Via & Radeon AIW

[sean74]

Does anyone own an AIW Radeon on a via chipset (A7V motherboard?) and actually got it to work without crashing on WindowsME?

I've checked this forum, and another forum at via's webpage and there are plenty of people asking about it, but I haven't seen any posts where someone successfully got that Graphic Card/OS/Chipset combination to work right.

I'd really rather not have to start running Windows2K just to get the T.V. Tuner to work.

I'm really dissatisfied with ATI's lack of usefull driver updates; they still don't support DirectX 8 without using their beta drivers.

Hobbit needn't reply, i've already seen your spam

 

[Kodiak]

Okie Dokie, I've got Asus A7V, WinME & Win2k and ATI AIW Radeon... it works... how? Beats me! I guess I'm just lucky (unlike Hobbit
I've got my system custom built for me in Calgary, so I can't tell you exactly what they did to make it work... but, I have 1005A Bios, 4.26 Via 4in1 and latest Official ATI drivers... I've downloaded the newest beta ATI drivers for fun in WinME, can't tell you what the improvement (if any) was... however, all my games work with either driver, and I've got DirectX 8 installed, so...

as far as TV, it crashed on me the first day or two on a semi-regular basis... and now I haven't had a crash in 3 weeks and watch TV at least an hour a day -- don't ask me *what* I did to fix it, since I did a zillion things at the time, it was a new computer after all :-(

I know this is not as helpful as you hoped... just to tell you there IS a way... one just has to find it

if you have any specific questions, I'll be happy to look up my configuration

 

[breed33]

Kodiak,

It is great to see that your radeon works for you, but can you truly say that all features work even 90% of the time in both operating systems? There is no doubt that TV works in both OSs, but do the extras work?

Are the following things working reliable (almost everytime) for you both in WinME and W2K:

- Pausing TV and letting it cache the show to disk and then continue watching without hiccups.
- Recording an hour long show and closing the TV tuner without it hanging.
- Watch a DVD or any recorded mp2 file
- Resize, move, shrink, pause, stop, start a DVD movie without crashing. (this was a dream for my system. W2K couldn't play anymore than four seconds of a DVD before freezing)
- Capture to mp2 from any external source.


If your system can pass all of these tests repeatedly in WinMe and W2K, then you truly are a lucky one, perhaps the only one out there ever.

I would ask you to try all of these tests and report back to us. If you can operate all these tests we would all be interested in your entire system configuration.

Hope this card works completely for at least one VIA user.

 

[sean74]

Kodiak,

I'm happy to hear that there is at least one person that got an ATI on an Asus A7V to work.

I'm running an 800mhz Athlon on my A7V, and I got a new ATA100 hard drive to take advantage of the onboard controller. If i can't get this stupid thing to work my alternative was to trade my new motherboard, cpu and ram, for the pentium system i gave my mother when i built this one.

This graphics card worked beautifully on that system:
600mhz PIII 100mhz frontside bus, SE440BX-2 intel motherboard, 256MB RAM)

Would be quite a kick in the performance, but at least it would be stable. Then again, it would just really gall me to know my mother had a faster system than I do.

Oh, but anyway, I've emailed a problem report for ATI, waiting to see if they have anything usefull to say (doubting it) then I might take you up on your offer to get some system configuration information off of you.

Also, regarding breed33's post, i don't forsee myself wanting to record mp2 from an external source, but have you tried some of the other stuff? (the pausing t.v., recording, dvd playback, and currently my biggest problem.. opening a browser window with a t.v. window open, damn thing crashes almost immediately

 

[sean74]

I've got the t.v tuner actually working under DirectX 7, full functionality without crashing even the pausing works, which suprised me.
I can do all those really challenging things that the system hated before, like clicking on the start menu, opening explorer, resizing explorer etc. resizing the t.v. and DVD display (power dvd)
I will say i that i had ati's dvd player open earlier and was about to write this note and the stupid thing crashed, but i prefer powerDVD and haven't had any problems with it.

Problem is.. I don't know exactly what I did to get it to work, i managed to screw something up in device manager badly enough that on the next restart it was unable to load the ati drivers, or find the monitor at all (640x480 16colors). installed the via agp driver, the system crashed at the end of the installation, and afterwards everything worked fine.

see, i should have tried that from the beginning

 

[Kodiak]

breed33:
As I said it works for ME, which means it does what I need it to do...
I haven't tried all of the things you mentioned because I don't need them... of the things I've tried:
ATI DVD works perfectly... I'm in love with that thing!
I've had a stupid SoftDVD on another computer and tried PowerDVD on this one which is OK, but I love the picture quality and the zoomin on ATI DVD... I can't believe how well that thing zooms in, drags, and extrapolates... so the DVD works very well -- and I wouldn't really consider it an 'extra', it is one of the reasons I got the card

I watch mp2 files with the File Viewer with no problems... these are files I have recorded using the TV Tuner... I can't say that I've recorded anything an hour long, but I've recorded 15 minute things with no problems... I have a pretty fast 2x 46.1GB IBM Deskstar in RAID 0 hard drive combination, so that surely helps

I haven't tried capturing mp2 from 'external' sources (other than the TV Tuner)... I have yet to mess with that stuff

Pausing/TV on demand worked fine when I got the computer... I've disabled it since I don't use it and I don't want my HDD to work any more than it has to (though it worked very transparently, again probably because of RAID setup).
If I try to just click pause now, the picture gets resized in a funny way... I think if I took the time to reenable it by default as it used to be, it would work fine (I see no reason why it wouldn't if it used to), but maybe I'm just an optimist

as far as capturing, I am still looking for an optimal custom setting which would give me the best quality for least size, but I'm sure somebody who knows what the heck I, B and P frames are (or whatever) would find out the optimal solution faster than me... nevertheless it records fine, even if it is a bit bigger than I'd like it to be...

truth be told, I think the reason it works is just the professional setup; I know a fair bit about computers, and I could've put mine together myself, but decided to have actual professionals do it -- VooDoo computers (kind of like Canadian version of Falcon Northwest). They just know how to put things properly betten than most hobbyist and computer freaks do, simply because that's ALL they do and they have people working on R&D alone, just figuring out how to make things work... even the expert technicians out on the boards don't have the time to do that kind of thing... so I think it was more of a skill (though not mine) than pure luck, although luck always has something to do with it

 

[Kodiak]

sean, I had similar problems my very first day of using my new computer -- TV would crash almost immediatelly after opening a browser window (took me a while to realize the cause/effect relationship there.
However, I did a few things that day, one of which has somehow fixed the issue...
I updated the 4in1 drivers, the ATI drivers, etc.
Though the thing I THINK did it for me, is that I got a external router/switch which took care of my broadband internet. previously I had to use a ADSL dialup software for PPPOET connection which was custom written by my ISP. That program was the worst written piece of garbage I've seen in a long while, and I think it was the program that crashed my TV rather than browser itself...
right now I watch TV and write on boards concurrently on daily basis... wouldn't have it any other way