If I had to do it all again, or more to the point, could afford to do it all some more, I'd buy a small separate machine for my Scope with a Micro-ATX (only 3-4 PCI slots) nForce based Athlon 64 board or whatever chipsets the latest Intel high-bandwidth boards are based on so it would fit in one of the shallower rack briefcases.
Then I'd use that machine to do CWA, only CWA and nothing but the CWA and then buy an RME Cardbus or Firewire adaptor for my laptop.
The main reason for this is that Once you get a taste for the sound of the CW stuff (I've graduated from 9DSPs to 21) you'll want to just have everything rocking in realtime. If you're doing this all on one PC, even if it's a REALLY sweet PC, there will come a point where you want to load those last 3 stereo ASIO Busses so you can have BFD mixed by their microphones outs (or whatever you might use at the studio), and then the SFP project will start giving you errors.
"Maximum PCI Bandwidth reached."
Then you'll tinker a bit, and try it again. It will look like its taken until you realize you have to re-initialize the ASIO driver in Cubase. Down it goes again.
The reason why this happens is because even though things on the CWA cards are loading on the DSPs, the cards have no local memory, so anything that requires a memory buffer (like reverbs, delays, and ASIO busses), they'll have to open up a dedicated percentage of the PCI bus (which leads them to your RAM, and consequently, to the CPU).
The more ASIO channels you are running into the CWA mixers (assuming the CWA card is doing all your local ASIO work), the less demanding DSP-based plugs you'll be able to load before erroring out, regardless of how much DSP room you have left. The VIA chips haven't historically had a lot of PCI bandwidth breathing room, hence people's hesitation on the matter.
So technically, if you have an old junker machine which has a suitable motherboard, you could use THAT as the host for your CWA cards (if the RME is doing your ADC, then you'll probably want the ADAT only CWA card) and have the CWA doing nothing but receiving ASIO channels over ADAT (after the # crunching has already been done on the sequencing machine). Then you can fill up your DSPs with whatever you want; i.e. synths, effects busses, etc.
That will also allow you to integrate other equipment into directly into your CWA rig (like you would with any hardware mixer) without exposing it to the added latency of the ASIO rig, though RME is one of the best when it comes to latency.
What's more, using a plug like FXTeleport, or if you're lined with gold and using Steinberg technology, using another copy of SX/Nuendo and link the two machines' CPUs together in an ASIO cluster. That way you can still gain some extra CPU power for VSTs and the like on the sequencing machine without really interfering with the work the CWA cards are doing.
Sorry if that was a little long winded. I can get carried away some times.
Hope that helps,
Sam
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: dehuszar on 2005-01-22 13:22 ]</font>
<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: dehuszar on 2005-01-22 13:27 ]</font>
A7
