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Bugs in Intel IB video drivers?

VirtualLarry

VirtualLarry

No Lifer
I recently overhauled my HTPC.

It has an ECS H61H2-I 1.1 mini-ITX 1155 motherboard, G1610 IB 2.6Ghz dual-core, 2x4GB GSkill DDR3-1333, and a Kingston V300 120GB SATA6G SSD, in an iStarUSA mini-ITX case.

Running Win7 64-bit.

I run Waterfox 28.0, and whatever version of Flash Player is newest.

I listen to flash-based internet radio.

My previous HTPC, a Foxconn NanoPC AT-5570, would let me listen to music, and stay running, for days / weeks at a time.

This one, I wake the monitor from sleep, and half of the time, Waterfox.exe and Plugin-container.exe have crashed, and Win7 is prompting to close them.

Once, I tried to wake the PC, and had nothing but colored lines all over the screen, and I had to force power-off.

I know that Intel's video drivers aren't the greatest (for example, IE versions newer than 8, that use hardware acceleration, will crash on Intel's GMA950 drivers for Win7 32-bit, according to something I read).

So has anyone else had any issues with long-term app usage of their HDMI audio output on an Intel 1155 (or 1150) motherboard?

Or am I dealing with dodgy RAM (passed Win7's integrated memory tester thing), or ECS motherboard quality issues (mobo has all solid caps, so I thought it would be decent)?

Edit: Did some updates. The version of the Intel video drivers on ECS's site was 9.x, the version I installed from Intel's site was 10.x. Also updated Flash.
 
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Could be the PSU. Most cases come with crappy ones. What are the specs of the PSU?

I would run the PC with just one stick of RAM and see if the crashes continue. Then do the same with the 2nd stick.
 
He didn't say what sort of PSU he has. I can only describe the intermittent troubles that took me months to troubleshoot and expunge.

For a long time, I had two "special features" of the Z68 motherboard working: ISRT with SandForce SSD controller, and Lucid Virtu in "dGPU mode." Since I don't sleep this system (I HAVE to have the TV running all night lest I wake up to silence and boredom -- gotta keep up on the news about the terror-iss') -- my troubles cannot be traced to "faulty sleep configuration." Instead, I suspect the Sandforce SSD controller together with the BIOS version and IRST software revision. Once I got rid of the ISRT caching and replaced it with a standalone SSD, the problem disappeared -- forever, it seems. But I'd also turned off the iGPU (as much as BIOS tweaks would do it) -- junked the Lucid software. So I could never be conclusively sure of the precise cause.

Video apps like Media Center running LiveTV would seem "iffy" with sleep-mode anyway. If you have a cheap or less-than-stellar PSU, it can play havoc with sleep-modes. I'd replaced two PSUs with Seasonics just to get sleep to work properly on two of the family's machines.

The OP might also try tweaking the sleep configuration, or changing from S3/S5 to S1 in BIOS.
 
You might have to inconvenience yourself and run the board connected to a known good PSU you have on hand, just to see if the problem is dependent on the PSU.
 
If it was the PSU that was the problem, shouldn't an OCCT PSU Test suss it out?

Anyways, the other day, I pulled the 2x4GB DDR3-1333 kit of GSkill, and threw in a 2GB DDR3 DIMM that came out of one of my Lenovo i3 PCs.

Today, woke the screen up, yep, Waterfox appcrash waiting for me.

So I'm going to try an OCCT stress test next, and if that survives, then the problem is somewhere else. Board? (It is an ECS, afterall, which isn't known for quality.) Software? (Two different flash player versions, two different Intel HDMI video / audio drivers.)
 
Just a follow-up. I did an OCCT PSU test for something like 8 minutes. Nothing crashed, temps got up to the mid-60Cs on the CPU.

Waterfox prompted me to update to 30.0, so I did. So far, no crashes yet. Maybe it was a software bug? But why only on this machine, and almost daily?
 
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