Hardware rant... feel free to ignore

[davin]

Argh!!!

I wanted to share my latest hardware snafu... it is incredibly frustrating.

I have a MSI K7N2GM2 motherboard in my sage box. It's a MicroATX board with an nForce2 IGP chipset. I have been running two PVR-150MCE cards and the onboard video for about a year without problems.

Awhile ago I put in a GeForce 6600 AGP card I had lying around (upgraded my desktop PC card) and was experiencing random crashes and lockups. Oh well... I took it back out and all was well.

Well, this weekend I put the 6600 back in, installed the lastest nVidia decoders, turned on VMR9 and WOW... incredible picture. I was happy with picture quality before, but it was incredible now, and with less load on the CPU than with the onboard video.

Last night the crashes came back. Video will freeze during playback, requiring a reset-button reboot.

This time I poked into it a little bit, searching through the forums, and discovered that my 6600 was sharing an IRQ with one of the PVR150s. Whoops. That's gotta be the problem. I spent awhile playing with the bios, trying to get IRQs to switch around to no avail. So I checked out the users manual for the MB, and sure enough, PCI slot 3 shares IRQ with the AGP slot on the motherboard. My PVR150s were in slots 2 and 3.

Easy fix, right? Just swap the card from slot 3 into slot 1, right? So I thought. I go to do the swap, and the card just doesn't seem to want to seat in the slot.. the front edge will go in, but the connector-side of the card seems to be hung up on something.

Huh? The CDin jack on the motherboard is mounted right next to the edge of PCI slot 1, and the bottom RCA jack housing on the card was up against it!!! WTF?!?! I know that you have to pack things into a microATX board, but come on! A connector at the edge of the MB right next to a PCI slot? What were they thinking? And even if you can't avoid it, at least put it next to the slot that shares an IRQ!

So my sage box is in pieces right now and I'm going to bed... I'll tackle it tomorrow. My plan is to get out the soldering iron and remove the connector from the MB. I don't listen to CDs on my sage box, anyway, and if for some reason I need the functionality, there's an AUX in port on the MB that I can hook the CDrom up to.

Anyone else have similar nightmares? It's uncommon for a bug to be mechanical rather than electrical or code-based.

[phantomfsoc]

Had the same issue with one of my MB's. Just rip the tiny B*t*h out!!! I did it, and works fine, just make sure the holes where the plug was are nice and clean so the MB thinks its still there.
Good Luck

PS: Maybe you should plug something else into that PCI just in case it shares with something else.... just in case

[Oats]

You think thats bad, I have a microATX board in an old gateway and it has 3 PCI slots. All of which have capacitors between the PCI slot and the edge of the motherboard. My PVR-150MCE would not fit in ANY of the 3 PCI slots. I was able to modify the Audio IN connector on the PVR150 which was hitting the MB caps and it will now fit in 2 of the 3 PCI slots. The 3rd slot has 2 caps and I would have to completely remove the Audio IN connector from the 150MCE.

[xxilikedirtxx]

Oats, I have the same problem with my ABIT NV8. Two of my 3 PCI slots have capacitors between the PCI slot and the edge of the motherboard so I had to use the bottem one for my fusion3 card and as for my pvr 500, I had to snip the bottem of the right audio in jack as far in as I could with out cutting off the actual metal contact at then put a peace of elec tape to keep it from direct contact with the capacitor. Why would they build boards this way, god forbid if want a add on sound card.

[Menehune]

When I was demoing sage on my shuttle ss51g, the top F connector (the FM radio connector) physically blocked the pvr-250 from properly seating in the PCI slot. The shuttle case didn't have enough clearance above the slot to allow the card to slide fully back to align with the PCI slot.
The solution involved bending the bottom tab of the pvr-250 card to the outside of the case to clear the mobo so I could gain the extra 1/4" to align the PCI card in the slot. I could've also used my dremel to notch the case, but I didn't want to remove the mobo from the case.

[dagar]

Yeah, my AN7 has Abit board crap (caps, etc) so I can only put a PVR card in 2 slots ... max

[davin]

Well, I performed surgery tonight with success. Desoldering wasn't going smoothly, so I removed the connector shroud relatively easily and then just snipped the pins off the board with wire cutters.

Unfortunately, when I got the thing back together, I am STILL getting the freezing video problem, even though now the two PVR150s and the 6600 are all on different, independent interrupts. Time for a new post...

[mayamaniac]

Sometime I wanted to kill the guys that designed the PC components.

The power plug for harddrives and CD/DVDs, what moron made that thing? Not sure how many time I lose skins busting my knuckles just to loosen it. And the memory slot, another "genius" designed that. Sometime I feel like I'm breaking the motherboard just to get it seated.

I'm slowly phasing out IDE drives and replacing them with SATA. I know the new SATA connectors aren't as tight, but I haven't had one fell out yet, both the data and power cables. So much easier to run cables with SATAs. I haven't seen DVD drives that uses SATA yet, but hopefully there are some out there, so I can rid of IDEs for good.

By the way, davin, you don't need that CD in cable. XP supports the digital out, so you can listen to Audio CDs that way. I think you turn it on in the Device Manager if its not already ON.

[waynedunham]

Originally Posted by mayamaniac

I haven't seen DVD drives that uses SATA yet, but hopefully there are some out there, so I can rid of IDEs for good.

Plextor makes one. It's the only DVD burner I've seen so far, but I have seen SATA DVD Rom's before. A quick search on Newegg turned up the Plextor DL burner, but I didn't see any plain DVD Roms with SATA interface.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16827131351

Read through the user reviews. Being something new, some people had problems getting their Mobo's to recognize it properly. Some had to download new firmware/drivers for their SATA chip on the mobo. (if one was available)