Trouble with Biostar M7VIW. Advanced help needed

[PepperBreath]

I'm getting choppy playback with a Biostar M7VIW that I bought in September. This did not occur with an older Biostar M7MIA. Audio will be fine but there will be intermittent pauses in the video. This happens with all forms of video streaming off the HDD and does not occur with DVDs played off my DVD drive.

Just a list of things I've tried to get smooth video playback:

1. Tried several different versions of Via 4-in-1 drivers.
2. Updated BIOS to latest version.
3. Swapped IDE cables.
4. Turned "Prefetcher Mode" off and back on in the BIOS
5. Turned "UDMA" off and on in both Windows and in BIOS
6. Stepped down the speed and tried ATA33 through ATA133
7. Tried different video playback software.
8. Tried turning down video hardware acceleration.
9. Switched video drivers.
10. Formatted and reinstalled Windows XP.
11. Tried 3 different HDDs.
12. Pulled all cards out except video card.
13. Tried different RAM.

There's probably a few things that I'm forgetting. I've tried just about everything to get better video playback but nothing seems to work. Oddly, DVDs played from my DVD drive don't have the pauses and play fine.

Here's the real interesting thing though. When I'm downloading a large file over the net in the background, video playback is perfect. Last night I was downloading a large game demo with a download cap at 80KB/s and video playback couldn't be smoother.

Given that, is there any way I can fix this poor playback problem? Downloading a file in the background seems a poor way to fix video playback although I do find it interesting that my HDD has to be busy in order to play files more smoothly. With nothing running in the background, video is choppy.

Also, assuming this is some strange hardware bug that I can't fix, is there any way I can keep my HDD busy in the background so that I can watch videos?

Even though I've had this board for more than a month, I'm very close to exchaning it at newegg. I'm pulling my hair out trying to figure this out.

 

[pyrojunkie]

Interesting problem indeed. Any program that would put constant work on a hard drive would be very devastating to performance. Your problem could be IDE channel. I suggest switching the hard drive over to the secondary IDE. Don't worry its ok to have your boot disk on the secondary IDE.

If the result comes out that the primary IDE channel is the problem, RMA the mobo.

 

[PepperBreath]

Just gave it a shot. No dice. Still has the pauses with the HDD on the second IDE channel.

Good suggestion though. It's something I hadn't thought to try.

 

[pyrojunkie]

This problem puzzles me. I just want to check all the bases. What CPU aer you using by the way? When you have installed the 4in1 drivers, you installed them before any other driver? Is it generally all video files that play poorly?

 

[PepperBreath]

AMD Athlon 1.333Ghz

4-in-1s were one of the first things I installed if not the first thing. That was the .49 though. I just recently installed the .51 but it didn't make a difference.

Basically all video plays jerky although for some reason .wmv seems to be the worst. I forgot to mention that I've tried Windows 2000 as well as switching from NTFS to FAT32 and back and the problem never went away.

I'm really starting to think it's a defect somewhere. I haven't seen anyone else complain about this problem with the particular chipset (Via KT266A) or the particular motherboard (Biostar M7VIW). Of course, everything else works fine so it's one of those obscure problems people may not be noticing.

I really miss the old motherboard. I should have just bought the same thing.

 

[DieHardware]

Have you tried it without the 4n1's?

 

[jmagg]

Have you tried it without the 4n1's?

This is a good suggestion.

I recently worked eith a MSI mobo where the opticals would not go DMA regardless of ide driver combinations.
Win 2000 sp4 with no mobo drivers solved the problem.

This is not a direct comparison as the MSI was a SIS chipset but...an outside shot.

Probably a mobo bug.

 

[PepperBreath]

Originally posted by: DieHardware
Have you tried it without the 4n1's?

Yes I have. On the initial install of WinXp before installing anything else it does the same thing.

 

[DieHardware]

What program? Have you tried using any others?

 

[PepperBreath]

Originally posted by: DieHardware
What program? Have you tried using any others?

Originally posted by: PepperBreath
7. Tried different video playback software.

Divx Player
Windows Media Player
Media Player Classic
VideoLAN
WinDVD
ATI file player
etc.

It's not software.

 

[PepperBreath]

Well, I'm going to send it back. I think I've tried just about everything trying to get smoother playback and I'm pretty fed up now. I don't think newegg.com even sells this board anymore so I have no idea how they're going to replace it unless they just send me the same board and call it referb.