[vdr] Re: Hardware falures

[NoSpam-@zocki.toppoint.de (Rainer Zocholl)]

einStein@donau.de(Christian Berger)  29.04.02 16:09

Once upon a time Christian Berger shaped the electrons to say...

>Servus

>Uhm, are your DVB cards also failing so often? Recently I sent mine to
>the factory for the second time. I just want to check wether that's
>just my card or a general problem with Haupauge's cards.


Meanwhile i have returned two/three cards

one Nova 
Failure Report: "artefacts"
"no question asked" full refund after "only" 6 Weeks

I had checked another Nova of the same series:
Artefacts too.
(nova did not become hot at all)


and one V.2.1 is STILL in the fingers of the "distributor"
now the second time in the 4th Week.
The frist time, after 6 Weeks the broken card was returned
with -believed it- "Tested in 4 PCs, no failure found".
The problem was:
If the PC was powered off for more than 4 and less than 24h,
the card blocks the PCI bus in the boot up.

The fault was perferctly reproducible on my PC
when i unplug mains entirely for 4..6h and switch
the PC on by the mains switch! (Yes, the BIOS allows that
setting: "boot on power return", and that is a MUST for
timed operation, because the clock interrupt may have occured
while power was entirely off..)

It makes timed recordings impossible, because every
evening, i see the computer hung in BIOS. But only when
that card was inserted. Other cards did not make no such
problem. It was a clear problem by that card.


I would say: every second of my cards were broken/unusable in some way.




If you use the V.1.3 you _must_ place a fan to blow 
between the boards!
V2.1 seems not to be so temperature sensitive, have higher RF 
sensitiveness(26uV vs 28uV) and are too generating/dissipating 
much less heat.

I messured after a short while approx 35C(!) on the outside koax plug 
of a V1.3, when the cards starts to generate many errors.
The remaining case was only 28C.
After adding a 60mm fan for 2 cards, all are 28C ;-)