Windows.

Lo and behold! Despite a dismal 4,500kbs write reading from expert in this mode, my machine is quite happy capturing from Premiere Movie Capture at 3:1, 768 X 576! Including audio!!

Well, I'm quite happy about that but I still need more storage for this ongoing project and I have no more motherboard connections left unless I trash the CDRW. Hence the interest in Promise's ATA-100 card. And so we come full circle - is there an issue with this card and the AMD drivers and will I have to somehow load the Windows drivers anyway?

MB

MB
Offline
Joined: Sep 21 2000

A quick update:

microsoft driver problem solved - Microsoft MSHDC.INF file had been removed somehow from the INF directory. Solution: port it over from another non-AMD machine! Default drivers loaded automatically at boot-up straight away.

MB

Mark Jones
Offline
Joined: Oct 25 2000

Hmm, have personally had a pretty good experience of the Promise card. Installed fine under 98SE on a Gigabyte motherboard with a P111. Using it with two IBM 75GXP drives on separate IDE channels and not a skipped frame in sight using a Raptor card. Actually used the Promise drivers but was expecting to have to rip them out in favour of 98SE drivers but again, no problem. Have you poked about for an IRQ share/conflict? Would the Intel/Athlon difference be contributing?