PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

freezes again
unfortunatelly only 3 pci clots.
gigabyte ga-965p-ds3
2gigs kingston
conroe 6600
nvidia 7900

i tryied to disable as many onboard devices as i could.
there is a freeze once in a while.
is it reasonable to set this system standard pc?

i had the same freeze problem for a week that driven me crazy.mine was about the network card and pulsar was sharing irq's.even it did NOT show.i had to change slots and disable two usb ports(as well as parallel-serial infrared vs..)now it works fine still on acpi mode.

In recent MoBos ACPI mode works very well with Scope, but if U have some recurrent problem I think is better switch to "standard PC" mode.
Then set in BIOS one free (explore into windows control panel/hardware/propriety) static IRQ to any PCI slot (i.e. pci1=IRQ7, pci2=IRQ5, etc.) and set "plug'n'play OS" to "NO".
Disable any port that U don't use: Parallel port, second USB controller, unused Raid controller, unused audio chip, etc.

Before switching to Standard mode, remove all scope cards and switch on the PC, then switch off, then try to put one card, then try if it works, then switch off and add the second card, then try if it works, until U reach the complete set.
Sometimes, if U fill all 3 cards in one step the system has trouble.

My system works in Standard PC mode and shares a lot of IRQs with i.e videocard, lan card, creative audio card (yes, sometimes I like play games... shame...)

If you freeze is "blue screen" sometimes are'nt IRQ problems but weak memory chips.
Try to operate with only one memory stick and look if it freeze again.

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: erminardi on 2006-10-15 07:41 ]</font>

i am still on acpi and disabled as many as i could.
i have only one irq for usb and i think that helps a lot.
the question is if i go to standard pc which is so stable am i going to loose something according to my conroe 6600?

_________________
ELVISLIVES

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: ARCADIOS on 2006-10-15 14:32 ]</font>

It's stable as ACPI but may U could loose some stuff related the power saving management... nothing so important for an audio DAW.
In some cases the PC's switch off operation must be tweaked in the reg for a fully funtionality.
Anyway don't worry

I find that standard mode gives me more control over IRQ settings and NT legacy APM makes it shut down when I want to.

since conroe are dual core processors, acpi multiprocessor makes sense.
do they still work "dual core" on standard pc? i know that my previus prescott loosed hyperthreading. that was not big deal, but now with dual core cpu>=? what?

I think that the dual core is the real problem with your Scope system... I really don't know if standard mode jeopardize the dual core use.
I've purchase a single core expressly for avoid this issue.

I've used scope with dual cpu's quite a bit. Dual core would only make a difference if there was a chipset bug. That's imo at least.

Since your system only has 3 PCI slots you might find you can't get a slot to be unshared, and so you might have to do a bit of trial & error to figure out what the Scope card isn't playing well with. However, controlling PCI slot sharing on an ACPI system where things are remapped only takes a little bit of homework. Any onboard components run the risk of 'not playing well' when sharing with Scope. There is a way to understand your hardware addressing without trying to understand how any onboard irq steering & windows ACPI implementation interact.

What you're after here is the sharing of onboard devices, which can be revealed by the listing of IRQ's as they're mapped in hardware in the 'legacy' 16-irq mode. I'll explain further below, but it's VERY important to understand that this is ONLY a 'data collecting' phase here, I'm going to recommend disabling ACPI/APIC in your BIOS as part of this 'discovery' process of hardware sharing--the same as you would when switching to standard mode but the one thing you SHOULD ABSOLUTELY NOT DO here is allow the boot process to get to winxp. Going through the driver discovery phase will begin to mess with your hardware install. If you're not paying attention and let Xp boot to the desktop, windows will definately try to remap everything to the standard mode. Also, note that I'm not discussing changing from ACPI to Standard mode in WinXP (for the record there is a standard multiprocessor mode but I'm unsure how well it handles dual core).

To view currently allocated IRQ's, you can either watch your POST screen on boot (you can try hittiing pause/break and doing ctrl+alt+del resets until you get all you need) OR use some sort of boot cd/disk + utility to view your IRQ addressing from a command prompt/linux etc. In my personal opinion the POST screen + pause/brk method is a pain compared to a nice boot cd, so I actually recommend the latter-- have a few utilities on boot cd's around here, some on command-line XP boot cd's I've made (to do repairs on my XP install) and others on either DOS or linux boot cd's.

Before you do ANYTHING, make sure that you don't have any unnecessary things active in bios (disable unused RAID ports, com ports, parallel etc).

Make sure that ACPI/APIC disabled in the BIOS, and remember NOT to allow Xp to boot, turn the system off.

Now you'll only the graphics card installed, and some small PCI card you're familiar with (I usually use an Intel 10/100 or 10/100/1000 networking card) to use as a 'test' card.

Install the 'testing' card in the first slot, boot the system into your util cd and check the IRQ's . Write down 2 things, what IRQ that PCI slot maps to by default and what onboard component its sharing with, ie anything else with the same IRQ shares with that slot. ( Btw leave all BIOS settings for IRQ Steering to auto if you have onboard steering). Then turn the system off & repeat for each subsequent PCI slot (moving your 'test' card from slot to slot.)

When you're done you'll have a complete listing of all devices that are assigned to each slot in what XP would consider 'standard mode', figure out which slot shares with something that you can either disable or that won't be needed while Scope is active and install your Scope card in that slot (note that some devices like USB slots might pose a problem even then). Users of multiple Scope cards should put their intended Primary card in that slot

Turn the system on, go into bios & reenable the APIC controller (ACPI mode), and boot back into XP. Let Xp reorganize the components that either moved or disabled, and (re)install drivers.



Btw, what I'm discussing here is actually the first thing I usually do with a new motherboard or system build. Since I typically bench-build my systems (and even upgrades I don't do with the PC in place) this process is actually quite painless and takes only a few minutes. I've done this since my very first Compaq luggable pc, and even with modern systems I find that doing this greatly improves system stability.

thank you valis very much. i have to state this though.
in my bios there is not option to disable apic.
but there is information of the 3 pci slots.
it says which onboard are passed through these slots and consequently share irq.
1st: shows nothing.
2nd: raid controller gigabyte, usb 1.1, vga and lan,
3d: usb 1.1
i suppose that if i do the test you described above t, the results will not differ.
anyway i think that i will make it work.
at this moment i am on afresh xp installation again.
sp1. no updates atall.
and i try to disable as many as i can onboard devices.

ps.
this fase of trying to make the new system optimized for audio wuld have happened in a simplest mobo and oler installation as well.
mi do not compare this system to the older 478 that yes, they worked very stable on standard pc, but now i see much bigger effisiency in many many things.
from audio grabs to heavy projects handle of this powerful system.
in the near future i am sure that the new intels cpus(intel has the intension to reach 10core cpu till the end of 2007) will be much better for scope systems as well. in that case i do not thinmk that we will still talk about single core situations.
multicore is the future and if some problems appear with creamware cards there must be new drivers. at least creamware ought to develop their products.

Most likely future creamware efforts will be for new hardware, meaning you'll need a legacy system to run Scope. I could be wrong, they might come out with Vista support for current hardware, but you certainly aren't going to use your scope cards on systems where the PCI slot is no longer well supported (end-of-life).

Interesting to hear that your BIOS actually explicitly lists slot sharing, much better than past systems. There's probably a way to disable the APIC controller too, although they might just have it under an option called "Plug'nPlay OS" (enable/disable) or some such. In any case if you can see that the slot isn't shared and you're still having problems then seek on. Sorry for the length of the above post, it's from an older thread elsewhere and I just edited it slightly to fit & pasted it in.

scope is 100% compatible with conroe in my experience.

thanks!
now it works, even if i see some shares.
i hope that it will last.
one other thing i have noticed is that creamware cards have no problems, there are very stable. most problems come out of pc stability.

one other thing i have noticed is that creamware cards have no problems, there are very stable. most problems come out of pc stability.


come on arcadios... creamwarecards are used in pc's and its about what a card does to your system. after one year suffering i finally found out why freezes were there with help on this forum. i do not blaim the computermaker for this. its creamware not updating the drivers that causes the problem. not continuing the updating of drivers is a sin for soundcardmanufacturers imo. after all its not a cheap card. sure i love the system but thats no reason for technical blindness.

microsoft needs update not creamware.
xp is completelly shake boossaaa nova baby

Actually more often than not it's the chipset or the other device that's sharing with the Creamware card causing the problem. I have had my Creamware card share with both intel NIC's and various other integrated pieces on my $700 supermicro xeon board without any issues. Stick the cards into an older VIA/SiS motherboard or have them share with usb (which is the world's crappiest i/o spec) and you'll have problems.

Since I have a music-only pc and have always some trouble with this irq sharing issue I would like to disable USB completely.
Unfortunatly I need it for the cubase-dongle.

Question: Do the other Sequencer-Progs also use dongles (e.g. cakewalk sonar)? Should I change?

rgds -melger-

vipal wrote:... i do not blaim the computermaker for this. its creamware not updating the drivers that causes the problem. ...

ok, I admit it's not about a 'soundcard' but nevertheless... regarding drivers
the Oracle (database) network driver for Mac is apiece of 68K machinecode from (say) 1989 when the Mac OS was number 6.5. Computerstonage, some may say...
That little piece of sh*t runs in a client app unmodified up to MacOSX 10.2 for 17 years, the server running NT3 is up 24/7 with just a couple of reboots (caused by thunderstorms) for 6 years.
Do I have to mention it's the pre-SQLnet V2 version - outdated and entirely unsupported since more than a decade... but still running...

cheers, Tom
don't believe the driver BS - a software is either smart or it's not, it doesn't get better by fiddling with it

melger wrote:Since I have a music-only pc and have always some trouble with this irq sharing issue I would like to disable USB completely.
Unfortunatly I need it for the cubase-dongle.

Question: Do the other Sequencer-Progs also use dongles (e.g. cakewalk sonar)? Should I change?

rgds -melger-

usb is not the problem. the dongle is not a problem. i don't see a reason to change. once the irq issues are sorted, it will run properly for a "lifetime".