HDPVR, Gremlins & Hardware Sensitivity

[Diego Garcia]

While this is a hardware-related story, I'm posting it under the SageTV Software forum 'cause for the longest time I was convinced the problems I was experiencing were software-related.

I've been running Sage for a number of years on an AMD x2 64 3800-based ASUS M2N-SLI Deluxe motherboard. If you're familiar with ASUS' naming conventions you'll realize that the M2N-SLI was primarily intended to be a gaming system. Its BIOS is highly tweakable and overclockable, and the nVidia software (chipset?) was designed to support multiple high-end, for the time, graphics cards.

It's not an obvious choice for a DVR platform . In my defense I'll just say I bought it because it was selling at an attractive price, as was the AMD processor I put in it.

I had a bunch of initial struggles getting Sage to run properly on the hardware, but then for years the system was pretty stable.

That all fell apart when I upgraded the OS from XP to Vista, and then Win7, and added an HDPVR to the mix. I had to add the HDPVR because Comcast, may they hope someday to become honorable , decided to encrypt all of the non-broadcast channels in their cable lineup.

In fairness to Sage, AMD, ASUS and nVidia, a certain portion of the wonkiness I ended up experiencing was my own fault. Neither Vista nor Win7 were supported platforms for Sage before v7, now in late beta/RC stage. But even after switching to v7 I was running into all sorts of weird problems. Very frequent HDPVR lockups. Random system crashes. Random system lockups. And on and on. No joke, some weeks I spent more time struggling to keep the system (sort of) running than I did watching TV on it. And I got awfully tired climbing up and down the stairs of my house resetting the server just so I could watch a recorded show upstairs while I was folding laundry...

After the last set of blowups a few days ago, I decided I was going to make one more attempt to get things stabilized and, if that failed, give up on Sage and go with a Comcast-provided DVR . I decided I would junk the existing motherboard and processor, and replace it with a modern, Intel-based package. Given recent less than endearing experiences with ASUS mobos I decided to give Gigabyte a try.

Replacing the guts of the system wasn't as crazy as it sounds at first, because the straw that broke the camel's back was an inexplicable failure of one of the two gigabit NICs on the M2N-SLI. Now, in my frustration I will confess to blaming Sage and Hauppauge for a lot of the problems I was experiencing , but a NIC? There's no realistic, plausible reason I could think of which would lead either vendor's product to crash a NIC. So I gambled that maybe most of my problems were hardware related.

So far (it's been about 24 hours, and, yes, I know I'm tempting fate by writing this post ) I'm happy to say the new system is rock solid. I've gotten so used to seeing capture device errors from the HDPVR that it's literally shocking to see it merrily record program after program without any glitches at all. If things continue as they are I think I'll finally be able to get back to enjoying Sage, rather than dreading doing battle with the system.

So the moral of the story is that, at some point, you really should start thinking about blaming the hardware. I still don't know why the M2N-SLI mobo was associated with all the problems I was experiencing, but it looks like it was the culprit.

Maybe the fact that the M2N-SLI was designed to be a gaming machine was the issue. For a media server that runs 24/7 you don't need a lot of performance but you've got to have reliability. For a gaming machine I think the opposite is true -- if your system crashes once in a while but is a screaming monster the rest of the time you've probably come out ahead.

In any event, I hope this little tale helps someone else to take the plunge sooner than I did. Or at least supplies a little entertainment...