TBS-6984 not detected on Dell R310

[bob]

Hi,
WinTV-HVR-2200 used SAA7164,which has PCIE1.1 interface.
Our products use SAA7160,which has PCIE1.0a interface.

About 1 year ago when Intel Sandy Bridge platform was released AMI
(American Megatrends Inc) made very serious bug in their first BIOSes
with Sandy Bridge support regarding proper PCI-Express support, which
was fixed and almost all (at least the major and good brands) of
motherboard immediately provided BIOS updates that include the fix. so,
the BIOS bug is as follows:

the PCIe Root complex (North bridge of the chipset on the motherboard)
and the PCIe end-point (in the particular case SAA7160 on TBS boards) do
not finish the training sequence (TS1,TS2) and the bus traffic between
the Root complex and the end-point are keeping busy in retrain loop.
that is caused, because North Bridge register (TLS ) "Target Link Speed"
setting doesn't auto change from 5Gb/s to 2.5Gb/s, which is required for
1.x backward compatibility

so, in very short the root cause of the problem is that their BIOS sets
the TLS always to 5Gb/s and it doesn't auto-change it to 2.5Gb/s, which
is necessary for PCI-Express 1.0a bridges and when such bridge are detected.

That is not TBS fault and is major bug in the motherboard BIOS that affects wide
range of PCI-Express boards.So you have to update the latest BIOS for your motherboard or contact with Dell.

Regards!

[cody]

hi, i want to comment more on this issue too - there is nothing wrong with PCI-Express version 1.0a especially for a DVB card. also, SAA7160 is fully certified PCIe bridge chip:

http://www.pcisig.com/developers/compli ... list/pcie/

so, it's responsibility of vendors like Dell to make sure their products are following the specification - any PCI-Express compatible slot is supposed to be backward compatible with all previous versions.

also, how's that motherboard makers like Asus and Gigabyte updated their BIOSes almost immediately and thus their customers even didn't have chance to notice there is such problem (i.e. almost no Asus and Gigabyte motherboards with buggy BIOS were released to the retail market that needed to be updated) and one year later Dell still even don't want to acknowledge the problem and provide fixed BIOS - at the moment they don't have BIOS update that fixes the issue.

[ubaldo]

Two years later, cards not working on Dell R420... first and I hope last experience with dell servers...

[Benoire]

Hi, Sorry to necro this thread, it seemed appropriate to ask my question here.

I've got a Dell R310 which I use as my domain controller and wanted to add my two 6981s and run through this as I've always had trouble virtualising the cards on my other systems. I wasn't aware that this trouble existed with the Dell bios, which unfortunately appears to exist right now. Is the PCIe bridge used in the TBS cards still the same one? Am I likely to get around the issues in this thread by updating my cards to newer ones, or am I stuck?

Any direction is greatly appreciated.

Cheers,

Chris

[Benoire]

Right, so I can confirm that my two TBS 6981s are recognised by the R310 on Bios 1.12 and once in Windows, the drivers can be installed. MediaPortal appears to detect them fine and when I try to scan without any cables connected, it complains about signal... Will be checking over the next few days with cables attached for errors in the local free to air tv streams, if I do not get any continuity errors then I will be able to confirm that the cards work as expected.

Chris