Not another Intel vs. AMD Debate!? (This Time, It's About Video) - Incompatibilities
(Page 4 of 7 )
Manufacturers of high end video editing products have strict recommendations on their websites for the type of motherboards/chipsets/graphics cards that have been validated for use with their product. But they tend not to go into too much of detail as to what 1394b card won't work, what soundcard will cause freezing up, what makes of single sided RAM will cause your system to not boot. That's very much a job for the system integrator to discover through trial and error. As this knowledge is acquired after thousands of man hours of work it is treated as commercially important information and rarely disclosed. What we can discuss are those incompatibilities that are common knowledge, particularly with the less than enterprise level of video editing products. And add a comment that incompatibilities only get worse as you move up to more expensive products.
We touched on the fact that the RT.X100 has for a long time not been 100% compatible with Via chipsets (it does now, with some tweaks, but with some niggling little issues still unresolved). Via also makes chipsets for motherboards destined to take Intel processors so at a glance, it seems unfair to single Via out.
When examining the PC market in general, it's obvious that the number of Via motherboards shipped for use with Intel processors is a small fraction of the total Intel motherboards shipped. Intel chips like the 845, 865, 875, 7205 and 7505 have over 95% of the market, and companies like SiS and Via have little foothold here. On the other hand, Via dominates the market for AMD motherboards accounting for over 50% of that market. This makes the RT.X100 incompatible with less than 5% of Intel based PCs and over 50% of AMD based PCs. And it gets worse. The other big manufacturer of chipsets for AMD based PCs is nVidia with their nForce chips, accounting for another big chunk of the AMD market. And the RT.X100 is incompatible with nForce2. In fact the only chipsets Matrox has approved for use on AMD machines is the AMD dual CPU 760MPX (like this one) and the SiS 648 which together account for less than 3% of the market for AMD based computers. Yes, that's right, less than 3% of AMD PCs are fully compatible with the Matrox RT.X100 card.
What about other video editing cards and software? Why pick on the Matrox among mid-range cards? From our experience it's the most 
forgiving of all semi-professional cards, the easiest to work with, and the one least likely to give trouble with other hardware/software. Move over to Pinnacle and you'll run into a whole host of other problems. For example, the Pinnacle Liquid Edition Pro which comes bundled with an AGP video cum video editing card will even give problems working on a PC that previously had another ATI graphics card. That's because the Radeon 8500 chipset on the bundled card doesn't like any previous installation of ATI drivers. Don't even mention motherboard chipsets and other hardware you may want to have in the PC. (Among all the motherboards approved for use with the Pinnacle only one is a Via K8T800, and that's for Athlon 64s).
What about the third player, the Canopus DVStorm2? Isn't it a great card with great support for other hardware? Well, great card, maybe. Great support? We're not convinced -- by a wide margin. Heck, when it first came out it wouldn't tolerate you sticking a Matrox Parhelia three head graphics card in your PC! There were other graphics cards it didn't like. And it was a long, long time before a patch was available. There are numerous other products our DVStorm cards gave us headaches with, but we won't go into too much detail except to say that a lot of problems with the Pinnacle and Canopus products were on AMD based PCs.
But it's not just the video editing cards themselves. Builders of professional systems are cautious about building solutions around AMD because there are several other known issues. For example, a customer calls about a possible faulty IDE/SATA hard disk (let's say it's a Maxtor). You could ask the customer to download Maxtor's Powermax diagnostic utility, or send it to the customer on a floppy. Except that it won't run on an AMD machine. (Powermax doesn't work on nForce and Via chipset based machines. which excludes most AMD PCs). Customers are unlikely to have a spare Intel PC lying around just to move the hard disk over and run the Powermax diagnostics. So if it's an AMD based machine it would have to come all the way back to the manufacturer just to confirm that the hard disk is OK. That's annoying, disruptive and, expensive.
Next: Big Boys Bully Buyers >>
More Computer Processors Articles
More By Clinton
