Hardware configurations questions for nForce3 -- urgent!

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 1:45 pm

Hi everyone,

As some of you know, I recently bought an EPoX EP-9NDA3+ motherboard with the nForce 3 Ultra chipset and the AMD Athlon 64x2 Dual Core 3800+ CPU (which required a BIOS upgrade to support). I'm having a problem where if I have three CreamWare cards running at once, and occasionally even two cards in a certain configuration, Windows XP SP2 locks up after a couple minutes of using Scope (this also happened with SP1). If I have one or (most of the time) two cards running, it seems to work fine. It isn't an issue with an IRQ conflict -- I've switched around board priorities and PCI placement, and I get the same results always. Also, I took one of the CW cards out, leaving me with two, and then I put in an RME Hammerfall HDSP 9652 as the third card, and, using Sonar with RME and operating the Scope software alone, it worked fine. It's only an issue with three CW cards.

I talked to EPoX, and the guy said that based upon my description it didn't sound like this particular unit was defective, it sounded like there was an imcompatibility with the chipset. I know many of you are using nForce3 with CW just fine. But -- are any of you using nForce 3 with three cards at once? Also, do any of you have a dual core CPU? When I switched from ACPI to Standard PC mode, which disabled multiprocessing, the three CW boards worked fine. I was wondering if it's an issue with dual core, but I don't have another socket 939 chip to test.

Please let me know your experiences!

Thanks!

Shayne

cannonball · Post by **cannonball** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 2:53 pm

hi

i use msi
neo2platinum 939
chipset nforse3 ultra
1giga memory
amd 3000 64
windows xp2
3 cards pulsar2 powepulsar luna2
iobox and a16ultra swissonicad8
without bigi problems sometimes after several hours of works i must restart

ale

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 3:04 pm

Thanks! The chipset works fine, then. But you're using a single-core CPU. As I said, when I put Windows in Standard PC mode, thereby disabling multiprocessing, it worked OK. Is it a dual-core issue? I hope not -- I spent good money on that CPU!!

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 7:18 pm

Update: deciding to enjoy the weekend, I decided to use two cards and play around with my new system, thinking it would work. After about a half an hour, it finally locked up. I had never tried it for more than fifteen minutes at a time before. So -- either this board is defective, or Scope is not compatible with dual core, regardless of how many cards I use. Are there any dual core users on this list?

Thanks!

Shayne

next to nothing · Post by **next to nothing** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 8:36 pm

one thing comes to mind: both of you report instability after long time use. this probarly rules out chipset incompability. my guess is one of two alternatives:

-system temperature. make sure you have GOOD VENTILATION in your computer cabinets. a good airflow is essential, heat leads to instability. more dsp's, more harddrives, hotter cpus more heat and..

- more power consumption. make sure you have a good quality power supply. preferably a power supply with a 120mm fan underneath it to draw hot air from CPU area. these PSUs is also in general more quiet that the standard ones with an 80mm fan on its back.

also make sure that your airflow within your cabinet is correct. tidy up your cables, put a fan on the back of your cabinet sucking air out of your system, and keep your cabinet closed.

good luck.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: piddi on 2005-10-28 21:37 ]</font>

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Fri Oct 28, 2005 11:47 pm

How long did you test the 3 boards in Standard PC mode? And have you tried one card at a time with nothing else besides graphics card?

astroman · Post by **astroman** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 3:50 am

On 2005-10-28 21:36, piddi wrote:
...preferably a power supply with a 120mm fan underneath it to draw hot air from CPU area. these PSUs is also in general more quiet that the standard ones with an 80mm fan on its back.

also make sure that your airflow within your cabinet is correct. tidy up your cables, put a fan on the back of your cabinet sucking air out of your system, and keep your cabinet closed.

Imho it works reverse: the 120mm fan sucks cold air from the back through the PSU and blows it over the CPU.
The CPU fan blows down, so if a fan above it sucks up that could end pretty messy

According to my experience the 'suck out of the case' doesn't work anyway.
I have a system here with front panel thermal indicator. It overheats if the big casefan tries to move air out of the case, but works if it just pumps in more air. I have the top drive bay open.

Your argumentation is logical, and I had exactly the same strategy, but the meter proves me wrong.
On the other hand the difference isn't that big probably - the system is constantly at it's temperature limit as I try to avoid as much fan noise as possible. Unfortunately it doesn't specify how much it overheats

cheers, Tom

next to nothing · Post by **next to nothing** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:00 am

well Tom i still prefer these psu's to regular 80mm fitted ones

this is just a general tip; i have also seen the reverse results (as you mention), but in THEORY what i wrote SHOUld be OK

I also suspect bad temp sensor placement to sometimes give the wrong image.

a low fan in front of the cabinet, sucking cold air into the cabinet, combined with a fan placed high up on the back extracting the hot air will provide a good airflow thru the whole system, including cooling down your harddrives and GFX card. Sure, these components will heat the air a little before the airflow reaches the CPU fan, so the CPU temp might rise a couple of degrees compared to having a fan blowing cold air straight into the CPU fan. the general system temp should fall though, and this is important for general PC health and might even make your busy harddrives last longer

back to topic; system ventilation is important to system stability. i guess atleast we agree about that tom

next to nothing · Post by **next to nothing** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 5:06 am

http://www.endpcnoise.com/cgi-bin/e/com ... oling.html

im arrested on one point, but its a nice little article anyway

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 7:54 am

Until last night, I was only testing for 10-15 minutes at a time. For all I know, Standard PC mode would have crashed as well if I had kept using it enough.

I have had my case completely open as I have been testing. It has also been cold here in California, so the room hasn't heated up. I have a 400W quiet power supply from EndPCNoise that sucks air up through the bottom -- power and ventilation aren't an issue.

I have not yet tested for a half-hour with one card only, but I doubt very much that would fix anything. I am, however, going to reinstall Windows from scratch on a naked drive and see how it behaves there. That's my last test before I return the motherboard.

Again: how many people here are using Scope successfully with nForce3? What about dual-core?

Thanks for your help,

Shayne

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 7:58 am

I know another Scope user (Pulsar2) who couldn't get things working with a dual core, same chipset as you. I'd probably say they're incompatible.

petal · Post by **petal** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 8:27 am

I'm using the MSI Neo2 MB with a NForce3-chipset. I havn't experienced it freezing yet. I'm running a normal single-core AMD64 3500 Venice-edition.
I have a Scope, XTC and an Electra-card installed.

If you do change the MB avoid the MSI Neo2, it works fine but it has some rather stupid placements of components near the PCI-slots, that doesn't allow my CW-boards to be placed in some of the slots. Also their choise in chipsetfan and chipset-placement could have been a lot better. That said it does produce a stable CW-system in my case.

Why don't you just change the CPU - Do you really need that "extra" power? I must admit, that I havn't been very convinced by the "extra" performance i've gotten in the last 2 upgrades I've made.
First I changed from AMD 800 Mhz -> AMD 2000XP - the actual performanceboost was minimal compared to what one could expect.
Then I upgraded the 2000XP -> AMD64 3500. Same experience, the performanceboost was minimal.

Good luck!

Post by **garyb** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 9:59 am

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 11:08 am

Yeah running fine here too with single core 754 CPU on nForce3 board and 2 Scope cards.

I went from a P3-1GHz to AMD64 3000+, the performance boost was a bit more noticeable to me, but I doubt you really need dualcore at this point. They seem extra-nice for multitasking heavy stuff and all, but for audio production I'm not sure it's worth it (unless you work in 32/192 7.1 surround etc, but then you'd be better off with a quad Opteron or something =P), and the chipset/drivers probably aren't perfectly stable yet.

claudioD · Post by **claudioD** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 12:27 pm

I'm afraid that what I thought about X2 is a real thing : like with Hyperthreading now the double core makes SFP crashing. You could try to open the Task Manager and assign the CPU affinity for SFP only to 1 core (not both). That worked with HT.

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 2:16 pm

Yep. I just found out that in the very place where you can switch to Standard PC, you can switch to ACPI single-core mode. (I don't know why I didn't try that before.) Yes, Scope is now working perfectly with all three cards.

There's a way to make Scope use one core even when in dual-core mode? Does it make it permanent, or do I have to do that every time I load up the program?

I'm rather upset I spent a lot of extra money for a dual-core CPU that I can't use half of, but at least my system is working now...

Shayne

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<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Shayne White on 2005-10-29 15:17 ]</font>

alfonso · Post by **alfonso** » Sat Oct 29, 2005 4:16 pm

Great! I think it's a powerful system anyway...

You could now have a little Masterverb test? It's a good thing to have described all aspects of the newer systems...

http://www.planetz.com/forums/viewtopic ... orum=19&16

darkrezin · Post by **darkrezin** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 4:23 am

You shouldn't be upset... there's always a risk trying out the latest greatest hardware

ScofieldKid · Post by **ScofieldKid** » Sun Oct 30, 2005 4:33 am

I'm doing X2 on an ASRock/Uli setup now, Scope Pro. I fortunately haven't had any of the problems you point to. Very fast, very responsive, no crashing.

Intel 955X is probably the ideal setup at this point, but I'm liking this X2 fine, thank you very much.

Note: clean install of windows xp pro.

I did notice that the Nvidia 77.77 works a whole lot better for me for some reason than the newer one, and I'm running dual head. But that's the only tricky thing I saw.