Another VIA thread!

  • Thread starter Thread starter mada
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mada

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I thought I'd start this thread to pass on some information. I too was plagued with the VIA bug and I was all set to ditch my motherboard and buy a new one.

BUT, just yesturday I checked M-Audio's website and saw that there was a new driver for my Delta 44. I installed it, and I still had the crackle. :(

So I thought I would do a little more research to see if anything has changed, or if someone has figured out for good how to fix this problem. To make a long, long, long story short, I finally got my DAW to work without snap, crackle, or pops.

Here are my system specs:

AMD Athlon
Abit KT7A-Raid w/ VIA KT133 chipset
512 MB ram
Delta 44
Windows 200 Pro

Here's what I did (in order):

1. Installed new delta driver ver 5.10.00.29 (didn't fix problem)
2. Flashed bios
3. Installed new 4-in-1 drivers ver.4.49
4. Set bios to fail safe configuration (no crackle)

And that's it! I realize this might not work for everyone, but I thought I would share it just in case. I've spent a long time trying to figure this out, and now I can finally enjoy recording for the first time! yee-haw!

Feel free to email me if you have any other questions about what I did.

Adam
 
mada said:
I thought I'd start this thread to pass on some information. I too was plagued with the VIA bug and I was all set to ditch my motherboard and buy a new one.

BUT, just yesturday I checked M-Audio's website and saw that there was a new driver for my Delta 44. I installed it, and I still had the crackle. :(

So I thought I would do a little more research to see if anything has changed, or if someone has figured out for good how to fix this problem. To make a long, long, long story short, I finally got my DAW to work without snap, crackle, or pops.
Here's what I did (in order):

1. Installed new delta driver ver 5.10.00.29 (didn't fix problem)
2. Flashed bios
3. Installed new 4-in-1 drivers ver.4.49
4. Set bios to fail safe configuration (no crackle)

And that's it! I realize this might not work for everyone, but I thought I would share it just in case. I've spent a long time trying to figure this out, and now I can finally enjoy recording for the first time! yee-haw!

Feel free to email me if you have any other questions about what I did.

Adam
Click to expand...

your damn lucky to get alot of todays hardware to play nice with chipsets, via does stay busy pumping them out but they are the largest reseller for amd chipsets...

isn't google wonderful, you can search up most any issues you run into with a few clicks...
 
You might want to run some system benchmarks. Often the "failsafe" BIOS settings will include changes that will greatly degrade performance.

What you might want to do - this wil take some time but may well be work it - is list which exact BIOS changes are made between standard and fail-safe configuration. Then go through the individual setting one by one turning them "up" until you find out which one is causeing your problem. Most likely something dealing with interrupts (IRQs).
 
I own the KT7a board, and can testify PCI performance is pitifully slow... and this with the BIOS in optimized performance mode. I can just imagine what yours is (not) doing in the Slug bait setting. Yikes!

My disk performance is about 1/3 what the same drive will do (Sandra scores) in a motherboard without the VIA bottlenecks in the PCI bus. Just to be sure, I rebuilt the Win2000/SP4 workstation from a clean FDISK.

The KT7a is now running Red Hat 8 just fine. I use it for an internal DNS server in my lab.
 
Screw VIA, I will not touch another motherboard based on any chipset from them with a 10 ft pole! Not only I had major nightmare with my Q10, but my audio files would get corrupt when copying from one drive to another on a different IDE bus!

I have since got an MSI board with nVidia chipset and haven't had any isseus.
 
bgavin said:
I own the KT7a board, and can testify PCI performance is pitifully slow... and this with the BIOS in optimized performance mode. I can just imagine what yours is (not) doing in the Slug bait setting. Yikes!

My disk performance is about 1/3 what the same drive will do (Sandra scores) in a motherboard without the VIA bottlenecks in the PCI bus. Just to be sure, I rebuilt the Win2000/SP4 workstation from a clean FDISK.

The KT7a is now running Red Hat 8 just fine. I use it for an internal DNS server in my lab.
Click to expand...

humm, 1/3? the via posted 66% slower benchmarks? that's stretching it a bit don't you think? i know back a few years ago (kt7a) via did have these pci issues of around 20-30% even at 133, but they were not as bad as your's are, as in the benchs between intel and amd chipsets posted years ago...

other system config do effect benchmarks also... if you believe in sandras accuracy to begin with....

this area of topic always starts flame, iv'e seen it many many times the past 3 years since the athlons release in 99...
 
RWhite said:
You might want to run some system benchmarks. Often the "failsafe" BIOS settings will include changes that will greatly degrade performance.

What you might want to do - this wil take some time but may well be work it - is list which exact BIOS changes are made between standard and fail-safe configuration. Then go through the individual setting one by one turning them "up" until you find out which one is causeing your problem. Most likely something dealing with interrupts (IRQs).
Click to expand...

I used the fail safe settings as a starting point. I'll be making changes to the bios to increase performance for sure.
 
ok. time for the computer literate to inform those of us without vast knowledge of bios upgrades.

I too have been plagued by the Via K7AMA MOBO but have to sadly admit that I have no idea how to go about "flashing" my bios.

how does one go about this?
 
I followed the instructions on the ABIT site. Check with your mobo's manufacture to see if they have any BIOS upgrades.
 
Doh!

good idea. I think I have an ECS elitegroup K7.

you think they'll have it?
 
Fusion2 said:
humm, 1/3? the via posted 66% slower benchmarks? that's stretching it a bit don't you think?
Click to expand...
The drive turned in a Sandra 2000 score of 8097 on the slow board, and close to 30,000 on the non VIA board. I have the current BIOS installed on both machines, correctly set, etc etc.

Sandra is simply a comparision tool. Using the same version on both machines is an apples-to-apples comparision.
 
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