Stability of MP under Win7 x64 (1 Viewer)

[doveman]

Hi Doveman,

I tried it when I put an SSD in my main HTPC and it was terrible. It could have been the drivers for the TV Tuners, may have been the Mobo - I particularly struggled (IIRC) sourcing the correct drivers for my Hauppauge Nova 500 Dual Tuner and also for the Peak Dual Tuner. As we use MP for the main TV it seemed too shaky over a couple of days and I couldn't risk the WAF being reduced any - so back to x86 it was!

Hey, maybe it was your post that I saw then

One of the reasons I put x86 on my brother's PC is because there's no x64 BDA (there is a WDM) driver for his Nebula tuner, which by all accounts is a decent card so it seemed a shame not to use it but I think now it would be a shame to sacrifice the advantages of x64 just for that. I might still be able to use it's video input, so my brother can at least use it to transfer some of his VHS tapes to DVD.

I have a Nova-T 500 and didn't have a problem finding the drivers but I know there's a couple of different Novas so maybe you've got the other one.

 

[doveman]

x86 vs x64 is not faster or slower. No overhead, problems whatever on a full OS benchmark. In fact x64 plays nicer in general because the x64 WDDM drivers are better these days and you can use a decent amount of RAM not artificially limit your machines performance. You can never have enough RAM.

Don't even think about these days to use an x86 OS flavor unless you like a crippled machine because of a RAM bottleneck.

It wasn't so much of an issue before because it was a DDR2 motherboard with 2*2GB and I wasn't planning to add any more as DDR2 isn't so cheap anymore. That motherboard died on me though when I put it in the case so I've bought a DDR3 board to replace it and will be fitting 2*4GB.

DDR3 prices are great aren't they. I'm going to add another 8GB to my machine for 16GB total as even with programs/games that can't use more than 4GB there's always stuff to use it for, like putting the pagefile on a RAMdrive

 

[porky996t]

Hi Doveman,

I know there's a couple of different Novas so maybe you've got the other one.

I do remember having to look at the serial number on the card to identify the driver so you are right.

The reason for trying x64 was to use the 12Gb of RAM I have, but I then bought some dedicated RAMdrive software so just use that for timeshifting on win7 x86.

I'm hoping to migrate to using two TBS quad tuners (a DVB-T/T2 & a DVB-S/S2) soon on a dedicated TV & Media Server, so I may give it another go, esp as I have a Phenom II six core to go in it for the video file conversion and x64 may help lift the overall performance... (although I don't know if it will) and I'll be sticking 16Gb of DDR3 in there too.

 

[doveman]

I'm hoping to migrate to using two TBS quad tuners (a DVB-T/T2 & a DVB-S/S2) soon on a dedicated TV & Media Server, so I may give it another go, esp as I have a Phenom II six core to go in it for the video file conversion and x64 may help lift the overall performance... (although I don't know if it will) and I'll be sticking 16Gb of DDR3 in there too.

I think it very much depends on which software you use for conversion/encoding, as some is optimised to fully use x64 and multi-core and some isn't. I'm sure there's a fair few to choose from that are though, so you should be able to find something that suits you.

You can keep using some of your RAM for timeshifting in Win7 x64 of course. I use Dataram RAMDisk as I think it's the only free one available for x64 and that works nicely but if you've already bought some software for x86 you might be entitled to a free x64 version or cheap crossgrade.

Anyway, hope it goes better for you next time if you do decide to try it again sometime.