What it is the best mother board 4 making SVCD's?

[GtMustangJim]

I'd like to ask all the people that get good results with DVD2SVCD

What kind of motherboard do you have?
And do you have to use the CRC patch?


I have:

1.4G Athlon Tbird CPU
K7AMA mother board
256mb DDR SDRAM


I must have the worst machine for making SVCD's. I can get an OK encode with 1 pass but to do a multi pass and need to use the CRC patch on all movies and the quality really starts to stink.

"The more passes you do the better the quality gets" isn't that sopose to be the rule? On my machine the more passes I do the worse the quality gets, especially when the screen is mostly black. If I do a 5 pass the quality just makes me want to cry :(

I got my friend into making SVCD's and he has almost the same PC. He has the same CPU and Ram as I do and the results he gets makes my jaw drop, Absolutely perfect!! The only difference between our PC's is the mother board.

I have tested my memory with GoldMemory v5.07 software and it is 100% good. Actually I have 3 sticks of 256 but can only use 1. If I use more than 1 stick my PC won't even boot up. My main board manual says it supports up to 1G of Ram (Yeah right)

I have also tested my PC with "burn in test" and it passes. I couldn't find Prim 95's torcher test. (If any one knows the link to it let me know)

So if you have a Athlon let me know what kind of mother board you have if you get jaw dropping results without using the CRC patch.

I'm just going to buy another main board and hope this solves my problem.

Thanks...

[DDogg]

I am really impressed with the Dragon Plus. Only down I found was it does not let you tweak your ram voltage. It is a solid board, very fast with a XP1800 and has the raid and onboard 5.1 sound with optical out. I build one up for a nephew and wish I had bought one.

I use the 8kha+ from Epox and it is good but I don't know if I would recommend it until I see if they have fixed a couple of oddities in the next bios. I have never had a problem with CCE on it.

Prime95
http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft.htm

[SiliconSoul]

I have a 8kha+ from Epox also and it works great xp 1700 and 512 ram in two chips... i would recommend it as long as you do not get registered ram. if you do you will have tons of problems and need a different bios update than the ones the original boards came with.

ddogg pm me about the problem you have had with your 8kha+

[GtMustangJim]

@DDogg

That Dragon Plus sure is one expencive mother board. I guess you always get what you pay for and belive me I got what I payed for :(

Not to sound stupit or anything but I don't have a XP1800. It will still work with my 1.4GB Tbird, right?

PS there were a lot of links on that page. Which one is for the torcher test?

@SiliconSoul

I havn't ruled out 8kha+ and it is more afordable but doesn't that have a via chip set? doesn't DVD2SVCD have some issues with via. Also do you need the CRC patch with that board?

Thanks guys...

[SiliconSoul]

i had an issue at first when i got the mb but since i have installed some of the via software and via bus mastering software i have not had any problems. ive been using dvd2svcd for about 2 months now and i have not had to patch cce at all or anything... or any crc patches...

:-)

any one else have problem with this mb?

[DDogg]

The earlier versions of Prime95 had a special test in it to actually certify your machine to attempt the prime computations. Later ones are different so just run it and check back to see if it has any errors.

Oh re the dragon. It has LAN, raid, 5.1 sound all onboard so at 145 bucks it might be the cheapest deal in town for those features. You can set up the raid as a simple striped set so you can turn two 40 gig drives into an 80 that is twice as fast as a standard drive. Very sweet indeed.

Don't get me wrong on the EPOX. It is a ROCK solid encoding machine with a 1.4 Tbird with FSB @ 150. 2 sticks of crucial ddr with that fsb really make it hum. 1.8 on 16:9 encodes is smokin for a 1.4TB

[markrb]

If cost is an issue the two best boards for under $100 are the Epox and the Soltek. I own a Soltek and for the most part am very happy with it. Both boards have issues though.
The Epox has some problems with the bios. I am not completely sure what they are now as I have stopped following that board.
The Soltek has rock solid bios and the board is rock solid at lower FSB speeds (anything under 138Mhz).
The problem with the Soltek is that it has problems with higher FSB speeds if you plan to overclock. If you overclock by adjusting the multiplyer there is no issue with this.

Now a big issue is if you plan to use RAID all via chipset boards have known problems in the PCI bus that will give you much slower performance then on other chipsets, but for the most part if you don't use RAID it's not a big issue.

If money is not an issue and you are not going to overclock much the following is the way I would rate the boards.

1. Soyo Dragon +
2. Soltek DRV2 or DRV4(ATA 133)
3. Epox 8HKA+

I have had no problems encoding CCE on my Soltek board with an overclocked Athlon XP 1700+.
You can get all the boards at www.newegg.com for a reasonable price.

Mark

[GtMustangJim]

OK just bought a Dragon plus. I paid $150 + $15 shipping.

[GtMustangJim]

Originally posted by SiliconSoul
I have a 8kha+ from Epox also and it works great xp 1700 and 512 ram in two chips... i would recommend it as long as you do not get registered ram. if you do you will have tons of problems and need a different bios update than the ones the original boards came with.

ddogg pm me about the problem you have had with your 8kha+

Whats is "registered ram"??

[gerti67]

Hi GtMustangJim,

here is a (very) short and simple but good description i found somewhere on the net:

Registered Memory
SDRAM memory that contains registers directly on the module. The registers re-drive the signals through the memory chips and allow the module to be built with more memory chips. Registered and unbuffered memory cannot be mixed. The design of the computer memory controller dictates which type of memory the computer requires. Hope that helps,
Gerti

[GtMustangJim]

Originally posted by gerti67
Hi GtMustangJim,

here is a (very) short and simple but good description i found somewhere on the net:

Hope that helps,
Gerti

Thanks for the reply. I don't belive my Ram to be Registered Type. So I guess that is a good thing.

Thanks again...

[markrb]

If it doesn't clearly say registered then most likely you don't have it.

Mark

[bradnopit]

Best performance at best price epox 8kha+ all the way.
haven't had any cce problem what so ever

[GtMustangJim]

Just got done with my first encode using the Dragon Plus. It took 3 trys. The first time I got a CRC error at 2% so I tried it again and made it to 10%. The CRC checks were much closer to passing with the Dragon Plus. i.e

A45BC1
A45BC3

I ended up having to install the CRC patch. The encode was 100 times better than what I was getting with my K7AMA mother board. With my old board the multi pass encodes were C- or maybe even a D+ and with the new Drangon Plus I'd give the encode quality A-.

I'm sure the Dragon Plus is a great mother board but I think the Epox 8kha+ might be better suited for making SVCD's since I have heard of no problems with the CCE check sums what so ever.

Just wanted to report my personal findings.

[markrb]

Your motherboard is one of the best solutions for Home Theater PC's as well. It has the capability to pass digital audio to a reciever built in.
It's a good board. I wouldn't worry much about the CCE CRC error. It seems pretty common.

Mark

[GtMustangJim]

@markrb

With my old K7AMA the CRC check sums were WAY off and with the CRC checks disabled the multi pass encodes were total crap.

With the Dragon plus the CRC checks are still off but much closer to matching and the encode quality is much nicer. I'm thinking if I had gotten the 8kha+ I would not have goten any CRC errors and the Quality would have been perfect.

I'm not sure I'm almost temped to buy the 8kha+ but at the same time I don't want to take a loss.

[jasond]

I am using the ecs k7s5a elitegroup board. I find it works great.

It has 2 ddr and 2 sdram slots and handles 1 gig of ram.

Its under $100 Canadian!!

I am using a duron 1 gig chip with a volcano HS.

CCE speeds on widescreen dvds are normally .975 or fullscreen 1.1 RT

I would suggest you check into this board if you were wanting a cheap one that works great.

PS. I am using 196 PC100 ram so I might notice a speed difference when I switch to DDR.

I always do 4 pass VBR and only had problems once but that was due to my motherboard monitor as posted in DDogs CCE stress test thread.

good luck! :)

[Winroute]

I used to have a ecs k7s5a ....
I RMA'ed it when i found out it couldnt take DDR sticks...
(with "old" SDRAM it worked close to perfect!)

Now I use ABIT KR7A-RAID to do "everything else", and a dedicaded rig to do DVD2SVCD :)

My (built for) DVD2SVCD rig:

Abit BE6-II ver1.1 (flashed to ver 2.0)
Intel Celeron 850@1133 (running at 133 MHz FSB)
Win2k SP2
ASUS Slotket S370-DL
1 x 256 MB Apacer CAS3 SDRAM (runned as CAS2)
1 x 128 MB Apacer CAS" SDRAM (-------"------)
2 x Seagate U6 20 GB drives in RAID 0
ATI XPert98 (with TV out)
Soundblaster 128 "something"
Creative DVD1241E (Revision: 0p44 (patched region free))

Winroute

[ipf123]

I am considering getting the Epox latest 8K3A+ m/b. But can anyone tell me why the CRC patch has a detrimental effects on the video quality in CCE multi-pass ?

[GtMustangJim]

Originally posted by ipf123
I am considering getting the Epox latest 8K3A+ m/b. But can anyone tell me why the CRC patch has a detrimental effects on the video quality in CCE multi-pass ?

Intalling the patch won't have any effect on the video quality. Its your hardware that will cause the effect. But after intalling the patch Cinema Cratf won't care whether the passes match or not. If your getting CRC errors it is an indication that there is a problem. I would always recommend finding the problem rather than installing the patch. I recommend the 8kha+ because so many other M/B's generate CRC errors.

I have a soyo dragon plus and even I was getting CRC errors but instead of installing the patch I found the problem and corrected it.

Sorry for my bad spelling...