[mythtv-users] 9xxx series motherboards/VDPAU

[Ian Clark]

2009/5/13 Steve Curtis <scurtis at fixation.net>

> 2009/5/13 Phil Wild <philwild at gmail.com>[snip]
>


> Hi Paul,
>
> hmmmm that's odd - I'm using a Asus M3N78 PRO, not sure if thats the exact
> same thing as you?  I did have a perfectly solid system except since I've
> tried to move to VDPAU.  I tried switching a while back to a Inno3D 9500GT
> first, but I got awful sparkles and distortion on the early 180 drivers with
> this, whereas moving onto the 8400GS gave fanastic picture but with
> these occasional (once or twice an evening) lock ups.
>

What's your cooling like? how hot does the card get? How long has the card
been used? There' s an issue with some of the 8000 series nVidia chips. They
had a design fault with a whole truckload of their chips, all from about
this era. It primerally affects laptop users (as the issue is exacerbated by
thermal stress, and it's more common for laptop users to have a GPU going
hot-cold-hot-cold.) but it's a general issue. It might be something as
simple as that, especially as VDPAU would increase the load on the GPU?

>
> Maybe a BIOS update or software rebuild is in order! :-(  I tried booting a
> Jaunty install disc on Sunday but failed to make it to X..
>

Some possible steps to isolate it:

1. Download Memtext x86+, and run it for a good few hours (or at least for
one complete test run.) Broken memory can be random and hard to trace.
2. Stress test your CPU (something like a few itterations of Prime95
concurrently in the stress test mode)

If your memory is fine, and stressing your CPU doesn't produce random
crashes, then check your HD, look at the SMART status, or just perform a few
intensive operations. (eg, 'find / -type f -exec grep foobar {} \; 2>&1
>/dev/null' or similar)

Next item could be sound, do something graphically intensive but without
noise, see if that's stable (although not being able to get to X sounds like
GPU to me.)

If all that checks out fine it's pointing to either your GFX card or your
PSU, however I'd expect the CPU stressing to show up a PSU issue, especially
as it's not a high end GPU.  If the card's not too old then I'd send it back
citing instability, and referencing the nVidia issues.

Sorry that's not much help but it may give you some places to start looking.

Cheers,

Ian
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