[mythtv-users] Fanless: What about VIA mobos ?

Tim Phipps mythtv-users at phipps-hutton.freeserve.co.uk
Fri Oct 12 12:45:36 UTC 2007


David Brodbeck wrote:
> I've heard persistent rumors about DMA problems with VIA systems, but  
> I haven't encountered them myself.  I don't know if it's specific to  
> certain cards, specific to certain motherboards, or a problem that  
> once existed but doesn't now.  There are quite a few of us using  
> MythTV on miniITX systems, though, so if it were a common problem  
> with the chipsets common on those boards I think we'd be hearing  
> about it more often on the mailing list.

I've experienced it and it smells to me like a hardware bug and there is
no fix other than buy a newer mobo.  Via are stonewalling the problem, a
few BIOS upgrades in a couple of years that don't fix the problem.

I've a 4 year old M10000 that will hang when enough data goes through
the northbrige and since the video shares system ram, you can get this
quite easily using myth. It's temperature sensitive too, better in the
winter.

Having said that I've also got a 2 year old M6000 that has never had
this problem and is very nice. The chipset version numbers are the same
so I suspect VIA have made a silent fix to a bug and they're hoping
everyone will forget about the problem.

If you're buying a new mobo for an SD frontend, I would recommend Via.
The TV output is very good, especially on a real CRT TV. No good for
HDTV and power limited for backend work like transcoding or RAID5.

> Be careful what you buy, because some of the newer VIA chipsets  
> aren't supported by the Linux video drivers yet.

For SD. I'd stick with CLE266, don't know what I'd do for HD.

Cheers,
Tim.


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