Asus P6T experiences on openSUSE-11.1

I updated the BIOS to 0406. The update did not improve the Video playback performance.

I also tried the VESA driver, it was marginally better when using X11 output video mode, but still slower than an athlon-1100 PC, which makes no sense. I’ll likely try the nVidia proprietary driver next.

what? You still don’t use it? :open_mouth:

You know me … slow, … worse than methodical, 1/2 step at a time … :slight_smile: … and proprietary driver? ehh ??? whats dat ? :slight_smile:

OK, so I installed the nVidia proprietary driver 180.51 a few minutes ago. Its like NIGHT and DAY. The nVidia driver finally makes the Asus P6T with an Intel Core i7 look the way its supposed to. I have not done any checks yet, but smplayer without VDPAU it was at about 13% cpu loading of one core. Not great (I know winXP with vlc playing the same video was around 3% cpu loading of one core) but a SIGNIFICANT improvement. I can go full screen with this and it is still smooth as can be.

So there are problems there, … the openGL graphic driver needs major work … and there is possibly some kernel problems (likely to be fixed in openSUSE-11.2), … and possibly some other problems. … but at 13% cpu on one core, with 4 cores (8 core if one considers the "virtual core) then this PC now “blows the drawers off” my other PCs. …

So I’m a happy camper again. :slight_smile:

I think I may have problem to but never know.
So you must have lots of fun.That what I was thinking about driver 180.44/51 and you should use Nvidia the first time,I know you like to playing with other stuff :wink:
My new computer I will not use Audigy card at all,I have on my motherboard sound7.1 that I will using it with my G51.

I have to go to pick my Ingrid from the school she is 9 years old what a little girl.See yeah

With vdpau and mplayer, the Asus P6T with an Intel Core i7 and nVidia GTX 260, playing the meanest High Definition video I could find, was at 1% load on one (and only one) of its 4 cores (or one of 8 cores depending on how one wishes to count). … A bit over kill :slight_smile: … Thats the same performance of Media Player Classic Home Cinema with the same video under WinXP (where Media Player Classic Home Cinema takes advantage of Pure Video and offloads the decoding to the GPU, just like VDPAU in Linux).

Could you please explain me what is core and how can I find out about how much I have on my motherboard.

Read this:

In openSUSE it will tell you after clicking on the “My Computer” desktop icon.

**BIOS stupidity **

*… or how even old-in-the-tooth users can be dumb *

As part of my efforts to improve the behaviour of video when using the openGL (and vesa) graphic driver, I updated the BIOS on the Asus P6T, because I noted the latest BIOS offered some video related fixes.

What I did not mention was my own stupidity in doing this. :X

I had previous read the Asus motherboard manual on how to do the BIOS update. The Asus P6T motherboard is really neat, in that to update the BIOS it gives users many choices:

  • install BIOS update program in Windows and update BIOS via Internet;
  • install BIOS update program in Windows and update BIOS via downloaded file
  • create boot floppy for BIOS update
  • download updated BIOS file and update BIOS from BIOS itself
    Since the PC had winXP for my wife, I decided to update the BIOS from winXP. So I inserted the motherboard CD (that comes with the motherboard) and installed the BIOS update program. I had previously downloaded the updated BIOS file, so it was a simple matter to run the program, and select the file, and the program updated the BIOS. It went with out a hitch. It then advised an immediate reboot was necessary …

… and here is where the fun began …

When it booted it told me to enter “Setup” to recover the BIOS setting. I was to do that by pressing “F1” to run “Setup”. Alternatively I could press “F2” to load default values and continue. Well, I did not want the BIOS default values, I wanted the BIOS settings the local store setup for me, so I selected “F1”. …

Well, that took me direct to the BIOS, and to my horror, all settings had been reset to default anyway. … < sigh > … and unfortunately in my rush/enthusiasm to play with the PC, I had only recorded (via digital picture with my digitial camera) only 1/2 of the BIOS settings. … Now years ago, this would not have bothered me. But today one gets a zillion BIOS options, … so many that one could write their PHD dissertation on BIOS settings lol!

Hence I went thru the BIOS settings, with the manual open, one-by-one trying to set them up properly. When done, I saved the changes, rebooted and no go. The PC would not boot. It would not recognize the SATA driver. Instead it has some message that stated:

a) Intel ICH10R 32_bit ACHI/RAID Driver disk"
b) Intel ICH10R 64_bit ACHI/RAID Driver disk"
c) FreeDOS command prompt" 
Please choose a ~ c: 

… Now there is where my stupidity came in … I had a long day at work earlier, and I was tired. Really really tired. … And that is why. One should not do a BIOS update when tired. So when I looked at those options, in my mind 1+1=42 and I decided the BIOS was still set wrong, and I restarted with <CTRL><ALT><Delete> … and tuned the BIOS settings again. Save, boot, same problem. Again <CTRL><ALT><Delete>

I did this for 1/2 hour, and then did a break for 2 hours, doing household domestic duties. I came back, and this time with my wife leaning over my shoulder went at it again for 1 hour. Same problem, over and over. Finally, toward the end of the hour, my wife fell asleep on the couch with extreme boredom, despite my growing anxiety. And I decide enough was enough, and I would boot to a live CD to see if I had inadvertently removed the partition table by the BIOS update (I know … that makes no sense, but I was tired … ).

So I opened the DVD drive to put in the boot CD, and low and behold, there was the Asus Motherboard Utility CD sitting very nice and pretty in the DVD drive.

… and then my stupidity, and the utter folly of my ways, sank in. … Duhhhh … How could I be so dumb !!

The PC was booting to the Asus Motherboard Utility CD, and that CD was bootable !! Never have I seen that before, and its a GREAT feature on Asus part, and it took me completely by surprise. So each time after I finished tuning the BIOS, the PC was offering to boot from the Asus Motherboard Utility CD, and I was pressing <CTR><ALT><DELETE> …

So I removed the Asus Motherboard CD, rebooted and everything was fine again! … Once again, the world was wonderful …

… at which point I went to the fridge, grabbed a beer, and celebrated my kick in the pants for being stupid. rotfl!

Walking into work this morning, I decided I have to give my 83 year old mother a phone call (who is running openSUSE-11.1 on her PC) and warn her in advance of the letter she is about to get from the EU or German government, stating:

Dear grandma_cpu, … We regret to inform you that your son is stupid.

… but of course she knew that anyway. rotfl!

Different maybe. But my Box has Asus mobo.
I always download the file to the HD
Reboot - go to BIOS
Update from EZ Flash 2 (Which my mobo has)
Works very smoothly.

As a follow up to this, I note this blog of an openSUSE user: OpenSUSE 11.1 - OpenGL problem after nVIDIA driver update - iKurt.com where this user reported major problems with the version 180.29 version of the openGL driver, and that by rolling back to the 180.22 they solved their problem. I am now wondering if I unwittingly was using a version of the Linux nvidia openGL driver that had problems, which I detected by the poor multimedia playback. …

It is no matter now, as the proprietary driver works well, but I suspect that I did run afoul of such an openGL graphic driver hiccup.

mplayer is still NOT multithreaded. There’s a ffmpeg-mt branch which evnetually will go into ffmpeg and mplayer and offer multithreaded functionality. Also, IIRC, you need the prop NV driver for VDPAU to function correctly

I’ve been fine tuning my setup most the evening.

I’m doing my best to support the local power company, with 3 computers under my desktop, two are ancient (with inefficient aging power supplies), and then there is my new PC :

  • 9 year old athlon-1100 w/1GB RAM & nVidia FX5200 (this is my sandbox PC);
  • 5 year old athlon-2800 w/2GB RAM & nVidia 8400GTS (this used to be my main PC);
  • Intel Core i7 w/6GB RAM & nVidia GTX260 (this is my new Asus P6T); …
    So I had to figure out how to connect them all to the one monitor, keyboard and mouse I have.

I ended up putting away my old Aten 2-way KVM, and pulled out of the attic a rather old Digitus 4-way KVM (model is K-614-1). I had not used it for some time, and a quick check of its specification confirmed it supported 1920x1440 resolution, which is the resolution I am using. So I plugged my keyboard/monitor/mouse into it, and also plugged the keyboard/video/mouse from each of the 3 PCs into it (almost). … I say almost because the new Intel Core7 uses a USB output for the mouse, and I have not figured out to plug that in to the KVM. (The KVM requires a PS2 and the PS2/USB converters I have are all the wrong “sex” for the converter ) . So I plugged our family laptop’s wireless USB mouse into the new PC. Tomorrow I’ll go buy either a converter, or a new mouse.

But then I had more problems. …

When booting the Asus P6T via the KVM, the keyboard was NOT recognized at the grub menu stage (via the digitus KVM) but it was recognized after the PC had booted up to KDE-3.5.10. Fortunately, I found a fix. I shut down the PC, removed the Asus P6T from the KVM (connecting it directly to keyboard and monitor) and booted into BIOS and changed its USB settings from “auto” to “legacy”. I then shut it down, reconnected it to the KVM, restarted, and the keyboard now worked at the grub menu stage.

Next problem, when I plugged in my athlon-1100 into this ancient 4-way KVM, all the screens came up with a very strong yellow tinge! … I guessed there was a problem either with the KVM cable, or with the KVM port. So I shut down, changed to a spare KVM cable I had and also moved the PC’s KVM connection to a different KVM port (the one remaining), and restarted, and it worked fine.

Next was internet. We have a Speedport router that has 4 ports, and connects to the internet.

But by my desk, I only had 2 ethernet ports available, with 3 PCs. So it was back into the attic again, this time to pull out an old Level One router we had not used for years. So I plugged it into one of the ethernet slots that connect to our main Speedport router, and connected my athlon-1100 and the new Asus P6T (Intel Core i7) into the Level One Router (creating a subnet). I left the athlon-2800 outside of the Level One router (but inside our home router to the internet) because our printer is connected to the athlon-2800, and I did not want to fight Level-One subnet firewall issues when it came to printing.

Next I had to change the Speedport’s port forwarding to forward selected ports to the Level-One router, and then change the Level-One’s port forwarding (or in some cases just opening ports) so the two PCs behind the Level One’s firewall functioned ok.

Then after I was done, I had to some functional tests.

  • all PCs running at once? YES ! (but lights in the city noticeably dimmed) :stuck_out_tongue:
  • Internet works on all PCs ? YES !
  • Firewall configured ? YES !
  • keyboard, mouse, monitor all work ? YES !
  • sound/speakers all work ? YES !

But I still need to setup network printing from inside the subnet to the printer on the main net. This should not be an issue. I successfully did this 3 years ago, …

The truth is, I don’t really enjoy this. Most the time while configuring I was cursing just like a grumpy old man, as I moved the cables about. My wife quickly retired to the far corner of the apartment, to be as far away from me as possible.

Anyway, thats done! Now maybe I can finally play :slight_smile: … Hopefully this weekend I will be able to test the speed of encoding videos on the new PC :slight_smile:

Just a brief note … video encoding is fast on this Intel Core i7. Real fast. So fast, it lead me into making another silly mistake.

One application I use is “stills2dv”. stills2dv home page stills2dv, as the name would suggest, allows one to take a high resolution image, and then turn that image into a video, panning across the image, zooming in, zooming out … etc … Its not packaged for openSUSE, but the tarball is easy to build/compile. Its one of my favourite apps …

Now stills2dv has various settings (and a config file) that one needs to use in creating the video clips. Its a command line program, and not gui based. And one of the command line options is a relatively new (as of the latest version 0.5) command line feature: -fastrender which will turn off anti-aliasing totally and make the rendering something like 5 to 10 times faster, perfect for checking/developing/debugging the script that creates many hundreds of images, which will later be turned into a video.

On my old athlon-2800, I used that “fastrender” feature all the time, to speed up the rendering, until I had the zoom-in, zoom-out, pan-right/left exactly the way I wanted. And only then would I remove the “fastrender” feature, for the final high quality ‘production cut’, where that production cut was quiet slow in its rendering.

So I installed stills2dv on my new fast Core i7, and went to use stills2dv. Of course, I completely forgot about the “fastrender” feature. Well, I was disappointed in the rendering speed of the Core i7. The speed was only marginally faster than my old athlon-2800, and I figured it should be 8 to 10 x faster. So after rendering a couple of videos, at what appeared to me to be far too slow a speed, I started checking my PC’s configuration, checking the application, checking its dependencies, checking anything I could think of, to see what I was doing wrong.

Then after over an hour of pondering it (while doing something else on the web) the answer came to me. My memory brain cells had let me down and I finally recalled that I needed to use the “fastrender” feature. I enabled that feature, and suddenly rendering was incredibly fast. I did say fast? I mean FAST !!

In part, I figure the very speed of the Core i7 was to blame. Because of that speed, I was slow in noting that I missed this feature, because without the “fastrender” feature, the Intel Core i7 was amazingly still marginally quicker than my old athlon (when the athlon was using the “fastrender” feature). If the Intel Core i7 had not been so fast, I think I would have picked up on my silly mistake earlier.

I did say the Core i7 renders fast? :wink:

Funny how these mistakes happen. :slight_smile:

A mistake here on my part. The specs say this PC has an AD2000B, but it is identified by the alsa-info.sh script as an AD1989B.

I can get 5.1 surround sound if I download the file http://www.halfgaar.net/media/chan-id.zip and unzip that and play it in mplayer or smplayer.

But the following two speaker tests do not give 5.1 surround sound:

speaker-test -c6 -Dplug:surround51 -t wav -l1

It freezes in the konsole at the first channel.

And the test command

speaker-test -c6 -l5 -twav

only yields 2 channel sound.

I may go to IRC#alsa and see if any of the sound guru’s there can shed some light on this. … although it does “sound” that I have 5.1 sound working.

Sounds like you have had loads of fun with this new pc. Where did you buy the parts and how much did they cost? I am a bit jealous at your spec, to be honest. My wife would do more than just move to the other side of the house if I were to get my hands on a machine like that. lol! Enjoy and I am glad you are sharing your experiences here!

I put most of the details here (including cost) in post#7 above (in this thread): openSUSE Forums - View Single Post - Asus P6T experiences on openSUSE-11.1

It was incredibly expensive. I speculate in a few months, the price for an identical system may be 30% to 50% less expensive.

I purchased the parts from here (they are also the shop that assembled the PC for me):
Zimmermann Electronic GmbH

Their store is a 10 minute walking distance from my place. We have good tram service between that store and our apartment which is very handy, especially since my 25 year old car died in December-2008, and we sold it (the car). Before this new PC, we have purchased 3 desktop PCs from them in the past, of which 2 are still ‘alive’ (my athlon-2800 and my athlon-1100 were both purchased from them). We paid them to assemble my athlon-2800 (about 5 years ago). The athlon-1100, my wife and I bought the parts from them (about 9 years ago), and successfully assembled that PC our selves. It taught my wife a lot about PCs (she does all the cabling) but I find assembling a PC from parts, by myself a pain. :slight_smile: I would rather pay someone to do it, and use my time elsewhere. But I do prefer to pick the parts.

So I try and send business to that local store, as long as they are not too over priced.

I have also updated both the athlon-2800 and athlon-1100 where many of the parts (larger hard drives and extra RAM) came from their store.

Indeed, my wife was not too thrilled about this. But I have been talking for 2 years about getting a new desktop for myself (my last desktop purchase of a PC for myself (which is the athlon-2800) was 5 years ago). So finally my wife agreed. She also understands that I prefer to custom pick the parts, to ensure 100% Linux compatibility. She understands that by having picked parts that I know in advance are Linux compatible, I can save hours tearing out my hair if I had not done so, and if I had instead purchased some complete package, where not all parts in the PC are easy to configure with Linux.

I also needed a state of the art PC to work with AVCHD camcorder video, where playing with video is my major hobby.

I build all my pc’s myself. I like assembling things and then find that they work. But I can understands paying someone for it. It can be hard work and time consuming. Also frustrating if things don’t work when you press the button.

I got a new Antec Nine Hundred case from my wife at christmas. The old parts look really nice in a new shiny case. My parents thought I bought a new pc.

The rescession is hitting us pretty badly here in Ireland and as a result money is tight. So I will have to make the best of the parts I have for as long as I can. Might get some extra RAM or a new processor.

My overclocked little E4300 is under pressure from running nearly at twice the stock speed >:)

Thanks for the links. I find Germany to be a bit cheaper when it comes to PC parts then Ireland (besides the VAT difference). I might buy new parts in Holland when I am going over to visit my parents. Thanks again for the entertaining and informative thread!

Thats very nice !! Very futuristic looking.

My case is rather simple looking and bland, but it does have a metal cage inside to reduce electronic interference: Arena Electronic GmbH - Chieftec - - SH-01
I purchased the “all black” Chieftec SH01 ATX case. But for a power supply, I went for a different brand name. The case and power supply recommendations were made by our PC shop, and I followed their recommendation.

overclocking ! You need good cooling for that. :slight_smile:

Holland has reasonable PC pricing I find.

Here is the site I typically go to in order to get a German price comparison:
Preisvergleich Geizhals.at Deutschland
or
Preisvergleich Geizhals.at EU

Yeah, I have a ThermalTake BlueOrb FX as you can see in the picture of the previously mentioned blog entry. It does the job but I am thinking of changing it to something a bit more silent.

Yes they have. The VAT difference will always make a difference but I generally fine it’s at least 10% cheaper in Holland then in Ireland.

I buy my parts in a local(ish) store which has a huge stock and great prices. I might pay them a visit in June and get myself a Core 2 Quad Q8200 which is €17.71](http://www.komplett.ie/k/ki.aspx?sku=366000) there than in one of the market leaders in Ireland. I should get a bit of benifit from this CPU in video editing and games. Also, I will probably run it on stock speed instead of a overclock resulting in better powermangement by OpenSUSE (none at the moment due to the overclock), lower electricity usage and a quieter computer.