From Newsgroup: alt.os.linux.mint
On Fri, 7/17/2026 4:12 PM, pinnerite wrote:
I have just completed the rebuilding of an HTPC.
For the first time I used an ASRock motherboard.
It went well until I plugged in a TBS-6281 DVB-T2 TV card.
After I booted up it could not be detected. I went through hoops
accompanied by an AI but nothing worked.
I contacted Turbosoft and they confirmed that changes on some modern
boards prevented my card being detected. However they said that one of
their later cards would definitely work.
Well, there was no going back so I ordered the new one.
Unfortunately it had to come from the USA via the far side of the moon
it seems.
I plugged it in yesterday and set about getting the software to work.
This included restoring all my TV recording garnered on another
machine. By tonight it was working perfectly.
I didn't have this problem with ASus or Gigabyte boards. A professional engineer friend said ASRock are the bottom of the pile. I would think
twice before trying therm again.
Alan
Historically, there were problems with "types" of cards.
For example, if you take my 440BX motherboard from around
the year 2000, it does not know what a "SATA PCI card" is.
It only knows about IDE. If you plug in a SATA PCI card,
it cannot boot from it, it does not assign a chip select
signal to the populated slot, and this also results in the
slot being invisible when the OS is running.
A second kind of error is "slot specificity". My Dell Refurb,
the #1 slot is "for video card only". The BIOS will halt
if you stick a SATA PCI Express card in the slot instead.
No other computer in the house, does this.
When this happened on Asus, it was fixed on the very next BIOS
release (so that any card type could be in slot #1 next to the CPU).
On the Dell Refurb, this was *never* fixed.
Asrock can be every bit as good, in terms of a motherboard design.
They've done all sorts of eccentric boards, like my board that
had a PCIe slot for video and an AGP slot for video. But their
BIOS habits are weird. They release more BIOS Than other companies,
but you can't tell what they fixed or what changed.
My MSI board has some weird habits, and I can't even tell if this
is a bad motherboard, or it is the quality of their BIOS.
Generally speaking, boards have been getting more complicated,
and harder to release in 100% correct fashion.
As far as I know, a TV tuner card is a "known" card type. And really,
cards that are "Media Center compatible" should work, as the majority
of cards aim for that. Even though Media Center no longer exists,
if you are a TV tuner company, it's still a target to aspire to.
Paul
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