[mythtvnz] IDE-SATA adaptor?

[Stephen Worthington]

On Sat, 28 Jul 2012 20:37:02 +1200, you wrote:

>On 28/07/2012 8:01 p.m., Stephen Worthington wrote:
>> My entire motherboard, CPU and 8 Gibytes of RAM was only about $550,
>> so I think it was a very cost effective upgrade from my old
>> motherboard's 4 SATA ports.  The new CPU and extra RAM means that
>> commercial skip processing happens in real time on up to four
>> recordings at once, which really cuts down on the disk accesses as the
>> data is all still in RAM cache.  So I would recommend seriously
>> considering a motherboard upgrade as the best option.
>
>That's super cool Stephen, what is the new CPU and did you add a video 
>card or use the the M/bds video chip (assuming you use the backend as a 
>frontend)?

It is a backend/frontend box.  The old motherboard was an Asus
M2NPV-VM, which did have a bulitin Nvidia chip, but it was the old
6000 series which does not do VDPAU.  So I had long since installed an
Asus Bravo 220 (Nvidia GT220 silent) card, and I just moved that to
the new motherboard, which has no builtin video.

The new motherboard is an Asus M5A97 EVO ($202.22):

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=397936

http://www.asus.com/Motherboards/AMD_AM3Plus/M5A97_EVO/#specifications

I got mine for $191.91, so it seems to have gone up a bit.

The CPU is a quad core AMD FX-4100 Black Edition 3.6 GHz ($182.25):

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=400101

and the 8 Gibytes of RAM ($130.62) is:

  http://www.ascent.co.nz/productspecification.aspx?ItemID=402694

which is down a little on the $136.64 I paid.  This RAM is on the
official compatibility list for the motherboard, which seems to be
important now.  In buying from Ascent, I could not find only 4 Gibytes
of compatible RAM, so I decided to get 8 Gibytes and I have not
regretted that.

The current total price would be $521.10 for the upgrade.


HOWEVER: I have a problem with this combination of hardware.  It works
fine with my current production software, Mythbuntu 11.04 and MythTV
0.24+fixes.  But when I try to use Mythbuntu 12.04 with any of the
current Nvidia binary drivers, I just get a blank screen (including
TTYs) and the error messages suggest that the Nvidia driver is
crashing.  I am pretty sure I had Mythbuntu 12.04 and VDPAU working
with the GT220 card on the old motherboard, but the software versions
from the install CD and the now current versions just do not work. I
have tried lots of different Nvidia versions and the result is the
same with all of them.  The Nouveau driver works fine, but of course
does not do VDPAU.  I get this at the end of Xorg.0.log:

  [    35.399] (EE) NVIDIA(GPU-0): WAIT: (E, 0, 0x857d)

and this in kern.log:

  Jul 24 15:50:24 mypvr kernel: [   20.326861] AMD-Vi: Event logged
[IO_PAGE_FAULT device=01:00.0 domain=0x0016 address=0x00000002125a2000
flags=0x0010]
  Jul 24 15:50:24 mypvr kernel: [   20.326867] AMD-Vi: Event logged
[IO_PAGE_FAULT device=01:00.0 domain=0x0016 address=0x00000002125a2040
flags=0x0010]

This is probably not a total disaster, as the CPU looks to be able to
do the video output without VDPAU if necessary.  But I would certainly
prefer to have VDPAU working, and I would have to do extensive testing
to ensure it would work without VDPAU.  And the electricity bill would
show a bit of an increase without VDPAU too.  So I am holding off
upgrading to 0.25 until I can solve this problem.