TR Forums

So I've posted comments to articles a decent number of times, but I don't really do much in the forums... but these problems are starting to drive me nuts. I've been building my own pcs since 2001 and have never run into a problem so frustrating to troubleshoot/correct.

About a year ago I built a system using an ASUS M2N4 SLI board, Gigabyte Geforce 7600GT, and various other hardware (I'll list what I feel is relevant, if someone wants to smack me for leaving something out please do so...) And set up BeyondTV with an Internal PCI Tuner and an older External USB 2.0 Tuner (Hauppauge WinTV-PVR USB2.) The USB Tuner was working fine on the previous system (Which was stolen, dumbasses didn't bother to steal the tuner, but did steal the power brick....) So I bought a new power brick from Hauppauge...

I first noticed that some recordings would not finish. Wondering if my new PCI Tuner card was the problem, I pulled it out, and still had problems with recordings. I tried the other way around, just the PCI Tuner card, and the problem went away.

Snapstream has some of the best support out there, at this time I thought it was some weird BTV issue since I had just upgraded to 4.0 and we went through a lot of troubleshooting before determining that the USB tuner had a problem. They really are awesome at getting answers.

Anywho, I was upset, but it seemed to work most of the time. A few months ago I put the system in the living room and set it up for video games... At which point I noticed that sometimes the games would just stop accepting input from the controllers for a split second. You'd be running right, then just 'stop' because the game stopped getting input from the controller.

At this point I started getting curious. I tried the USB Tuner and the Controllers on other machines (a Laptop and a different desktop) with no apparent issues.

I tried some flash drive copies but I'm guessing file system retrys and things like that would hide all but the most gruesome failiures... but I am really starting to think that packets are getting randomly bunged on the USB ports.

Has anyone had similar problems? Any advice? I'm running the "Newest" forceware drivers for the motherboard but they're over a year old.

Do you have a usb bracket, something like this, to plug into the the other usb headers on your board to see if the problem lies with usb ports in the back, or somewhere else? Doing this will give you better idea of the extent of the problem.

I have had several nVidia motherboards. NONE of them had USB ports that worked correctly with my Logitech mice. I think there is something not fully in spec with their USB implementation. To get around this, I used a PCI USB card. Things plugged into that worked just fine.

I also noticed that USB drives hooked up to the onboard USB ports were only getting about half the throughput that I would get through the PCI card.