Ongoing My HTPC - Some Good News, Some Bad... (1 Viewer)

Elf

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June 8, 2005
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After a *lot* of "clarting" (my wife's choice of words) with resolutions, codecs, tv-outs, you-name-it, I finally used some birthday cash to buy a GeForce 6200 card (to replace my old GF4 MX) and a copy of the Purevideo decoder, and I have to say Wow! :D

To anyone experiencing the "looking at the TV through cotton wool" effect like I was, this (for me at least) has been the best thing I have ever done - super crisp and smooth picture in MyTV, easily as good if not better than anything I was previously getting from my Sky STB.

On the back of the elation of discovering a whole new life to MediaPortal, the Gods of evening-things-out stuck a hand in and my system (an AOpen XCube EA65II barebones) bluescreened followed very closely (too quickly to read the bluescreen) by a hard reset. After a reboot it went on to do this every ten minutes or so (after an initial 3 hour stint with no problems) leading me to wonder if overheating was the cause :cry: . As an SFF case, the components aren't half crammed in there, and the GeForce card only has a heatsink which sites quite close to the CPU cooler.. Certainly when I passed my hand around the back of the machine it was fairly toasty.

I need to confirm that overheating is the problem, but it looks fairly conclusive - anybody have any thoughts on how I might keep the heat down, given that the nature of the case is such that I can't put in any more fans and buying a GeForce with a fan isn't really an option?
 

Elf

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June 8, 2005
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:oops: Good idea - I'm at work right now so I'll have to take one and post it tonight!
 

niekh

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October 19, 2004
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Could be that your PSU is too weak (not enough wattage)...or maybe the following...

I had similar symptoms after exchanging the heatsink on my CPU and it was driving me mad! After some investigation it turned out that the 3.3V rail of the PSU started to drop and the whole machine bluescreened when the voltage went down to about 2.8V.

Oddly enough, the cause of this was a power connector (molex) that wasn't properly inserted into the DVD-Drive. Didn't think it would have something to do with 3.3V (since the molex carries +5V and +12V) but evidently the poor connection caused such a strain on the PSU so that it showed up first on the 3.3V rail.

Good luck!

/Nils
 

davej00

Portal Pro
March 22, 2006
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Pleased with the good news. I have a 6150 based mobo -- and with the purevideo decoder, and component video out to my 32" panny -- I am very happy with the picture quality.

On your system BSOD I would run some monitor software or alarm software to watch the temperatures in the case. The wattage of the PSU is also a key issue to check.

- Dave
 

moullas

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January 15, 2005
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About the blue screen...
To prevent your system from rebooting, go to Control Panel -> System

Go on the advanced tab, and click on the Settings button under "Startup and Recovery"

There, uncheck the "Automatically Restart" button, and (optionally) set the "Write Debugging Information" setting to None (this will speed up somewhat the process, since i don't think you need the memory dump)

The usual suspects though suggest the PSU or Overheating... since your problems started after moving to the new case right?

* Update: added BSOD troubleshooting in the Wiki at http://wiki.team-mediaportal.com/TroubleshootingBlueScreens
 

Elf

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June 8, 2005
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It's hard to tell if the problem is related to the new case or the new gfx card; When I first set up the new case it was my old GF4MX gfx card but I never got the chance to run the system for more than 15-20 minutes. It was only after I installed the new gfx card and got such good results that I settled down to watching it full-time, and the problem only appears after it's warmed up for a couple of hours, which is why I suspected overheating.

I didn't get a chance to take a picture of the case interior, sorry! More evidence did surface during last night's experiments though. Once again it ran happily from cold for a couple of hours, but then started showing graphical glitches like fonts replaced with garbage. Interestingly, the TV picture remained fine, but a few minutes after seeing the glitches, the whole thing froze with a screenful of graphical mess. Overheating surely, although the control panel for the GPU temperature says 53 degrees, which doesn't sound that high?

More things to try this weekend: Running with the case lid off to see if it helps, replacing the old gfx card to see if it makes any difference. I wonder, is it possible to *underclock* the card - would that help and would it affect the 2D performance that much?
 

surfermc

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May 7, 2006
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Have you tried using something like speedfan to monitor the temperatures on the motherboard.

It might not be that the graphics card is overheating but the rest of the system.

MC
 

Elf

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Great link MC, thanks, I'll give it a go!
 

Elf

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June 8, 2005
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OK, getting somewhere now (at least in diagnosis, sadly not solution!)..

..my system is certainly overheating - the ambient temperature in the case rises constantly and all components are pretty much affected.

It seems to be related to the fact that the CPU is running very high, which I find interesting. If TV is playing it jumps around between 70-80% (all attributed to mediaportal.exe) although I expected my graphics card (Geforce 6200) to do most of the work there?
This happens whether timeshifting is enabled or not. Also, if I start up Mediaportal without TV enabled, it runs at 5-7% but once I've enabled TV it rockets up, and stays there, even if I then disable TV again.

Finally, apparently randomly, while TV is running, it eventually jumps to 100% usage and stays there.

Is there perhaps something I'm not doing to enable hardware decode in my card? (I'm using nVidia Purevideo decoder and have activated the dxva option and applied the various registry entries to enable DXVA in the card..) Or does anyone know if this is a known problem and will the latest SVN help? (Haven't had a chance to try that yet).

<edit>
For info

MediaPortal Version: 0.2RC4
MediaPortal Skin: MCE
Windows Version: Windows XP (SP2)
.NET CLR Version: 2.0.50727
DirectX Version: 4.09.00.0904 (9.0c)
Audio Codec: nVidia Decoder
Video Codec: nVidia Decoder
CPU Type: Intel Celeron 2.2Ghz
Memory: 512 MB
Motherboard: AOpen somthing-or-other (Intel 865 chipset)
TV Card Model: VBox DVB-T
TV Card Type: DVB
TV Card Driver: Latest Vbox
Video Card Model: Geforce 6200
Video Card Driver: Latest Forceware
Video Card Resolution: 720x576
Video Render Type: VMR9
Audio Card Model: Onboard
Audio Card Driver: unknown
</edit>
 

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