J. Clarke said:
Funny, I've had one running in one of my servers ever since they were brand
new to the market. Had another one running for years--it would probably
still be running if I hadn't managed to apply the wrong voltage in the
wrong place and let the smoke out of it.
As for being "developed early", in point of fact dual PII motherboards that
can provide the correct power and clock speed accept dual PIIIs just fine.
The boards made specifically for dual PIIIs are much newer than those.
He didn't say what OS he was using--any Windows NT or Unix variant should
make good use of dual processors.
However there are known problems with video capture and dual processors that
are related to driver issues and haven't necessarily been corrected with
the latest drivers--I suspect that that is what he is encountering.
The *problem* is the god damn Swiss-army knife AIW.
If you wanna capture video, and are serious about it,
get a DEDICATED video capture card, NOT one of
those all-in-1 disasters. They try to do too many things,
and wind up doing all of them in a mediocre fashion
at best.
I have used Winnov Videum cards under four different
multiprocessor systems from NT4 through XP SP1
with NO problems whatsoever. The earliest of those
was a dual Pentium Pro that ran at just 200 mHz and captured
704 x 480 @ 29.970 to U2W (80 Mb/sec) drives with
no dropped frames. If you want to make use of your
dual CPU's, the capture driver and the compression
codec in use has to be written SPECIFICALLY to use
more than one CPU, most aren't.
Properly designed capture hardware imposes little or no
CPU load-that's all handled by the card itself.
If the AIW is capturing to MPEG2 on the fly, and NOT using
hardware compression, something
in your system is likely to be overheating-check your CPU fans
and the vid card fan and clean the crud outta them.
Alternatively, capture to a non-compressed format if you have
the space and encode off-line using TMPGENC or similar.
When the CPU has all the time it needs to encode (non real-time)
you'll get a better final result as it's not being pushed to do something
it may not be able to sustainably do.
