Greetings! I have a UDOO x86 Ultra that I got from the Kickstarter campaign, and it was working well as far as I knew, although I never really did anything intense with it before. Now, however, I'm trying to use it to play videos through my home theater system, and it does well for a few minutes, but then I'd sort of lose video. The screen will change to either gold (some shade in my background image) or, now consistently, black, while the audio would continue to play. The only way I can seem to recover from this is to reboot the system by either remoting in with RDP or by pulling and reattaching the AC adapter. So, is it overheating? If so, why? Shouldn't the processor detect the thermal conditions and throttle accordingly? Would the official fan take care of this issue? (My unit didn't come with one.) My UDOO x86 is currently running Windows 8.1, fully patched, with the latest Intel drivers, per the Driver and Support Assistant (Which is garbage, by the way), and I've been using VLC to play high-definition videos from a USB 3 hard disk in full-screen mode.
And since there doesn't seem to be any way for me to edit my post, is there an alternative source for the fan, perhaps in the US? The UDOO store is telling me shipping is going to be nearly 150% of the part cost. :/
So I rigged up a fan to keep the heat sink cool, and it now stays cool to the touch, but I'm still losing video after some random interval, apparently even when not playing video, and yet the system is still otherwise responsive and accessible with RDP. Do Intel's drivers just suck? Do I have a defective unit? If so, what am I supposed to do with it?
it seems you're experiencing a sudden surge of current demand and your power supply can't handle it. when the cpu works on a heavy duty job instantly, it require a burst of current supply. but if your power supply also has to give current to your hard disk, when that current surge happen your power supply will drop it's voltage for a very short time and cause this. try to give a different power supply to your hard disk like a powered USB hub.
Okay, so I offloaded the USB hard disk onto a 4-port Plugable USB 2.0 powered hub. Gets recognized fine, and playback is fine, except the screen still goes black after so many minutes. HWMonitor showed temps hovering around 40C during playback and 30-36C during idle (this is with the fan blowing down on the heatsink), so it's not overheating. Perhaps the GPU drivers are crashing and then not automatically reloading? What can I even do about that? It's not like UDOO has published a specific package of drivers that they've extensively tested for compatibility. I've already uninstalled the drivers with the uninstaller, followed up with the Display Driver Uninstaller, and then reinstalled the driver package using the Driver and Support Assistant. Is there a specific version that's known to work?
As a test you could try to boot from a Ubuntu live USB and see what happens. On Wayland (17) there is an issue with graphics and you should switch to x desktop.
I tried removing the graphics drivers again and installing the ones from Windows Update. It seemed to last for longer, but the screen ultimately went black again. I've had an Ubuntu 18.04 live USB instance running overnight, and I've not encountered that issue, so it seems to me like the graphics drivers haven't been tested well on Windows 8.1. I'll install Windows 10 soon and see if the graphics drivers are more stable on that OS.
I have the black screen issue with mine w10 fix so far for me put the unit to sleep and pull it back out. Must be driver issue like you said.
