Beware of Matrox Parhelia

[Francois Stark]

We have been running the Parhelia card in our Intel Vero Beach Dual 2.8 Xeaon machine because it is such a good all-rounder: It can drive three screens, and is mighty fast for 3DS Max and Combustion.

But: we are also running a Decklink HD card, and did not heed blackmagic’s warning not to use the Parhelia. We have been getting these problems:
-The blackmagic capture app causes Blue Screen of Death(BSD) on exit
-Premiere’s capture window stops capturing between 1 hour and 5 days after installation. Stays on black screen. Causes BSD on exit also. The only cure was to uninstall and reinstall decklink drivers.
-Premiere’s playback out to Decklink SDI stops working
-Premiere can not play back blackmagic codec uncompressed SD footage to local screen or to SDI, even though DV footage continues working.
-Premiere can not play back targa sequences at all

All of these errors points to the decklink card as the culprit. But no.

This morning we ripped out the parhelia and installed a Quadro 350 card – much slower in 3DS Max and Combustion, but premiere and decklink is stable. We did a lot of capturing and playback today, even some RT dissolves between two uncompressed BM clips and it seems fine.

We need to run it a lot longer to test stability, but all of the problems mentioned above was fairly easy to reproduce, and now it seems they’re gone.

Bottom line – Don’t run Parhelia and Decklink together!

Regards
Francois

[Barend Onneweer]

I’ve had some of the same issues with the Parhelia board next to the Decklink HD Pro. I’m in the process of replacing it with an nVidia 6800 board.

Bar3nd

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[Jeff Anderson]

My system has a Decklink Extreme and a Parhelia card and I have not experienced any problems. Have you tried running the latest Matrox drivers for the Parhelia? Also, have you tried using a different PCI slot for the Decklink? Maybe your motherboard is having a resource conflict between the Decklink and Parhelia. Just a thought.

Good luck.

MB – Supermicro P4SCT+II
CPU – P4 3.4
RAM – 2GB
OS – Win XP SP2
Video – Matrox Parhelia with dual LCD monitors
Boot HDD – WD 7200 RPM
Video array – Stripe set of 4 x 250 GB SATA HDD with Promise FastTrak S150 SX4 RAID controller
Video Capture – Decklink Extreme v4.8.1
Video Editor – Adobe Premiere v1.5

Jeff Anderson

[Francois Stark]

Hi

The DL extreme is only PCI, not PCI-Express. Maybe that’s the difference – who knows? We had many problems and tried many solutions – this has been going for more than a year now.

Since the problems always pointed to the DL card, and not the Parhelia, we tried swopping to difference PCI-X slots, always using the newest drivers, even tried the WHQL drivers. Nothing helped until we removed the Parhelia.

[Peter Corbett]

We run a BFG 6800GT 256mb overclock Barend. Works very nicely with Premiere Pro.

Peter Corbett
Powerhouse Productions
Australia