Paul Pang musicserver/pc my experiences

[Pepsican]

I just bought a music player from Paul Pang. It was delivered last week and the nightmare started then. Frankly, I bought a FC10 case, ASUS H170m-Plus, i7-6700t, PP 16G ram and OCOX clock modified. I purchase and install a Crucial M.2 250G SSD by myself and plan to install Windows 10 and HQPlayer. I power it up with a 12V 10A LPS.

 

I spent a few hours to make it boot-up the first time. I then installed Windows 10 and all the drivers needed, but it was about 20% chance to reboot my machine, not to mention the PC will reboot by itself.

 

Even sometimes it is working fine, I experienced frequent dropouts about 20-30 per minute during HQPlayer with Cubox-i NAA setup. I have been using Macbook Air i7 2013 for HQPlayer upsampling with any problems.

 

Anything I can try?

 

My initial thought is that you possibly have two separate issues. Your boot and reboot issue looks like being on the edge of your power supply. As if some part cant quite get enough juice, fails, and then triggers a reboot.

The streaming dropouts smell of a buffering problem.

[Pepsican]

I also worry about the LPS whether it is juicy enough for the system, but to me 10A is quite a lot, especially without any Graphics Card and SATA Hard Drive.

 

Yes, but that 10A is split over multiple rails. If I recall Paul's set up, then he takes the output of the LPSU and then changes the voltages using various solutions to bypass the standard MoBo routing and feed components directly. It may be that the total of 120 W is fine, but if somewhere not enough current diverts to a certain component, or one of the switch boards (or whatever they are called in English) malfunctions, then we have a problem.

 

You mention the SATA harddrive, which you do not have. But you do have a M2 drive, which gets its power not directly from the PSU (which I believe is what PPA's design assumes) but through the motherboard. I'm not saying this is the problem, but something is near the edge. And the reboots suggest the MoBo is not getting what it needs.

 

A possible way to debug is this by firing up the system using a standard ATX switching supply. If all then works and is stable, then you need to look at the power supply. If you have the same problem, the motherboard or CPU may be damaged.

[Pepsican]

After spending 6 days of experimenting this PC, the causes are:

 

1. A loose contact of Clock jumper

2. My HDMI connection with Panasonic LED TV caused a lot or problems. I guess my TV HDMI is sort of not "very compatible" with the onboard graphics card.

3. Missing a media streaming driver caused the stuttering when playing HQPlayer

 

I would say PPA products are good in quality and the loose contact could be due to shipment.

 

 

Hurrah! Also fair of you to post back your comments :-)