Avermedia NV5000 crashing computer

[vnzill 0]

Greetings all, newbie here needed some help.

 

I recently installed an Avermedia NV5000 card on my computer and sometimes but not always get a system crash with a blue screen error of MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION. I have been unable to figure out exactly why that error appears but it only happens when I have the NV5000 software running. When no crashes are taking place, everything appears to be operating correctly.

 

I currently have just one camera hooked up.

 

I am suspicious that my power supply may be underpowered but cannot find specs on what the capture card power demands are.

 

I have a 430W Antec power supply (about 5 years old) which is powering the following:

4 - 7200 RPM hard drives

2GB RAM

DVD/RW drive

3 1/2" floppy

ATI Radeon 9250 video card 256MB

Gigabyte motherboard GA-K8NSNXP socket 754 with nvideo nforce3 250 chipset

AMD Athlon 64 2.41 Ghz Processor

3 80mm fans

A couple PCI cards

Avermedia NV5000 capture card

 

Running Windows XP Pro Service pack 3 with latest updates

 

Since encountering the machine crashing I have removed a fifth hard drive that had been installed as well as 2 other PCI cards.

 

Perhaps I missed a key installation process on the card?

 

Any ideas would be most helpful and appreciated.

[bpzle 0]

Wow... that's a lot of crap running on one power supply. A pretty old on at that... I'm lucky to get a power supply to last 4 years, at a fraction of the load you're putting on it.

[rory 0]

Take off the floppy, and the DVD unless you really use it - could use USB for evidence sharing instead.

Disable them in the BIOS also.

 

Can you cut these 4 hard drives down to just 1, or 2? 1TB or even 2TB is not expensive these days.

 

Power supply could just be failing, perhaps change it?

Motherboard or PCI Port/Bus could be bad also. Try another PCI slot?

Was this computer ever on any kind of Voltage Regulator or Line Conditioner? If not expect failures unless you have perfect electric.

Is anything getting too hot, like one of the hard drives?

 

Its a hardware issue generally, so you need to swap out hardware until you find the culprit, or at least disable it in Windows or better yet the BIOS.

 

Anything errors come up in the System log?

 

Otherwise 430 should be fine with current hardware but you have alot of other hardware on that with all those drives, fans, video card, etc and its also old and can draw more current.

[vnzill 0]

I will pull out the floppy but leave the DVD as that I do use. One 40GB HDD is for my OP System with two 200GB HDD mirrored for data storage and one 1TB HDD for storing security footage video so I really don't want to cut out any of those.

 

I can see nothing in the event viewer telling me any good information. When the system crashes, some parameter info is logged which I am not literate enough to understand.

 

I believe all my hardware is compatible with the NV5000 card.

 

One power supply website I visited indicated that over prolonged usage up to about a 30 percent drop in power will happen in power supplies. I believe this had to do more with capacitors fading. When I figure in a 25% to 30% power drop then perhaps I am exceeding the output capacity of my trusty old Antec. Now that I think about it more, I think my power supply is about 6 years old.

 

I'll pull the floppy, retest the system, and let you know my results. I'll check the BIOS for other issues also. Thanks for the help and time.

[vnzill 0]

Well I removed my floppy drive which operates on 5V power. The NV5000 card was not fully seated in the PCI bay and so I moved it to a different bay and was able to fully seat it in the slot. This computer has not been on any power conditioner.

 

Upon boot up, the system said it found new hardware but I think it was just because it was in a different PCI slot.

 

The software opened up fine and camera view was operating fine as was playback. However, when I segmented a video clip and told the system to export that video clip to a mpeg file, immediately upon the conversion stage is when I again had a blue screen PC crash with MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION error message. This precise point in time was where the system had crashed one time before. So in my limited view, the extra strain on the processing power of the computer lead to the crash. Perhaps the PC demands higher amounts of power during "thinking"?

 

That is my progress and thoughts so far. I really think I should just order a new 550W power supply and try it. Any different views?

[rory 0]

Maybe bad memory, its at that point that its doing alot in memory as well, the software may be writing to memory huge chunks of data to convert to video .. I think, depends on the software .. check the task manager when you are doing this if you can, and see how high the memory usage goes, also check the CPU usage. If this is an older CPU with new software it might not be fast enough and max out and then its all over. Memory is easy to check, if its 2 strips then remove one and if needs more memory it can always use the page file on the hard drive, try each strip of memory separately.

[vnzill 0]

The memory appears to be working just fine. I checked the task manager while running the NV5000 and with nothing else actively being run, the CPU usage ranges from the mid 65% to 89%. If I open Firefox or anything else, the CPU usage spikes to 100% for a brief time. Based on this, if the computer is instructed to perform much more complex tasks such as video rendering, I'm sure the CPU will be pegged to 100% for quite some time.

 

Perhaps as you suggested, this is the true culprit.

 

I had thought of building a brand spanking new computer for CCTV but wanted to try my current computer to save some $$$.

 

I think I will still try a new more powerful power supply as mine lists a max of 20A on its single 12V rail. Then look at other more expensive options.

 

Thanks for all your help.

[rory 0]

Try changing the video encoding down to CIF only, that way it will be less processing going on. If that gets rid of the problem then you know its the CPU and or memory and basically need a newer computer. I had the same problem with an old PC DVR recently, all the DVR company had was the new software, but it was maxing out the CPU and although there were no blue screens .. it would freeze up and shut down alot, especially if I tried to get in on Ultra VNC. Ofcourse in that case they also had very little memory (256) so that was also part of the problem although the page file would take over anyway. We had already replaced the HDD and the PSU as those had been bad, and added a couple new fans and cleaned it out and removed unnecessary hardware, everything short of a New computer. Turning everything down to CIF and medium quality made it at least work for now. Another thing I did was put it on continuous record as the motion record also seemed to raise the CPU usage alot, and audio was disabled in the DVR software, they had a mic. Heat was also an issue in the room where it was due to lack of any fan or AC but that didnt cause it to get hot enough to shut down, surprisingly.

[bpzle 0]

Try what Rory said with the RAM. If a stick is going out, the CPU and HDDs will work overtime to compensate. I've seen many a blue screen of death from bad memory...

[vnzill 0]

Well I tested each individual memory stick with RAM Probe software and discovered I had errors on one of the sticks. The "bad" memory stick still allowed the computer to boot up and run without any other noticeable problems so I am still not certain that the memory stick was the culprit. I'm now running at 1GB of the good tested memory. While operating with the good memory the computer crashed again when I instructed the computer to export a video clip I had segmented.

 

The blue screen error was again MACHINE_CHECK_EXCEPTION. I did notice down lower on the blue screen the file name of kmixer.sys along with lots of number and letter sets.

 

I searched for kmixer.sys on my computer and found it as a driver file with a description of a Kernel Mode Audio Mixer put out by Microsoft.

 

Any ideas? I'm going to look and see if this is the latest driver. Perhaps there is some conflict? I have no audio connected to the NV5000 card. It is simply inserted into the PCI slot with no other cables. My understanding is that the other cables are optional.

[rory 0]

That would be a generic windows driver, maybe try going in the BIOS and disabling onboard audio.

See if that works.

 

And what if you manually copy and paste a file like the size of the one you are trying to export, I mean from just in windows?

[vnzill 0]

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Well folks,

 

I tried disabling audio in the BIOS, still did not help.

I installed a new Corsair HX650W power supply, still did not help.

I tried reinstalling the software and drivers, still did not help.

 

Finally I contacted Avermedia by email and explained my troubles.

 

A fellow by the name of Dan recommended making sure my graphic card drivers were up to date. He also said to install version 7.1.0.0057g of the software since my machine was older.

 

I updated my graphics card software (doubt it helped but did not test) and then installed version 7.1.0.0057g. The older version seemed much less buggy during the install then the newer version. It did allow me to log in and use the software. I'm running the one camera I have in motion record mode at 30fps, 720 x 480 at 100% video quality. My CPU usage is around the 40-50% range now. That is much lower than when I was using the newer software version.

 

I tried exporting a clip while also recording and the computer did not immediately crash as it did before. Instead it waited to crash until almost the end of the conversion process. I then exported a clip AFTER I stopped recording and though the CPU usage was pegged at 100%, my system did not crash.

 

So based on all of this, I am of the belief that the culprit in my crashes has been an overloaded CPU. My CPU is about six years old and new CPU's out now are certainly MUCH faster. I don't want to put $$$ right now into a new motherboard, RAM, and CPU, so I will just baby my machine.

 

At least now I can record video, watch playback, and catch on video a neighbor who needs to spend time in jail. I wish the video quality was sharper but that has to do with camera placement, zoom level, and number of lines.

 

Thanks so much for all your help and recommendations.

[rory 0]

Did you try a different hard drive yet? Like exporting to a USB Hard drive?

[vnzill 0]

No I have not tried that yet but I might later on some time.

 

Thanks much.