I seem to remember that this is where I had the problem too (I have an AMD 1700XP), but it was fairly reproducible on my box.

This depends on where the error occurs, but all it takes is a single bit in error and it can completely screw your system.

I cant remember offhand, but I will endeavour to have a look tonight.

I think it took a bit of a hit, but unreliable memory is intolerable, and my system still performs OK with Standard def DVB with the slower memort timing, so I'm happy.

Not sure about this. It could even be motherboard related, so there is no gaurentee that replacing the memory will solve the problem.

Many motherboard makers tend to "push the envelope" on memory timings in their BIOS so that their product gets a performance edge in reviews. What you need to do to "detune" the memory access is highly BIOS dependent. See your BIOS manual for details. If you've lost it or tossed it, visit your MB makers website and DL the PDF version.

The first thing to look at is that you've optimized the "performance" settings in the BIOS for stability. This means you haven't selected "turbo" or "aggressive" timings for your bus and RAM. After that it's time to set specific CAS/RAS timings. The general technique is to let the BIOS autodetect the settings in conservative or stability mode, switch to manual or expert mode and bump the numbers upwards a notch or two to get longer CAS/RAS delays. You might also check the Kingston website to get their recommended timings for the RAM you have and make sure the BIOS isn't trying to squeeze blood out of a turnip.

Any loss of performance should be small, say 5% or less in real world cases.

Just an update. I checked out the stats on my memory - it is Kingston Value RAM 3200 CL3. According to the manual that came with my board that should be fine. However, on the ASUS webpage, they recommend CL2.5. The difference is slight and CL3 should be fine for most applications. However, mythtv isn't most applications.

So I went into my bios and found the settings tjc was talking about.

My bios was already set for stable settings based on my RAM
So I changed the settings from auto to user defined which made 4 more settings related to RAS and CAS available. 2 were already maxed out. The other two I bumped up from 3 to 4.Then saved and exited.

I ran memtest86 overnight and no errors.
So far no freeze ups or lockups in mythtv either.

Many thanks for helping me with a problem that has been plaguing me for a year.

Did you ever get this resolved? I think I may be experiencing the same freezing problems. I'm using a KT-600 MB with a Duron CPU and mythtv seems to freeze ramdomly.
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Chevrolet Epica

It is definitely a problem with defective memory. My stick appears to be marginal. It took extended testing to get it to act up. Once I figured that out, manually setting the bios settings to slower speeds made my box stable. It will still freeze up on occasion, but only once a month. I can live with that until I can get a replacement.

I suffered through this for a long time, till I desperately tried almost every BIOS option. I finally found the provlem.... The AGP aperature size!

My GEFORCE4 MX4000 video card comes with 128MB or ram, so my BIOS detected this (properly), but also seemed to be adjustable. When I bumped it to 256 the video playback was jittery. After I set it to 64 the system suddenly became stable.

"dmesg" now shows:
agpgart: Detected VIA KT400/KT400A/KT600 chipset
agpgart: AGP aperture is 64M @ 0xd8000000

This was unintuitave, especially since the graphics card had "128MB" as a great feature of the card. Why 64M vice 128MB? I have no idea. Any theories?
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V8

G'day all,

Well this is still a problem for me.
I have now just got one large pata drive having removed the sata from the mix.

It seems to show up when the pvr350 wants to record something while we are watching a recording.

If it happens I can usually guess that we will have a recording starting, does not always do it though.

_________________
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stinga

as of 17-May-2018
R8.2 - sort of working.
MB: gigabyte GA-P43-ES3G | RAM: 2GB
VGA: PNY Nvidia GT240 1GB
4 x Technisat skystar 2 dvb | 1 x TBS6981 dvb-s2
pata: 1x300Gb | sata: 2x1Tb 2x2Tb
Problems:
TBS6981 Does not work.