PCI Overload

[TylerK]

I am having a few issues with my system.

I have:
Asus Pundit
P4 2.0 Ghz
512 MB RAM
PVR-500
PCI FX5500

Due to the crap onboard video on the pundit I decided to give buying a PCI video card a try. Unfortunetly the pundit has a single PCI slot with a riser card that makes it 2 PCI slots. I'm pretty sure this is a problem.

With the pvr and the video using all the PCI bus even watching TV alone causes stuttering. (not to mention recording and watching at the same time). This is all using VMR 7 & 9. Using overlay works perfect (i'm pretty sure this is becasue the video is dumped right to the video ram)

I dont want to use overlay due to the fact that you cant adjust the aspect ratio while watching videos (In TV i dont care).

Switching decoders has no effect.

Anyone seen a problem like this before?

It would be great if there where a setting so that I could tell the system to use Overlay for TV and VMR for everything else.

Any ideas?

[ricklous]

hi tyler,

Im using a mini-itx board in my setup, which is also limited to one PCI slot.

Is the riser card passive or active? the one that Via sells for their mini-itx is passive, and theres also another one i saw which i think was a samsung that was passive, but after doing some research and finding people had had problems with the passive ones i bought an active riser, which has some sort of chip which controls whats going on between the two extra slots.

I bought mine from Tranquil PC and have a pvr350 and nova-t mounted in it, seems to work quite happily.

another good place to look as they have a few different ones is mini-itx.com, they also stock the tranquil riser too.

[TylerK]

Thanks for the reply. This looks like it could solve my problem. Not having much luck finding one in the USA though...

[stefan]

mini-itx.com do ship to the states.