recommended equipment for PVR350?

[farmboy03]

Is there anyone using the PVR350 with the tv-out that does not have problems with it locking up? If so, what equipment are you using? I would be willing to buy a whole new PC to get this thing to work. My only problem is Sage locking up while I'm fast forwarding/rewinding. Other than that, it works great.

Thanks,
Mike D.

[carlgar]

I was really hoping that someone with a perfect system would respond. It does not look good at this point.
Once I crippled my CPU by turning off the Hyper-Threading I have not seen any soft or hard lockups. When I first did this I encountered other problems which prevented me from being up for more than 3 days. I then discovered that I had a virus on my system. Once I removed that I was up for over 4 days. I then decided to try setting the sage priority to above normal and within just hours I encountered another unexpected reboot. I have not yet had a chance to see how long I can stay up if I don't mess with the Sage priority. I have currently been up for 2 days and 10 hours. However, as far as your questions go I no longer have hard or soft lockup with the work-around of turning off hyper-threading.
Note: I am using sageTV 1.4, so sageTV 2.0 could yield different results.

[tiburon451]

I had quite a few problems at first, but now my PVR-350 system is working like a charm. It is running in a commercial Dell GX-260 (P4, 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, 40GB IDE system drive, striped 2x250MB Hitachi DeskStar drives for video recording, USB-UIRT, Dish Network 4700 receiver. Its been running for about 2 weeks now without a reboot. CPU load is under 30% utilization, with software decoding to VGA display and SageTV Server enabled.

For me, what finally made it stable was installing the beta drivers at SHSPVR:

http://www.shspvr.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=5455

I've compared the s-video output from the PVR-350 to several ATI and NVidea display cards, and find the PVR-350 output cleaner, brighter, with more saturated colors; its as good as the direct y/c output from the sat receiver. See if the beta drivers work for you.

[farmboy03]

tiburon451 - what motherboard are you using?

[tiburon451]

Dell Optiplex GX-260, commercial Dell motherboard, BIOS vA00, P4 2.26GHz CPU, 512KB L2 Cache, 512 MB PC2100 RAM. This is just a recent midlevel refurbished Dell machine. You should try the beta drivers; they were intended for multiple PVR card setups, but my single PVR-350 wasn't stable until I clean installed them.

[::brainproxy]

Happy to report that my new system has been up a week without lock up, (typing this will probably jynx me).

VIA Mini ITX ME6000
PVR-350
512MB DDR3200
Windows XP pro

Using TV-Out on the PVR-350

Using SHS beta drivers. (this I think was the key)

Also, using Mlbdude2 skin. (Freytechnologies actually said this may help, I was already using it in this machine but I thought I'd mention this.)