[mythtv-users] Pentium D Motherboard Suggestion / Recommendation?

[William Powers]

Several months back, I "upgraded" my HDTV OTA slave backend to an Asus 
P5VD1-X motherboard with a Pentium D 820.  I did that to get enough cpu 
to stop having hesitations and stuttering while watching 1080i 
recordings, and that part was successful at least.  However, once I did 
that I started experiencing several types of intermittent problems, 
including lockups of the X display (but can ssh in), extended sound 
loops while exiting recordings, failed recordings ("B length 
recordings"), etc.

After much troubleshooting, I think I've isolated it to the motherboard, 
most probably to IRQ handling issues with regards to the PT880 Ultra 
chipset.  I can get it to work fairly reliably as long as I insert only 
one HDTV card, since in that case the HDTV card doesn't have to share 
one of the PCI IRQ's with another device like sound, NIC, or VGA.  
However, once a second HDTV card is inserted and operated, something 
immediately stops working.  Note that all of this worked fine with the 
previous motherboard which had an Intel 865 chipset.

I tried upgrading to the 2.6.17.6 kernel and that didn't fix the 
problem, so it looks like either I fall back to my previous m/b & cpu 
and live with the with stuttering, or find a new motherboard for the 
Pentium D 820.  Does anyone have any recommendations or suggestions?  
Cost is somewhat of a consideration since I'll likely have to also buy a 
new PCI-e graphics card (6200TC?) and some DDR2 (the advantage of the 
P5VD1-X, had it worked, was that it supported both AGP and DDR).

Thanks!

Bill