PVR-250 & PowerColor 550 don't work together

[mwj]

I've finally gotten around to building a new system for a PVR and photos, but I'm running into a bit of a problem and have no idea what to try next. I've tried searching the forum and the web, but I can't find any references to anything like what I'm doing.

My new system is an MSI K9N Platinum/AM2 AMD 4200+/2GB with SATA drives. I initially configured it with a PowerColor Theatre 550 Pro (PCI Express X1) and got it working with GBPVR. Now that that is working, I have tried to add my old PVR-250 card to the system, but it doesn't seem to be working. When I start WinTV2000 (the Hauppauge app), it just shows the Empire State/Planet screen and selecting "tuner" mode has no effect (well, the display switches from C1 to --). I've run HWClear and reinstalled the drivers as per the Hauppauge website, but the end result is the same. I've also configured GBPVR to use it, but it can't see it either (just gets a black screen in LiveTV mode).

Has anyone configured a system to use an Hauppauge card and an ATI card together? How about a PCI card and a PCI Express card?

They seem to have different IRQs, but is there anything else I should be checking or trying?

Thanks,

mwj

[nitrogen_widget]

I don't have this hardware, but if it were me I would turn off all unneeded onboard components in the bios to free up IRQ's & take everything but the video card & tuner cards out of the system then start playing musical card slots.

It might seem a little extreme.
Alternativly you could also go into the device manager & check out the drivers of each device to make sure their not trying to use the same memory address & conflicting that way & then just try a different slot.

[mwj]

I don't have this hardware, but if it were me I would turn off all unneeded onboard components in the bios to free up IRQ's & take everything but the video card & tuner cards out of the system then start playing musical card slots.

It might seem a little extreme.

Normally I would try that, but in this case one card is PCI and the other is PCI Express and I have no other cards in the system (well, except for the Video card, but I can't move that one as I only have one X16 slot), so I don't think musical slots would be productive. I do have legacy drivers, parallel, ir all turned off in the BIOS. Looking in the Device Manager, (IIRC) both cards have dedicated IRQs.

Alternativly you could also go into the device manager & check out the drivers of each device to make sure their not trying to use the same memory address & conflicting that way & then just try a different slot.

That's a good suggestion. I guess I don't understand the PCI stuff well enough to have thought of that. I'll have a look tonight.

Thanks.

[mwj]

Unfortunately, no luck on the memory. The PVR-250 and ATI drivers occupy non-overlapping memory. I did notice that the 250 has one memory allocation, where the ATI driver has two.

[mwj]

I don't know what I did, but at one point, even though WinTV didn't work, I tried firing up MCE and the Hauppauge card worked. So I tried GBPVR again, and now it works, too. I have no idea why it didn't work before, or what I did to fix it, and WinTV still doesn't work.

Though the 550 lacks a bit in saturation, it is noticably less noisy and has better dynamic range than the Hauppauge card.

Thanks to everyone who offered suggestions, both here and through email.