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View Full Version : Just Installed an AMD 64 X2 CPU and Running Windows Media Center 2005? Read This


Jason Dunn
06-23-2006, 03:00 PM
I spent a good four hours on Wednesday fighting with and cursing at my brand new AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ CPU. I had installed it on Sunday (after fighting with and cursing at my Shuttle SN95G5 because the CPU plate was impossible to get it) and although everything appeared fine at first, there was one glitch. Whenever I tried to play back a DVR-MS video from within Windows Media Center Edition 2005, it would play for five seconds, then stop - then sputter a bit - then stop. I could press fast forward on the remote and play again quickly to get it to play, but that was obviously a huge hassle.

I thought at first it was mis-behaving because I had mildly overclocked it (only 100 mhz or so). I clocked it down to stock, and the problem kept happening. I was wondering if it was a problem with Nero 7, which I had just installed, but then I remembered reading a post about the same problem (http://www.digitalmediathoughts.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=10594) in our forums recently. Since it wasn't likely to be a coincidence that I was having exactly the same problem as someone who just bought a brand new PC with the same type of CPU, I started searching the 'Net.<!>

I found all sorts of threads that discussed the issue, and the suggested solutions ran the gamut from installing patches from AMD.com to sacrificing a chicken and dancing around a fire (well, almost). It seemed like no one knew what the problem really was, or how to fix it - but many people were having the same problem. I called AMD's tech support line, and the tech guy helping me didn't have a single mention of this problem in his customer support database. He went to the second level tech support team, and they had never heard of it either. Did I mention I found people complaining about this very problem in the AMD forums? His suggestion was that I reinstall Windows XP, because swapping out a processor can "really confused the operating system". Yeah, right. Motherboard, yes. CPU, RAM, hard drive, sound card, video card, optical drive? No.

I found several posts that suggested the solution was to install the AMD Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core Processor Driver for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 from the AMD Driver &amp; Utilities (http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_871_13118,00.html) page. I tried that, and every time Windows started to boot it would reset the whole computer. I then wasted a few hours going down other roads, until posting to the private Windows Media Center MVP newsgroup, and a helpful MVP named Jason Tsang told me that the solution to this problem was in fact that AMD driver. I thought I'd take a different approach since I was getting nowhere, so found a slightly newer BIOS. I flashed it, loaded the defaults, then tried the AMD driver again (version 1.3.1). Lo and behold, it actually worked! 8O I'm now thrilled that my new CPU is functioning properly, and the speed boost in video encoding is very noticeable - Nero Vision uses both cores, so it absolutely blasts through video transcoding for DVD burning.

Jason Tsang has written a blog entry on this issue (http://jtsang.blogspot.com/2006/06/amd-x2-cpu-issues-with-liverecorded-tv.html) that has further details and more information on the symptoms - including the side effect that any TV show you record after installing the X2 CPU, but before installing the patch, will have a completely screwed up timecode and be unwatchable. I saw this first hand when an episode of The Daily Show started fast-forwarding on it's own while the audio stayed normal.

This whole situation is something that should have been avoided - AMD should include a CD with this driver in the box if it's this important, and Microsoft should release their own patch, or at least a warning, to let Media Center Edition 2005 users know about the problem.

Jason Dunn
06-23-2006, 08:08 PM
And something else I discovered: nTune, nVidia's software tool for system monitoring and overclocking, doesn't work with X2 CPUs.