PCTV Rave (& other capture cards) - Horizontal ripple? Problem solved!

[Kramer]

I know this moving horizontal ripple plagues quite a few PCTV Rave/Dscaler/PJ users.

For me the "foil sandwich" was useless, but I did find that earthing my digibox helped considerably.

However, I still suffered the occassional ripple.

But not anymore

As I'm watercooled now, & have my PC well OC'ed, I recently was "pushing" some of my BIOS settings.

So I actually decided to reduce my CPU speed & enable "spread spectrum" (this reduces EMF by "clipping" the peaks & troughs of the CPU clock cycles).

Result? Ripple completely gone

I've used Dscaler for about a week now, & not one sight of a ripple (well, I rebooted one night & disabled "spread spectrum" - ripple was back - so this has definately rid me of the problem.

So for all you HTPC users with capture cards & Dscaler, check you MB's BIOS setup.

AFAIK, this "spread spectrum" feature is a recent addition to MBs, but it's worth checking on any MB.

Hope this is useful for some.

 

[jrwood]

I have that option in my 4? year old motherboard HTPC . I occassionally see these ripples on some TV channels for some reason, so I will check this out.

Thanks!

btw what watercooled system did you go for ?

 

[Kramer]

I assumed it was a "new" feature (heard something about new laws on EMF output), as my last 3 MBs didn't have it (2x Asus & an Intel).

BTW, current MB is an Epox 8K5A2+, really happy with it - I'd recommend it.

Water gear is all custom made (apart from the pump), but I'm considering getting some from Dangerden (need a GPU block - it's too time consuming making your own, given the low prices commercial blocks sell for).

More info & some pictures can be found http://www.avforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?s=&forumid=46]here[/URL] .

 

[Timh]

Kramer

I decided on not going the pc rout because I could not totally remove the ripple when using the rave card.. Thanks for the tip I will check out my bios for this feature with my MSI MB.

Cheers

 

[Mr.D]

I've got some sort of emi suppression on my old PC ( asus A7V133 based). However there are no such features on my Asus TUSL2-C bases HTPC.

total bummer . The machine is very sweet apart from the interference on dscaler and I've got a falcon so apart from ditching the mobo which works great and is stable the next step would be an H3D card.