Weird pc slow down as soon as PCI-E card is in the system

[ZoneDymo]

Ok so bit of a weird hardware issue but you never know, maybe someone here has experience with it.

I have a simple PC that I want to use as a media server type of deal, it has an i3 7100 in it, 8gb of ram and an igpu 630 I believe.
Further more a 120gb ssd with windows 10 installed on it, local account.

now this tiny pc has 2 pci slots free, one pci-e x16 and one pci-e x2.

I have an old capture card from Avermedia, the H727 and I wanted to install it in that system, I used the same drivers I downloaded eons ago on this pc and even tried the old cd that came with it.

but the problem I feel is not driver related, tis more...core...more deep then that.

Basically when that pci-e capture card is in the system (regardless of which slot I use) the PC has periodic slow downs, like every 2 seconds the system just hangs, the mouse hangs, the loading animations hang, the audio hang....and for the life of me I have no clue what could be causing it.

With the card in the pc, well, the whole thing is unusable.

With it installed Device Manager does see the card and correctly names it and claims its working fine.
Yet weirdly the software dedicated to be used with it claims no card is installed.

Now currently Im a tad too lazy to throw it in another system to see if that works without problems but for now, anyone can hazard a guess as to what is going on?

 

[Hugis]

need more details, Motherboard for a start...

 

[ZoneDymo]

need more details, Motherboard for a start...

Curious why that would matter.
But for the information its an HP prebuild: the HP ProDesk 400 G4

The motherboard seems to be one of these:

Amazon.co.uk

 

[R-T-B]

Curious why that would matter.

Because how the pcie slots are allocated could help explain slowdowns (like if the slots are chipset wired and the card is fully saturating the cpu link or something).

I don't know anything about hp prebuilts, but I'm sure they are looking at that angle.

 

[1freedude]

For some silly reason, I remember something about a mouse issue. If you have a different mouse, try it.

 

[LabRat 891]

Sounds like the card may be trying to share resources/interrupts with something else

I'd look at this

Windows: Line-Based vs. Message Signaled-Based Interrupts. MSI tool.

... or another attempt to improve latencies Little bit of theory: ***** From "Windows Internals" by Mark Russinovich, David A. Solomon, Alex...

forums.guru3d.com

Apparently, there's a tool to configure devices' interrupts.

For some silly reason, I remember something about a mouse issue. If you have a different mouse, try it.

F.E.A.R. used to run stuttery and below 30fps if ya had select Logitech-branded peripherals.
Seems similar.

 

[qxp]

This could be a reset of some sort, maybe due to power saving. For example, suppose you don't use your new/old card and the system decides to use PCIe bus to put it to sleep. But the card is old and does not perfectly support it, so it looks to the driver like the card locked up. So the driver decides to reinitialize it. The card initialization portion has not been well-optimized because normally you do it just once per boot, so maybe the driver disables interrupts and tries poking the card registers waiting for a timeout. And you see it as a slowdown, because the interrupts have been disabled for everything else including the mouse.

Suggestion - lookup how to disable power save on your card in the OS you are using.

 

[ShrimpBrime]

Try to dedicated more system ram to the iGPU in bios and see if that helps the experience. Might help to slap another 8gb of memory in just to see what happens if you has any extra available.

 

[eidairaman1]

Could be a faulty card

 

[Shou Miko]

@ZoneDymo it's a HP board you got and it's listed as a x4 port and the x16 might also be wired to x4 according to HP's datasheet here: https://www8.hp.com/h20195/v2/GetPDF.aspx/c06045417.pdf

I expect the top PCI-E x4 slot to be wired to the chipset not the cpu and some capture cards don't work properly through the chipset so can you try putting it in the lower PCI-E x16 slot instead and see if it will work properly for you?

 

[ZoneDymo]

Right well I got updates

(see original message....ok nvm...apperently its been up too long to edit....great feature that....)


Right so, the biggest red flag was that another pc with the card added would also not proprely boot....so I guess suddenly out of nowhere, the card has turned bad sadly.

the suggestions of power management and allocating more ram to the igpu did not work but again, that is because the card is probably bad..

There was also a option in the bios for PCI-E/PCI SERR interupt but toggeling that on or off yielded no result and as per the original post, neither slot did affect the outcome.

Taking out all usb devices also did not affect the problem.

but again, totally different system also gave me the same errors so card is just suddenly bad, sucks but it is what iti is.

 

[mb194dc]

You could check the device settings in device manager and see if you can manually assign it a different IRQ. There are reddit threads with driver links for this card as well.

 

[chrcoluk]

If its very old you could try deliberately lowering the pcie gen for the port as low as the bios allows you to set it.

 

[Athlonite]

If its very old you could try deliberately lowering the pcie gen for the port as low as the bios allows you to set it.

It's an HP mobo you get what you gets and like it or not you can't change it atleast that's what I've found with older HP mobo's they usually have a pretty sparse BIOS and lack alot of the settings you'd get in a consumer mobo from any other manufacturer (except maybe Dell they to are shitty BIOS's too)

 

[qxp]

Check the electrolytic capacitors on the card - maybe some of them dried out or failed. If the capacitor has a cross shape on top that is puffed out it is best to replace it. If it does not, it could still be underspec, but the only way to find out is testing with LCR meter.

 

[Shou Miko]

If its very old you could try deliberately lowering the pcie gen for the port as low as the bios allows you to set it.

This ain't always possible on OEM boards....