PCI-E bus conflicts? (1 Viewer)

[spiderwheels]

I'm having trouble with my PCI-E graphics card dropping both picture and sound for about a second once every 10-60 minutes.

The graphics card has been running trouble free for 9 months before this problem started.

A couple of weeks before it started (or before I started noticing it) I removed an old PCI DVB-S receiver card and replaced it with a TBS dual DVB-S2. This is installed in the only 1x PCI-E on the mobo - right next to the 16x PCI-E graphics card slot.

The mobo also has an onboard IGP (ATI 4200HD) that I assume is wired in the PCI-E bus as if it were installed in another slot. I have swapped to the IGP in the BIOS and the issue has gone away.

If the problem had started as soon as I installed the TBS DVB-S2 card then I would have suspected it immediately. Either I just didn't notice (unlikely as I tend to notice the slightest occurrence of a dropped frame) or the problem really didn't occur when I installed the TBS card.

The TBS card never misses a beat. If I rewind after a video drop-out the stream is complete.

The problem is also getting more frequent. Which also suggests something is gradually failing.

Does this sound like a PCI-E bus conflict?

 

[Owlsroost]

I think I'd suspect either overheating (the new tuner card in the next slot will have altered the airflow around the video card, and/or the fan is failing - check the card temp in cat control centre), or a slowly failing component on the video card.

PCIe is not a shared bus like PCI - it's a collection of discrete 2.5 Gbit/s point-to-point links - high bandwidth mobo slots just have more of them available (e.g. x16 => 16 links, x4 => 4 links), and they are not shared between slots.

Tony

 

[spiderwheels]

I think I'd suspect either overheating (the new tuner card in the next slot will have altered the airflow around the video card, and/or the fan is failing - check the card temp in cat control centre), or a slowly failing component on the video card.

PCIe is not a shared bus like PCI - it's a collection of discrete 2.5 Gbit/s point-to-point links - high bandwidth mobo slots just have more of them available (e.g. x16 => 16 links, x4 => 4 links), and they are not shared between slots.

Tony

Thanks for reminding me how PCI-E actually works .

It could be temperature although it doesn't seem to be related to how hard the card is working (GPU utilization is very low on SD content but it still drops out) so that leaves a knackered card.