Come and pick holes in my plan!

[stu8080]

I'm planning to test a slightly unorthodox setup, and whilst i think it should work, i know there is a good knowledge base here and plenty that are far wiser than me!

I have a living room and study next to each other, separated by a partition wall. at the mo i have a gaming rig (Opteron 146 o/c 2.7ghz, 2GB ram and an AGP 6800GT 256mb gfx card) in the study and my htpc (Athlon XP 2500+ 1.5GB Ram, a Radeon 9200SE/GeForce 5900XT and 3 x Nova-T's) in the living room displayed on a 28" Toshiba SDTV.

Now the htpc is fairly unstable, and probably needs all its heatsinks checking etc. In addition my gaming rig is cooler, quieter and much more powerful and i want to use this for GBPVR and processing tasks etc, and do away with my difficult htpc motherboard etc. i dont want to lose access to my decent PC for online games though through a monitor.

What i thought i could do is combine the two, im pretty confident the pc can handle BF2 with plenty of memory and processor power to handle GBPVR and any other associated processes, have the pc in the study, using Nview have a dual monitor setup where the tv is the secondary display, and simply pass the s0video cable, the audio cable, ir reciver and an external USB DVD drive enclosure through the wall to sit with the TV.

The pc stays on 24/7 and is used to run GBPVR for the most part but allowing me to use the desktop as usual.

The only problems i can see doing this are:

• cpu intensive tasks *might* cause a crash (ive had only 2 in the past three months that required a reboot, most just require explorer.exe restarting at worst)

• Things opening on the TV rather than main display - Nview should manage that but i know diologue boxes etc can turn up in funny places on dual monitor setup.

P.S the two computers currently sit in adjacent corners between the two rooms so feeding cables through the wall isnt a problem. If it works i might install sockets on the wall for vid/audio and usb when i decorate.

So as usual, please feel free to point any glaring assumptions on my part!
Any suggestions welcome.

[ricklous]

how would you handle focus?

ie you need a setup that still allows IR commands to get to the GBPVR window/screen regardless of which program/game has the focus on the other screen...

although to be honest, looking at the grunt youve already got, id be more inclined to sort your stability issues out. if your gaming rig is quieter, maybe swap the case/heatsinks over, and get the benefit from the quieter case, possibly solving the unstable issues at the same times if they are heat related. I would think heat/noise is a bigger issue with your HTPC that your gaming rig as the gaming rig wont be on 24/7 and you'll be too busy killing aliens and stuff to notice if its a bit loud or not...

anyway thats my two-pennys worth

[stu8080]

Focus isnt a problem, as i use the hauppauge dongle with 'direct access to haup remote' on, so the remote only affects GBPVR.

The Gaming rig runs perfectly, handles anything and hardly ever crashes, where as my newly built htpc is still unstable and i dont know if it could be heat, bad Nova drivers or it could be the motherboard.

If im going to have to start picking it apart and experimenting, why not see if my gaming PC can handle both tasks effectively, and at the same time give myself some real grunt for some of GBPVRs heavier tasks (transcoding to xvid or transcoding for the MVP etc)

Im just getting the feeling that im missing something obvious, that will prevent this setup working, that i'll kick myself for later on!

[stu8080]

Also my gaming rig is running entirely on stock fans (even the overclocked processor!)

My HTPC has aftermarket fans and lots of them and its still unstable so i dont think my problems can be entirely heat related.

Im finding the recording service refuses to stop, i find it'll still be recording something that finished many hours before, GBPVR often locks up and needs closing, and generally Windows becomes very sluggish. I wanted to check heat/drivers etc before posting in the support forums about this.

[Koenie]

I have experience with a slightly similar setup where I used my sons PC as a GBPVR network client and had this PC connected to a TV on the secondary monitor port (ATI 9600 video card, Athlon XP 3000). This worked fine as long as my son was not playing any games. Some games claim the processor so badly that GBPVR was not able to play any video smoothy. I solved this with a Hauppauge mediaMVP. Even when my son is gaming the network tasks are handled properly only the GBPVR interface is a bit more sluggish but does not disconnect. (Yes the mediaMVP is run from the GBPV client machine and not the GBPVR server as I only have a wireless connection to this room.)

[stu8080]

Ive happily played some intensive games (BF2 and FEAR) whilst video has been playing on the desktop behind - is this an accurate test or would the fact that the video is in the background be a different situation than if it were run on a separate monitor side by side do you think?

If so i should be ok there, if not the MVP is definately a possibility, but i have a lot of AVI files that i play so a direct link would be preferable. (i intend to use 1 maybe 2 MVPs in bedrooms upstairs, but i would only access music and MPEG recordings)

[nitrogen_widget]

I'm using twin-view right now with an fx5200 & to be honest it doesn't look so good on the TV unless I mirror the VGA & TV-out.
This is my main recording server & I use it for playing recordings & DVD's on the spare TV so it isn't too much of an issue.

Just a little annoying when I need to administer it because 720x480 res. sucks whether it's on a monitor or through VNC.

I was thinking of adding a second PCI card just for the monitor so I could use it at a decent resolution.

you might need to do the same.

[stu8080]

I take it you are using Nview Dual View?

When you say it doesent look too good how do you mean?

I would likely have 800x600 on the TV and 1280x1024 on the monitor.

[daphatty]

Why does all of this seem overly complicated to me? You should just buy a MediaMVP.

[stu8080]

I have an MVP, but it has its limitations.

I want to do away with having two PC's, as invariably they are both on most of the time, using lots of power!

And i want to get the most out of a decent PC, rather than it simply being an expensive games console.

I have my reasons, but you are right, it is overcomplicated!