TV Tuner heats up the whole system

Whenever I'm running the tuner for a while, my system temperature jumps up. The CPU temp goes from 34/35 to 45 and the CPU load isnt even at full! The mobo temp jumps up 6-7 degrees.

Is this common?


edit : i have a Winfast TV2000XP "Expert", and am using the winfast PVR to watch tv.

didn't happen with my Hauppauge, you sure its not just that the cpu and gpu have to work harder to render the picture?

my video card temp is 56 degrees. (core)
38c (ambient).

ill report back on the "idle" temps.

Do you have full load temps without the tv card in use? is it possible that you are confusing heavy load with the card?

full load gets to 45 or so, but im here lookin at the task manager and the cpu usage is < 20% while tuner is playing.

I certainly have never seen anything like that being caused by TV tuner cards. Fortunately it does not send your temperature into a dangerous state. I'm going to see if I can find anyone with a similar problem from your model of card.

I have the same card, gonna pop the side panel off now and see what temperature it is.
Edit - My mosfets and SB are both far warmer than my card, it's only slightly above case temp.

I remember that rendering HDTV takes a lot of 2D GPU processing power (on my machine, the GUI will start to lag when HDTV is running). In fact, I once had a Pentium Pro that would work flawlessly with HDTV even though it had a 4MB video card (I think it's some ATi card with onboard MPEG decode), while a Pentium 3 with a 16MB 3D video card (X reports it as a "Jocelyn 2", don't know what that is) struggles to play HDTV.
With your 6800, though, there should be no problems. But the video card will warm up a little.

Whether or not there is significant CPU usage will depend on the software. It may also depend on whether or not the card has an onboard data pump (the unit that decodes the incoming bitstream to MPEG-2 packets to be processed by the video card, usually implemented in a FPGA or as part of an ASIC), which most do.