[geeks] Flash Player Video/XP/AMD glitch

[Mark Benson]

Got a bit of a follow-up to this problem. We established, by recreating the
problem with various drivers, in Flash Player (vi iPlayer and YouTube),
Quicktime player and VLC, followed by reproducing it in Flash Player under
Linux Mint 8, that it's probably not a software issue.

We tested it until we went blue, gave up and sent the board, CPU and hard
drive back to the vendor (LinITX, an all round excellent bunch). LinITX tested
it over multiple hours with iPlayer, YouTube and in XP SP3 and Linux with no
issues. They returned the board at no cost to us (very good of them we
thought). We are currently following up to see what configuration the hardware
was setup in for their testing.

We have the machine assembled again and the problem has returned same as
always. We suspected the PSU, which is a bit weedy on the 3.3V and 5V lines,
was at fault so set up the machine with a 300Watt ATX PSU sat on the table
nest to it. Still no dice.

Our attention turned to the RAM. We have been using OCZ DDR2-800 (PC6400) RAM,
in 2 sticks with heat spreaders. They don't get warm even. We swapped these
for DDR2-800 RAM (Kingston I think) from a fully working AMD Athlon X2 5800+
system in the same room. No dice, problem still occurs. We are on our 3rd set
of RAM now, a pair of DDR2-800 DIMMs we had spare. Also known-good from a
working machine that is out of service. Still the crashing is plaguing us.

We have come to the conclusion we are missing something. Is there anything
specific to AMD (bearing in mind I'm personally an Intel user) that we could
have overlooked. I know the RAM controllers are on-chip on the AMD64
architecture. I also know the Memory clock for the CPU, a Athlon II X3 400e,
is 667MHz and the base clock is 200MHz, if that means anything.

We're stumped. Seriously stumped. Like, we've not been this stumped since
about 1994 stumped.


--
Mark Benson

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"Never send a human to do a machine's job..."