ABIT KT7 VIA Drive Mouse probs....

[ryanbrucks]

Hi,

I have an ABIT KT7 non-raid, and having some mouse problems.

Here is my system
-Duron600@950-
-ABIT KT7-
-2 20gb ATA66 hdds-
-Mushkin 128mb PC133 Nanya-

I of course formatted my C drive before installing the new motherboard since the previous system was a 440bx, and its a PITA messing with that without a format. I set up my bios options correctly and installed windows.

Everything is stable at 950mhz, everything works fine. I ran some benchmarks in Q3 and found that performance was awful, less that wha I got on my P3 700 and this is 1GHZ. So I looked around on my ABIT CD and installed the VIA Service pack, but only the AGP driver since I didn't need any of the others. Now performance rocks..

I loaded up sisoft sandra, did some performance tests, it was running as fast as a 1GHZ Athlon and memory was faster thanks to KT7 tweaks.

Then i did the Hard Drive test, and performance was awful. A score of 3888, on a 5400 RPM ATA66 drive. On my BE6(with onboard ata66 controller) I was getting 10,500 on the same disk.

So I installed the VIA Busmaster(ver 2.1.49) and it enabled DMA mode. The reason I didn't do that before was because I read on VIAs website that windows98 already has ata66 ide drivers for the KT133. This is windows98se, and maybe it doesn't.

But now that I have this installed, my mouse skips and jumps whenever the hard drive is working. For example, if a program is installing in the background while I work in photoshop(which I'm always doing) the mouse will look like it is running at 5fps, missing movements and skipping large areas. I also tested other areas by playing movie files like MPEGs or AVIs in the background and loading a program, the video in the movie skips while the hard drive is being used, but the audio doesn't.

And in games like UT when some hard drive activity comes on in a game it skips all over the same, before it wouldn't affect gameplay. The strange thing though is that while it will make a 3d application skip and jerk, the frame rate doesn't drop. Almost like the CPU ignores the programs and mouse while it does hard drive work. Does anybody have a tip? I'd really appreciate it.

 

[aventari]

how are your IDE devices set up?? do you have a CDrom on the same controller as the HD or something/

aventari

 

[ryanbrucks]

They are set up as follows

1 ATA66 drive on IDE channel 1 as master. Another ATA66 drive on the same channel 1 as slave to the first drive.

My cdrom is on the second IDE channel.

The drives are ata66 IBM 5400rpm. I also have an ABIT BE6 and P3 700 setup, and it didn't do this, and they were configured the same(only for the BE6 the motherboard has its own ata66 ports).

I found that the problems occur using the VIA drivers or windows drivers, but both only if DMA mode is enabled. Hmmm. Windows ver 4.10.2222A

Ryan Brucks

 

[ryanbrucks]

I've formatted my hdd a few times today, and tried every BIOS setting(defaults, optimized, ect ect) that I can think of, but nothing makes a difference. Next i'm going to try taking off my second drive and see.

Regards,
Ryan Brucks

 

[ryanbrucks]

Ok, I've tried taking the second drive off to see if only having one drive on the system works. It doesn't.

To clarify, the mouse doesn't always skip, only when there is alot of hard drive activity, such as an install file, or something load or closing. When I first load quake3, the mouse skips slightly for a few seconds. When I load an installation exe, the mouse skips horribly while the installshield is loading. Its not just the mouse though but the whole system that jolts, because in Q3 when the mouse skips at the beginning, the flames in the Quake III Arena logo jolt as well. I don't know what to do, any suggestions would be great!

Ryan Brucks

 

[Technonut]

I only install the AGP drivers on any VIA chipset board that I setup. (which has been many) I ran the Sandra 2000 drive benchmark on my C drive (Maxtor ATA66 7200 RPM) and it was 17081, which smoked the other comparision drives. I reran the test 2 times with similar results. (re-booting and shutting down running programs before benchmarking) I have not gotten around to running HD Tach yet, but I know it's results are usually more accurate than Sandra.

If you re-install Windows, my advice is not to install the VIA Busmaster's at all, windows does a better job with performance. Just run benchmarks between the two, and you will see what I mean. I would also suggest installing Cacheman Cacheman Download and set it to either Multimedia user or Power User. You will be surprised in the difference it makes.

 

[ryanbrucks]

Thanks,
I'll try that utility out. I wonder if it will work. Right now I am just running the AGP vxds(since nothing else made a noticable difference) and enabling DMA through the device manager. But the mouse still skips around the same during lots of hdd action. It's weird. Its not something big, maybe something that is common but most people just ignore since it doesn't affect anything? I'll try that util, thanks.

Ryan Brucks

 

[Technonut]

BTW, what video card are you running? With my ASUS GeForce DDR, I am having great performance with the new 6.26 drivers. I am also using the new VIA 425a AGP drivers.

EDIT: To choose the settings in Cacheman, click the "setting" tab, click Win98, then choose your setting. Then click "File", then click "Save & Exit" to save the settings.

 

[ryanbrucks]

An ELSA Gladiac-32 GTS. Its not the video card or drivers though, because I tried the windows VGA and same thing. I also flashed the Gladiacs BIOS to the latest ELSA revision and nothing.

Cacheman didn't help, and only made performance about 10% faster and I tried all the settings.

I'm running 6.27 drivers right now for what it's worth.

Ryan Brucks

 

[ryanbrucks]

Here are some things that consistantly make my mouse skip around-

the Photoshop installshield
the AIM95 installer while the installation is almost done
the winamp installer skips the mouse quite a bit toward the end of install
4x4 Evolution beta install shield(this one is by far the worst) note it has nothing to do with the fact that its beta because its just the installshield that skips and thats always the same.

It also skips around whenever I make or extract a big zip file(20mb about). I list these so somebody else can try them on the KT7 with DMA and look for the mouse to skip, since it is something that might go unnoticed, please let me know!

Ryan Brucks

 

[Technonut]

I am still thinking about what could be causing it. I use Photoshop 5.5, and many other programs, and never have experienced the mouse problem. The closest thing I could relate to is when I was setting up a KA7 once, A BIOS version that I flashed to (forget which one) caused my mouse to bug out. It stopped when I flashed to another version. Are you using the factory BIOS, or have you flashed over to the UL? If not, I suggest that you do. Many of your problems may be solved. Also if you have a serial mouse around, plug it up and see if you experience the same problem.

EDIT: It is known that there are issues with the original shipping BIOS of the KT7.

 

[ryanbrucks]

My BIOS is the latest version. I didn't flash it, but it came with it. Should I reflash that?

Can you tell me the difference between the VIA 4 in 1 drivers and busmaster? I thought busmaster was in the 4 in 1 drivers because thats what the via site says, but I decided to download the busmaster separate, and its nothing like anything in the 4 in 1.

But the miniport driver is worse than no DMA at all for some reason, I get better PIO scores using the miniport. And what is LSD?

I'm going to grab a serial mouse...

Ryan Brucks

 

[Technonut]

Look at the bottom of your screen when you first boot up. If you have the UL BIOS, the date will be 08-25-2000, and to the far right it will have UL. Another way to tell is to see how high you could set your voltage to in Soft Menu. The UL allows up to 1.85v. If you do not have the UL BIOS, flash to it, and there is a very good chance it will do the trick.

 

[ryanbrucks]

Yes I have the UL version, because I can change my voltage to 1.85 and I have all the options that the new version lists on the ABIT site.

I just tried formatting my hard drive and installing nothing but the AGP driver then enabling DMA in device manager, and still the problem persists.

I read this on a news post on bmdrivers.com

"There is a known issue involving a small shipment of Western Digital high-performance WD Caviar Ultra DMA hard drives and the VIA VPX and VP2/97 (also marketed as AMD-640) chipsets.
During the initiation phase of an Ultra DMA read data transfer, a series of commands are issued by the hard drive, the BIOS, and the VIA chipset. A deviation from standard protocol by the VIA VPX and VP2/97 chipsets is causing the system and the hard drive to go out of synchronization, resulting in a system that does not respond or locks up.

Hard Drives Affected The specific Western Digital hard drives affected have CCC:C1 firmware, were shipped between 9/10/97 and 10/8/97, with model numbers AC35100 and AC36400."

I wonder if my IBM drive has similiar incompatibilites? I will be calling them today. My drive is

IBM DJNA-352030.

I've eliminated the idea that its anything software related, or heat related, and it doesn't seem to be the drive becasue my benchmarks are right where the should be, about 15% lower than a 7200 RPM drive. But I will call them anyways, then ABIT.

Ryan Brucks