2008-03-25

VIA VT310-DP usage

I used VIA VT310-DP every day for more than a week now. As expected a performance is not very good, however, it is suitable for most every day tasks. However, there is one exception that it is difficult to ignore. It is video. Most videos don't run smoothly on this computer. Like I said earlier, HD rip works very slow or don't work at all. Other videos run with troubles too. The most common problem is that audio runs faster than a video.

I figured out that this motherboard did not work with those PSUs which didn't have a -5 volt feed. It is optional by today ATX standard and it is needed only by legacy ISA add-in cards (I found this statement in wikipedia), because of this most PSU's do not have this white wire. I think it is a main reason why this motherboard is not supported by VIA anymore and they are difficult to find. Why does it need that -5V feed or was it a design bug? I don't know, there is no information on it and I didn't find any people complaining about this problem. Probably, this motherboard is not used that widely for somebody to notice it and complain in forums. Update 2012-04-30: Currently I can tell that it was wrong assumption. Motherboard perfectly works will all ATX PSU but screen blackout sometimes occur (usually on cold boot, more rarely on restart). I couldn't find the reason of the problem, but if you boot your system with VT-310DP motherboard and nothing appears on the screen (but motherboard works), there are several ways to bring it back to life. Try to attach other PSU, remove one RAM stick, clear CMOS, just leave it alone for some time and try again. I had such blackouts about from 10 to 20 times in 5 years but it always had returned into working condition once again. Actually it still works well for me and serves as testing platform for various purposes.

I have already bought an external audio card for it (Creative Sound Blaster Connect. After I connected it I had got a BSOD (blue screen of death) window. However, after I disabled integrated audio, everything worked perfectly until I tried to overclock a CPUs. I changed multiplier from 7.5 to 8. This small change was quite noticeable on overall system performance. However, some strange things began to appear with sound. The sound worked ok only with mono output. Stereo sound became to fast and I didn't find how to solve this.
Creative Sound Blaster Connect

No comments: