Pulsar 1 troubleshoot

[yayajohn]

Having some strange behavior with my Pulsar 1. Has been loading very stable for quite some time with the standard 1632 mixer and some in/out modules. Have loaded up the dsp's with some effects to capacity with normal behavior. However when attempting to load any delays or reverbs or things like hexachorus or synths the system freezes and/or crashes.
Have tried the following troubleshooting stuff:
The Pulsar card is on it's own irq
Pulled out card and inspected for damage/abnormalities - none
Used erasure on gold contacts - no sign of corrosion
Reinstalled windows and scope 4.0/4.5
Disabled USB controllers

Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks

Dan


System specs:
AMD Athlon 64x2 3600
ABIT AV8 motherboard w/ via k8t800 chipset
Nvidia 6600 GT video card
1.5gb ram

Pulsar 1.JPG (184.9 KiB) Viewed 1159 times

[astroman]

just have a look at the map of your architecture, and it's pretty obvious that the the PCI bus is almost orphaned in that design.
Check the path if the card requests memory... the bits have to flow both ways...

VIA usually focusses on ecellent consumer benchmarks... pro audio isn't their target, sorry.
Had one of the infamous KT chipsets myself years ago that made the Pulsar One respond with an immediate PCI overflow.
Exchanged the board to an AMD chipset and the problems were gone.

cheers, Tom

[yayajohn]

interesting pic, thanks.
yeah I guess VIA really does suck for the scope boards, esp for the 1st gen cards. The 2nd gen cards seemed to work fine on this chipset before I had to bump out the pulsar 1. Unfortunately this is where the card will remain until I decide to upgrade my main recording pc motherboard.
Just curious what you think, if it's a pci bus limit then shouldn't I be getting the pci overflow message?

[dawman]

VIA..............????
GET A ROPE........

[astroman]

well, according to your description I'd rather guess the bytes get lost (or not processed in time) because everything else on the path to memory has a higher priority than the PCI bus.

cheers, Tom

[yayajohn]

Well I guess i'm SOL then. Ah who knows maybe i'll see a deal on an older motherboard, i'll only need 1 pci slot so there should be plenty of candidates............one's WITHOUT VIA!