"..an "Apollo MVP4" video card. " It's not a video "card" - it's Trident Blade video built into the Via MVP4 chipset. It's okay for most video, but I know from previous experience it is POOR for DVD playback, probably no matter how much ram you have. It isn't so much a matter of you having a K6-2 400 as it is the Trident Blade video is poor for DVD. If the mboard has an AGP slot, you will get much better DVD playback if you use just about any accelerated AGP card. E.g. most ATI cards have built in hardware support for DVD playback that works much better than the Trident Blade does. e.g if the AGP slot is 2X, clone Radeon 7000 cards are still available and would work much better. If the mboard does not have an AGP slot, you could try a PCI card, preferably one that has hardware DVD playback support, but it must be one that can co-exist on a mboard with onboard video.

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Cobra: this motherboard supports up to UDMA-66. Tubesandwires: CRAP! I actually have an old Radeon 7000, but it's the AGP version, and this motherboard only has PCI. Is the Apollo MVP4 bad for DVD because it drops frames, or because it outputs poor DVD image quality, or both?

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If that motherboard was built before 2001 then it maybe even harder to find a pci graphics card that will work with it. 95% of all pci graphics cards built after 2002 are pci 1.2 standard and higher. if your pci slot are pci 1.1 or lower you are going to have to really be careful, because pci 1.2 cards or hight will not work with pci 1.1 or lower slots.

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"Is the Apollo MVP4 bad for DVD because it drops frames, or because it outputs poor DVD image quality, or both?" It drops A LOT of frames - it can be like watching a chain of freeze frames. If the Trident Blade video accelerates DVD video at all, it does it very poorly. I'm pretty sure it doesn't have hardware DVD playback support. In late 1999 I was looking at new mboards and narrowed my choices down to ones with MVP3 or MVP4 chipsets. I settled on an Epox MVP3-G5 because it had UDMA66 support (most other MVP3 boards had UDMA33) and an AGP slot and , for more future video upgradability; the MVP4 ones I looked at did not have the AGP slot. Later I worked on a guy's computer that had a Trident Blade video card - exactly the same circuits as in the built into the MVP4 chipset - and despite the fact I think it had more video ram on the card than the MVP4 video allows you to set as shared in the bios, the DVD playback was crappy. That was with an early DVD-rom drive, and at that time DVDs only required slower playback speed capabilities. Still later I learned from others they also were very disappointed with the MVP4 video for DVD playback. On the other hand, my Epox MVP3-G5, with a K6-III 450, and originally with a Rage Fury 32mb AGP card, one of the very first ATI family of 32 bit cards that had hardware DVD playback support, and later on a Radeon 7000 card, plays DVDs fine, with 128mb of ram or more in Win 98SE. There was a PCI Radeon 7000 card if you can find one used, but I don't think anyone makes them new anymore. I have no idea whether it is compatible with a mboard that has onboard video. I had problems installing a PCI ATI Xpert card on a mboard with onboard video - it's not designed to be compatible with a mboard that has onboard video. It came out after the Rage Fury card, but was based on an earlier chipset. After much fiddling I got it to work in 98SE(I documented how I did that), but the video drivers cannot be updated. However, the same card on the same mboard installs no problem in XP ???

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