Problem with NVidia in HTPCs... and Philips.

RodHaan

I bought myself a Philips 37" LCD 1080p TV late last year (37PFL9732D/10). Of course my aim was to play HD content. Building a HTPC seemed the most versatile path to take, and it's taken me a year to the day to finally come up with a solution that is small, quiet, cheap, and most importantly, works like a treat. You may be thinking "why did it take a year??".

My place of work has enough hardware for me to "borrow" kit for testing purposes. However the only graphics cards we have are NVidia - from GeForce 8400GS up to 9800GT. Surely one of these would work. But no...

Once hooked up, the Vista or XP desktop looked great, and then the TV would black out for a second and come back to the desktop again. The blacking out would occur every 30 seconds or so. Every conceivable NVidia Control Panel setting was tried and different connectors (DVI=>HDMI or straight HDMI depending on the graphic card's interface) were tried. Different (bloody expensive) HDMI cables also. Various OS versions were also tried - XPs and Vistas in 32bit and 64 bit. The problem occured in equal measure whether on the desktop or playing a movie. All testing was performed in parallel with Philips UK who found the same disturbing results.

Yesterday the problem was solved. I thought "Could it be NVidia? Why not try another chipset manufacturer". So my €39 Asus EAH3450 with native HDMI finally arrived at Elara (http://www.elara.ie/products/detailsfull.asp?productcode=MMEB994832). It's a low powered card which most gamers would spit on but it worked straight out of the box. No blacking out and beautifully playing HD content from the HDD and the PC's LG Blu-Ray player (http://ie.lge.com/products/model/detail/bluray_ggwh20l.jhtml).

Yes I'm a hardware teckkie, but no, I have no idea why an ATI Radeon HD works but all NVidia cards I tried failed. So should all HTPCs have ATI graphics cards or ATI on-board GPUs or does this issue affect Philips HD TVs only? Any thoughts or similar experiences out there?

MAJJ

Hi, I use a Nvidia 7650GT, direct HDMI connnection to a Samsung LCD using a cheap HDMI cable under Vista 32. Worked out
of the box and did so on XP too before I upgraded.

The computer was not home built and was a medion 8818 bought from Aldi.

Not going to help you but just thought I'd share my, less frustrating, experience.

Cheers,
majj

The Ritz

I have had periodic issues with ATI vs. nVidia cards doing 1:1 pixel matching in the past, I'm not surprised to hear that you had an issue which was solved by changing the make of card. Experience has taught me to try alternative hardware as a routine part of problem solving - I couldn't care less what the exact cause of the problem is as long as I get it sorted.

I'd say that I've spent untold ages sorting out one issue or another over the years, sometimes enjoyably, for instance with dvd-playing software before quality upscaling players became the norm) and sometimes baby-biting frustration with non-cooperative hardware. What fun !


Ritz.

RodHaan

Absolutely! Why argue the toss with Philips (or any other manufacturer) on why something doesn't work when an alternative piece of hardware becomes the solution. Life's too short.

The problem is how to get your hands on alternate kit when you're trying to get it working. Either you end up destitute, or end up like my mate Dave who's box room looks like a TV repair shop... and destitute.

Rod.
(also thanks to MAJJ for your comments).

mediacentre.ie

I gave up on Nvidia for there HDTV support. I have use a 8800 gt, 9600 gt, 9800 gt all cards disabled analogue audio so there was never any sound on my TV.

it is a known bug that they card even fix with there new cards.

I switched to a 4850 and I have been very happy with it. plays games at 1080p and HD is lovely. SD is not as good as nvidia though. The SD image tends to ghost with moving images. It leaves a trail if you know what I mean. other than that I was very happy with ATI.