Critique my dedicated GBPVR build

[Chris.Day]

Just a word of caution: When I got the Dvico card (Fusion 5 lite), I had a well-known issue with those cards, which is an IRQ conflict. This is on a system with only one other Hauppauge PVR250 card. If you have two tuner cards with the dvico, you may have the same problem as I did or worse. The company's official response is that you must reinstall windows as "Standard PC" without IRQ steering. As a result, you may run out of resources or have a heck of a time getting it all working, as I did.

Lots of luck

Does the Fusion 5 Lite use the Conexant CX2388x chipset, or Conexant Fusion 878A?

There is a problem with some BIOSes where some Conexant cards can be allocated the same memory resources as AGP graphics cards (usually nVidia cards). It only appears to manifest itself as a problem when the AGP Aperture is set to 128MB. Setting it to 256MB should clear up the problem

[daphatty]

Well, given the IRQ conflict problem and the fact that I can't use the purevideo codec with the Fusion, would I be better off going with a VBox HDTV capture card? Will this card work well with the Purevideo codec?

Not sure about this card. I've never heard of it until now.

There is a problem with some BIOSes where some Conexant cards can be allocated the same memory resources as AGP graphics cards (usually nVidia cards). It only appears to manifest itself as a problem when the AGP Aperture is set to 128MB. Setting it to 256MB should clear up the problem

Well, that could explain why I've been able to avoid the IRQ issue thus far. I have the aperture size set to 256 MBs.

[rgann]

Yes, the Fusion 5 uses a Conexant CX23882. If what you say is correct, Chris, then you are more knowledgable than dvico's own support staff. They recommend on their site to either 1. move the card to different slots or 2. failing that, reinstall as standard PC. I'm going to give this a shot.

[sethg]

What about the USB version of the Fusion card? That would solve any IRQ problems, but are there any other software issues?

[rgann]

It appears that the only real issue (see the thread "Dvico Fusion 5 lite and cpu usage") is if you are running a processor comparable to mine (~2Ghz Athlon XP+), because the BDA drivers are so much shoddier than the WDMs. With the processor you're planning to buy, it may be fine.