New Pulsar Base System - Questions

[sunset070]

In my sistem hyper treading work fine,no freeze,try to enable ht

I have ;
P4 3.600 HT
ASROCK 775i945GZ 945 intel chipset
3 scope cards

[rebornonline]

We've been running the new system for a few days now, so thought I'd report back as promised.

After some juggling, got the Pulsar2, RAID Card and a Firewire card all running OK on the PCI bus.

Firewire car works great, captures video straight to the RAID card.

The RAID card and array works great, I was happily mucking around in Pulsar while the array was building/formatting without any problems.

Pulsar seems happy enough, no PCI overflow messages and no problems to speak of within the Creamware OS.

installed all my audio software, the root of which is VST/32 (v5.1) and Pulsar 3.0.

Everything is great, except that when moving things around in VST at anything over 50% CPU, I'm getting clicks and pops in the audio. That's running at 7ms which used to be fine on my old 800Mhz Pentium 3 ! I even get a click/pop when the arrangement window scrolls/flips along. This is behaviour I haven't seen since Pentium 2 days

I'm thinking it's the graphics card, which is a X1300 PCI-e. But I'm not sure why as others on this forum seem to be using the card OK.

I've turned off all the enhancements, set to 16 bit, and even turned off hardware acceleration (which made things worse).

I also upgraded to Scope 4 yesterday, and things got even worse So I'll be going back to Pulsar 3 for now (Scope 4 doesn't really seem to offer anything new anyway).

I did have a lovely new Matrox G550 to try, but sadly this board doesn't use AGP - BUGGER!

Will be getting some more up to date VGA drivers as i'm running the Dell ones.

But, does anyone have any other ideas what I can try before I resort to buying another GFX card? Any settings in Pulsar/Scope or VST which might help?

All help appreciated

[next to nothing]

standard troubleshooting;
-Is your BIOS, motherboard drivers and device drivers up to date?
-Disable USB/Firewire etc. You may need it for your video work, but try disabeling it once to see if it is the source of problems. Dont know anything about RAID tho, might have something to do with it?
-Check for IRQ conflicts
How much RAM u got btw?

[rebornonline]

Hiya,

BIOS is up to date as are the drivers. Spec is as follows :

BASE : : Dell Tower running Intel i915G Chipset
RAM : 2GB RAM (4x512MB / Dual Channel / RAS#CAS# 3)
VGA : Ati X1300 PCI Express
AUDIO : Pulsar 2 (Tried OS 3.0 and 4.0)
HDD 1 : Single 80Gb drive for OS (onboard SATA)
HDD 2 : RAID 3 Array (as previously discussed)
Other : Firewire Card

All on board devices disabled except parallel port and USB which is needed for MIDI. (Disabled, AC97 audio, Com 1, Com2, LAN, Intel VGA)

No IRQ conflicts.

OS has been installed without HT, but has been recognised as ACPI Uniprocessor PC. In the old days, ACPI was bad for IRQs; it used to camoflage conflcits. I'm not sure if this still the case?

I had a look for any advance BIOS settings for the PCI, but it's a bit limited being a Dell.

The RAID speed is nothing short of amazing. I just copied all my MP3s (about 20Gb worth) from a laptop HDD via USB, to my RAID array, and was able to carry on Video Editing perfectly (no clicks and pops from the Pulsar!)

I think this may be more of a VST or Plugin problem.

I'm running
VST 5.1r1
Waves Native Gold (V4.0)
NI Pro 52
NI Guitar Rig 2
IK Sampletank XL (V1.0 - I have V1.4 but not yet installed)
Recycle 2.0
Reason 3.0 (installed last to stop ReWire problems)

Pulsar Software (extracted from allkeys)
SPLTransDesg
SB404
STS 4000
Graph EQ
Poison
Modular 2
EDS 16i
ARP01
ARP02
SPLAttacker
STS-3000
RM242
SM166
STS-5000
Optimaster
PSY Q
Vocodizer
Vectron
Pulsar Software
Scope Fusion Platform
Pulsar ProPack
Main Studiotools Package
Mixer Package 1
Effects Package 2
Elektra/Modular2
STS-3000
Effects Package 1
Synthesizer Package 1
Synthesizer Package 2
VolksZämpler SFP
STS-2000P
STS-2000P
STS-3000
STS-2000P
STS-2000P
STS-3000
STS 4000
SCOPE 4.0 Software
Pulsar Software

[rebornonline]

Still not resolved.

Now crossposting with Cubase.net forum.

http://forum.cubase.net/phpbb2/viewtopi ... 238#593238

[garyb]

try updating the video driver. go to the device manager and remove the video driver, restart and install the latest driver. this may help....

[rebornonline]

Hi Gary.

Already updated the video driver and chipset drivers. No difference.

[garyb]

have you tried running double dawg?(do a search for double dawg) many ATI video cards really hog the bus with ridiculously long pci latency settings. double dawg can help with this.

[rebornonline]

Not heard of that, I'll look it up! Cheers Buddy, this is the kind of advise I was looking for

Incidently, had some success with Cubase SX, but clearly still a problem somewhere. (see crosspost on Cubase.net)

[rebornonline]

OK, found it, tried it. Only seems to see PCi devices and not PCI-Express.

not sure this is the problem in that case, as PCI-E is a separeate bus, In therory anyway.

I notice this advise from my old buddy Martin Walker :

The biggest such problem to face musicians recently has been the performance of legacy PCI slots in the new PCI Express-equipped motherboards, as I discussed in SOS March 2006. Intel's 915, 925X and 925XE chip sets should be avoided for this reason.

I'm running 915G......but I'm sure some people here have run them OK....tim eto double check

[garyb]

yes, i believe it will see the ati as a pci device. is it on the list?

otherwise, you might try an inexpensive nvidia card, i've had very good luck with them.