About a year ago, I cross-graded my HTPC. I had previously been using a Asus P5E-VM HDMI board with an Intel E2200 CPU. Live TV worked perfectly. I decided to move that motherboard and CPU into my gaming system (replacing an old single-core A64), and purchased the following for the HTPC:
- Gigabyte GA-MA74GM-S2 rev 2 AMD 740G motherboard
- AMD Athlon x2 5050e 45W CPU
Common hardware between both systems:
- G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) DDR2-800 1.8V
- Nvidia 9500GT
- Hauppauge HVR-950 USB tuner
- Seagate 7200.9 sata HDD
The AMD system works perfectly for everything except live TV.
I have used XP Pro and now using Win7 x64. In XP, I used the free application WatchHDTV in combination with the Nvidia purevideo mpeg-2 decoder. In Win7 I'm using 7MC.
With WatchHDTV & XP on the AMD system, the video and audio lose sync. Pausing or FF/RW corrects this temporarily. But eventually the sync issues comes back. I applied the AMD dual core processor driver. I tried disabling cool n quiet, no difference. I tried various other A/V filters.
In 7MC, it seems like A/V is trying to stay synced, but this results in periodic "jumps" in the video. Like the video is quickly trying to "catch up" to the audio. This is very slight, and happens every 10-20 seconds or so.
In both cases, CPU load is 20% or less.
Now, check this out. I have a laptop with an Intel T3200 CPU @ 2GHz, GMA 4500HD, 2GB ram, and Win7 32-bit. Live TV in 7MC is flawless. No skipping.
I'm totally ready to point fingers at some combination of the AMD CPU or motherboard. I kind of want them to be at fault so I can blow some more money on this hobby/addiction!
Before I do so, anyone have any ideas on what's causing this? I've read and tried probably everything on the greenbutton forums.
7MC Live TV stutter on AMD, not on Intel ???
Moderators: NeilBlanchard, Ralf Hutter, sthayashi, Lawrence Lee
Talk about impulse... new motherboard on order: Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2L. Amazon has it for $49 w/free shipping. I have a spare LGA775 e1200 to test with.
Run CPU-Z and make sure your RAM is running dual-channel. I had a problem with Slingplayer running at an unbelievably slow speed, and I finally realized that for that particular motherboard, the RAM had to be in different colored slots for them to run in dual-channel. Talk about a major design flaw...