Latency, clicks, and IRQ matters

[micmac303]

Hello,

You people are going to laugh (or not) . I have just bought another 3DSP luna board on eb*y : woohoo doubling my precious DSP powa !!!
I know that's very little as compared with many scope boards out there, but still enough for me since I'm a hobbyist.

BUT... I'm running all this onto a windows seven 32 bits system, and I do have bad clicks and scratches in my favourite sequencer (ableton live)
whenever I try to play. Especially when changing patterns, or almost while doing any operation that involves clicking the mouse !

back in times when I had windows XP32 installed with only one board, I heard about this ACPI and IRQ problems, and I managed to fix this
problem by reinstalling the OS without ACPI support so that I could change the IRQs by myself.

Now that my quite new seven installation is already running, I am asking : is it possible to solve all those clicks and latency problems *probably
due to IRQs* without reinstalling the whole thing ???

I have to precise that the boards are linked with the dedicated cable (I don't remember the name, sorry) and seem to communicate correctly.

Thanks for any infos that would do the trick !

(I do have some video recording boards with which I do real-time image analysis, and they don't complain about IRQ or latency......)

cheers,
303 forever
F.

[garyb]

go to start/programs/accessories/system toos/system informatin/hardware resources/conflicts-sharing and tell me what is sharing an irq with the Scope card(s)....

[micmac303]

Hello garyb, thank you for your answer.

Here are the parts sharing an IRQ with the scope boards (2x Luna2 3DSP) as seen in the system information tool :

IRQ 18 Contrôleur hôte étendu Intel(R) gamme ICH10 USB - 3A3C
IRQ 18 Sonic Core DSP-Board
IRQ 18 Contrôleur hôte universel Intel(R) gamme ICH10 USB - 3A36
IRQ 18 Contrôleur hôte universel Intel(R) gamme ICH10 USB - 3A39

IRQ 19 Contrôleur hôte universel Intel(R) gamme ICH10 USB - 3A35
IRQ 19 Sonic Core DSP-Board
IRQ 19 Intel(R) ICH10 Family 2 port Serial ATA Storage Controller 2 - 3A26

So there's USB and serial ATA on the same interrupt with them (and the irq number is quite high too)... It doesn't look so good
I tried to force the PCI IRQ in the BIOS but it only led to crashes (must be messing with acpi).

Edit: I tried this method http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/forum/883 ... ssignments
without success on windows 7, because when I try to update the driver for the computer in the device manager, there's no standard HAL
driver anymore, only two choices with ACPI.

[garyb]

that's not the way to do it. with ACPI you won't be able to force irqs.

can you move the card that has all that stuff shared with irq18 to another slot?

in the device manager, you will need to disable the usb controllers that are sharing irqs. have you disabled serial, parallel and audio ports that aren't being used?

[micmac303]

I only have 3 PCI slots on the motherboard, and for now I can only use the two of them that are close enough for me to plug the STDM cable
between the Scope boards.

Maybe I could try the other PCI slot on the other side of the graphic board, but I would need a longer STDM cable, and anyways one of the Scope
boards would still be in one of the "problematic" PCI slot.

I think that I had disabled all unnecessary devices in the BIOS before, but I'm not totally sure about it so thanks for the idea I will look further this way.

As for disabling the USB or SATA controllers I guess that there is something to try there also, but I really need all those USB ports...
Perhaps I will have to reorganize all of this better, disable some of them, maybe use a USB HUB to reduce the number of USB ports being used.

I will try to disable things and optimize and see how ACPI handles this, thank you for your help.

Edit : I looked in the BIOS but every unnecessary device was already disabled (// port, serial, onboard audio, ...).
I also tried to change the SATA mode to AHCI to see wether it would be detected on another IRQ, but it didn't change anything.
So I don't know what to do... I cannot disable USB, I need it. Is there a way to trick ACPI into doing another detection, that would
change the IRQs ? or anything ? Is it even possible to reinstall Win Seven without ACPI at all ?

[garyb]

that sata port isn't the problem. the usb IS. what motherboard is that, again? i'e never seen one with a pci slot on either side of the video card's slot. you may need to use a pci-e usb card with that motherboard if that's really the architecture...

[micmac303]

The motherboard is a gigabyte GA-EP45-extreme : there is a first PCI slot, then the primary PCI Express
then two others PCI slots, then two secondary PCI Express.

If using a PCIE USB card (and disabling onboard USB) solves the issue, I'm getting one right away.

[Tau]

micmac, check on the BIOS if you have the CPU "power saving" options turned on (Speedstep, EIST, C0e, etc.).

I noticed, after moving to Win7, that I had a lot of glitches in the sound, and by running a CPU monitor while using Live I could see that the CPU was constantly jumping between 2GHz and 3Ghz, each time causing disruption to the sound. Turning Speedstep and C0e off, it started to work perfectly.

Cheers,

T

[garyb]

good point Tau!
it may also help to check for a bios update. bascally, the architecture of that mb sucks for your use., hopefully, you can make it work, though. a pci-e usb card might be the easiest solution...

[micmac303]

WOW ! I disabled all the C2E, thermal, and so on... options in the bios and IT WORKS ! WOOHOO !
Not any click at all anymore This is amazing !!! Now I have minimal ULLI latency (2ms in, 2ms out) and everything runs fine !

I could have tried the PCIE USB card as a last chance solution too, but no need for it apparently.

Thank you very much to both of you for answering and solving my problem !!!

[garyb]

i'm glad it's working. that's the main thing.