[haubrija]

Hi all -


I recently got an ATI DCT tuner to pair with my HDHomerun. It seems to work for Ok for the most part but I'm having random picture breakups and sound drop outs that I'm trying to pinpoint the cause.


I currently use a separate partition, formatted for 64k blocks, hooked up via SATA, on my primary drive for Recorded TV through WMC. I have two gigs of Ram with an E8400 and an NVida 8600 GTS.


Last night the ATI cable card was taping an HD cable program while I was gaming on the machine. When I went back to watch the program later there were random, but consistent, picture break ups and audio drop outs throughout the program.


Could this be caused by me recording to my primary drive, while it's getting alot of reads from the gaming? Or something else? If it's just that I shouldn't be recording on my primary, I can get another drive, but I wanted to make sure that was the problem before I went ahead and did that. Thanks for any help.

 

[sotti]

yeah when your game goes to do a level load it hits the disk pretty hard.


Get a seperate disk for your games and recordings and you should be fine.

 

[ogormask]

That could be it but if you are going to get another drive I would do raid 0 with them.

 

[fcorona76]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ogormask /forum/post/18256559


That could be it but if you are going to get another drive I would do raid 0 with them.

Why? Seperate the drives you're accessing and let the processor & system bus split up the load. RAID 0 is a train wreck waiting to happen and the minute peformance advantage it gives is completely unnecessary. A HD stream is writing about 2.5MB/s to the drive...a modern SATA drive is more than capable of sustaining 30 times that but the head can only be in one place at a time so by making it multi task you're losing all benefit. Two seperate drives can write two different things simultaneously....that's a huge benefit to gaming on a DVR/HTPC.


This principle holds true for where you store your page file....it works best to put it on the drive that does NOT contain your OS and/or is not going to need sustained write access such as your DVR/storage drive.

 

[sotti]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ogormask /forum/post/18256559


That could be it but if you are going to get another drive I would do raid 0 with them.

I would not do that.


If you have a dedicated drive for recording, then that drive will never have problems.


If you raid, you still might get disk thrashing since level loads will still want 100% throughput.

 

[haubrija]

Thanks all. I'm going to get a new drive and see if that fixes it.

 

[ogormask]

Yes that is true I guess with raid 0 you could still have issues but I was thinking the increased speeds might fix it. I was also thinking raid 0 would be much nicer for gaming. I used to have 2 32gb WD raptors in raid 0 for gaming and it was nice. Now I went to SSD...

 

[blue_z]



Quote:
Originally Posted by haubrija /forum/post/18257642


Thanks all. I'm going to get a new drive and see if that fixes it.

If a separate hard disk doesn't cure the problem, then probably your gaming is occasionally maxing out the I/O bandwidth of the PC.

 

[ogormask]

How much memory do you have? That could be it as well. Games eat it up quick. I was just playing a game on this computer with 8 gigs of memory and had Internet exploder open. A single tab was using 1 gig of memory. I was getting like 10 fps and couldnt figure out why.

 

[haubrija]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ogormask /forum/post/18258275


How much memory do you have? That could be it as well. Games eat it up quick. I was just playing a game on this computer with 8 gigs of memory and had Internet exploder open. A single tab was using 1 gig of memory. I was getting like 10 fps and couldnt figure out why.

I got 2 gigs. FYI I was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum at the time.

 

[haubrija]



Quote:
Originally Posted by blue_z /forum/post/18257990


If a separate hard disk doesn't cure the problem, then probably your gaming is occasionally maxing out the I/O bandwidth of the PC.

What would be the solution if this is the case? More memory? Dedicated controller? I don't game alot but I don't want it to be an issue.

 

[bonscott87]



Quote:
Originally Posted by haubrija /forum/post/18258368


I got 2 gigs. FYI I was playing Batman: Arkham Asylum at the time.

That game alone can use over 1 gig just by itself. You're definitely taxing the system. If you're a power gamer I would suggest perhaps gaming on a separate gaming PC and leave the HTPC alone to do it's job.


Otherwise yea, I'd be looking at going 64 bit Win 7 with 4-8 gigs of RAM for starters.

Make sure you video card is top notch to handle the games as well. If it's not it will tax the rest of the system including the hard drive.

 

[sotti]

what everyone saying is well and good, but memory shouldn't be much of an issue.


I'd put my money on a hard drive bottle neck.


The pipe between the USB controller and the disk is almost certainly not bottlenecked during a game.


It's simple the disk IO couldn't keep up with the demands of writing an HD stream while reading the game.

 

[ogormask]

It would be pretty hard to say for sure which is which without testing. You could try to check your bandwith usage on the drive during heavy use but it would be mostly guessing. You probably need more memory though.

 

[sotti]



Quote:
Originally Posted by ogormask /forum/post/18260700


It would be pretty hard to say for sure which is which without testing. You could try to check your bandwith usage on the drive during heavy use but it would be mostly guessing. You probably need more memory though.

Having more memory is surely a nice thing to have, but if a recording app was using a fixed memory buffer, then the game that dynamically allocates memory would just page out.


Also the amount of memory bandwidth that would be needed for recording TV would be miniscule compared to gaming.


Address the drive issue first, then if the problem persists take additional steps.



OTA, if you're playing games and you're on vista/7 x64 w/ 4gb of memory is a good place to be.