2014-08-29, 12:08
I have 2 pc's. one is an i5-2500k with 16gb ram which I use as my "workhorse", running everything fro my media downloads to the weekly household budget. The other is an i7-2600k running on an asus p8z77-m pro board with 16gb of ram and this is used as my htpc. Both machines sit within 3 feet of each other. So I got to wondering why I'm running 2 such decent specc'd pc's when one should be more than capable of doing the work of both.
So I decided to give this a trial run for a couple of weeks to see if it was possible to do this with the minimum of problems. But withing an hour the first major issue arose - if anyone was using the "desktop" side of things, xbmc got minimised to the taskbar. The answer to this, apparently, was to run xbmc in "full screen window rather than true full screen mode". This did the trick, until the first 1080p video started up at which point, everything on screen was like of those old flip-page cartoon books with stuttering movement for about 10 seconds of every minute. And the flickering of the screen was terrible. I was beginning to think this was a bad idea until I hit on the idea of using the onboard graphics for the pc end and a decent videocard for the ht end.
I stuck a radeon HD7750 card in and connected this to my tv and let the onboard intel 3000 graphics handle the rest, changed the bios settings to allow the dual graphics to run alongside each other and booted into my new, improved pc. Only I'm still getting the same problems, minimising in fullscreen mode and stuttering video with flickering screen in windowed fullscreen.
So what I need to know, before I go back to my old 2-box solution, is whether its possible to run the two graphics adapters independently of each other without any problems, or any tweaks that I can make to stop the stuttering video and flashing screen?
So I decided to give this a trial run for a couple of weeks to see if it was possible to do this with the minimum of problems. But withing an hour the first major issue arose - if anyone was using the "desktop" side of things, xbmc got minimised to the taskbar. The answer to this, apparently, was to run xbmc in "full screen window rather than true full screen mode". This did the trick, until the first 1080p video started up at which point, everything on screen was like of those old flip-page cartoon books with stuttering movement for about 10 seconds of every minute. And the flickering of the screen was terrible. I was beginning to think this was a bad idea until I hit on the idea of using the onboard graphics for the pc end and a decent videocard for the ht end.
I stuck a radeon HD7750 card in and connected this to my tv and let the onboard intel 3000 graphics handle the rest, changed the bios settings to allow the dual graphics to run alongside each other and booted into my new, improved pc. Only I'm still getting the same problems, minimising in fullscreen mode and stuttering video with flickering screen in windowed fullscreen.
So what I need to know, before I go back to my old 2-box solution, is whether its possible to run the two graphics adapters independently of each other without any problems, or any tweaks that I can make to stop the stuttering video and flashing screen?
