Stability issues

[reggie14]

I recently set up a dedicated Sage server that connects to a TV using svideo and I've been having a horrible time keeping it running. The system is a Athlon 2400+ on a Asus A7N8X-E, with a Ti4200 for a video card and a PVR-250. I'm running Sage 4.1.3 with PureVideo decoders.

Previously this was my main computer, and I ran Sage v2 on it without any stability problems at all. Since v4 came out, its been a dedicated Sage box. For a while, it wasn't hooked up to the TV, and I never used it for watching TV, just serving it to a client. When I did that, I never had any problems. Now that its been connected to the TV, the machine crashes occasionally, and the TV screen either freezes or I get a white screen with black X's in a grid. Either way I have to do a hard reset and nothing shows up in the Event Viewer after rebooting. I already reformated and installed the latest drivers for everything, but I still have the same problems.

Right now, there's basically only sage and winamp on the computer. The computer only crashes when I'm watching TV with Sage. I've been away from my apartment for about 10 days and the computer ran the whole time with the sage service going.

I'm at a loss to figure out what is causing these problems. I'm thinking its at least hardware-related, since the problems survived a reformat. The best guess I have is that its related to using TV-out with my Geforce4 Ti4200. Has anyone else experienced that?

Alternatively, it could be Sage or the PureVideo decoder. I've noticed that while Sage v4 actually seems to perform a little better for me than v2, it crashes more often. And, I never used PureVideo decoder before now, so I don't know if is a little buggy. Since I don't hear anyone else complaining, I doubt that it is.

So, does anyone have any ideas?

[sundansx]

a big difference in the two scenerios, is that you are using your audio and video card hardware when you are playing out to your tv.
Make sure the fan on your 4200 has not stopped running. the heat of video decoding could make it unstable. if you are getting a corrupted video display when it crashes, that could very well be a unstable video card (it usually happens that way for me). You might try swapping your video card with another if you have one.
Lastly, if you are overclocking any component at all, put it back to spec for now.
good luck.

[reggie14]

Thanks for the reply.

The video card fan is indeed running, and the card does not seem to get hot after using Sage for an extended period of time. I don't have any other AGP video cards that I could try using though.

Also, I don't think the display is really corrupt when it crashes. I get a pure white background with X's in a distinct pattern. Its certainly not a jumbled mess. And, as I said above, it doesn't always even do that; sometimes the screen just freezes.

I'm not overclocking anything, and for the most part, the components seem relatively cool.

After reading your response, I did get one idea though. I use Soundstorm to spit out dolby digital 5.1 to my surround sound reciever. I used it before, but I don't think I ever really had it on for several hours at a time. I've noticed the soundstorm chip gets hot, but I didn't think it was not much hotter than before. Right now I'm testing that theory. I have some songs playing in winamp on repeat. If the computer crashes in a few hours, then there would be a good chance its the soundstorm chip overheating.

I'm a little skeptical though. Sometimes when the computer crashes, the audio continues playing in a one-second loop. I would think if the soundstorm chip was overheating the audio would simply cut out entirely, and probably not even crash the whole system.

Do you have any other ideas for things I could test?

[reggie14]

Well, I ran some tests last night trying to crash it, but I couldn't freeze it up like before. First I played some music files over and over for 4 hours, but the machine never crashed and the soundstorm chip never got any warmer than what it is at idle.

Next, before I went to bed I started playing a 5 hour recorded show. When I woke up, the computer was still running, but Sage had closed somehow. No error pop ups and nothing in the event viewer. I've had a sage client close like that before, so I suppose its just a little bug in the application.

Before I did that test, I did UNDERclock the video card a little, dropping the GPU from 250 to 200MHz. At some point I'm going to try upping it all the way to 300, the speed I used to run it at when I gamed on it, and see if I can get a full system crash that way.

[JonTom]

I have a similar system, with 2 thoughts.

1) Not directly Sage related, but I used to have lots of stability problems with my mobo until I added a big heatsink to the 'soundstorm' chip (northbridge?). That fixed a bunch of small stability issues (including repeating audio like you mention) in general.

2) Had major stability and usability issues w/ SageTV4 (also became dedicated Sagebox, connected to TV at this point) until I completely uninstalled Sage (copy wiz.bin and 2x properties files elsewhere first), deleted both the Frey and Sage directories, and reinstalled SageTV4.1 (adding in the wiz and properties files saved above). Things are much improved now...