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On one of the machines in the studio, I’m running an Asus K7V-266-E w/ an athalon 1800+ processor.

Although the whole via chipset thing, prompts the thought that hindsight is 20/20, everything is working fine w/ one of our pulsar cards.

PCI slot 4 has a SCSI controller card, I’ve got the OS (98SE) and all program files on an ultra wide II 9.1 gig Quantum Viking on it’s own IRQ I boot the machine off of this SCSI drive, this is our C drive.

I’ve got 2 40 gig 7200rpm Maxtor IDE drives running Raid0 creating our main audio work drive of 80 gigs, which is partitioned into 4 sections (20 gig partitions for 4 different engineers) these are drives D, E, F, G.

On the primary IDE chain, I’m running a Sony 24x8x32 CD-RW for the master (Drive H), and the secondary IDE chain has a removable tray, for different drives, set in master, to be loaded into the machine by different producers, client’s, or engineers (Occasionally drive I).

98SE has been fully updated, the Video card is a simple ATI Rage Pro AGP card this is pretty much everything on the machine.

We put a pulsar I card, from one of my home machines in this system, while we decided what sound card to permanently put in this machine, and it works great.

I’m playing 32 tracks @ 48k 16 bit in vegas, running the pulsar mixer, inserting compressors, reverb etc…. using a good 75% of the dsp power available…. And not so much as a hiccup.

We decided, with this working so well, and after hearing about the last 2 available pulsar I cards, new in the box w/ full warranty on planet earth, at a deal that couldn’t be turned down.

We ordered one of them. When it arrived, I swapped cards (to take mine back home) booted the machine, and went to “Show settings” and the card would not lock to a sample rate, mastering, or slaving off of any of the devices, the clock source would just flicker on and off, indefinitely.

So… I opened pulsar, entered the new key, and…. No difference, would not establish a clock source at any sample rate.

I powered down, swapped cards back to my pulsar I card, it was fine.

We have 4 pulsar I cards, 2 are absolutely fine in this machine, the new one acts as explained above, and the 3rd card will establish clock source but will lose it when any audio is played, and is generally unstable.

I figured the new Card was DOA, but I took it home, swapped it with one of the pulsar I cards in one of my machines at home (ECS K7S5A w/ duron 1 gig processor) and the card is fine, I can tax the snot out of the system, and it is stable.

Why are the identical models of pulsar I’s acting differently on the studio system, the oldest card, completely stable, flawless, the brand new one, not even functional in the same machine?

Sorry for the long post, was hoping for some insight.

hmm.......well, with two working systems and and no real reason to do a complete reinstall,why worry?(all right, i'll give you that it's strange..........)

I guess the politics being that, my card (Old and void of warranty) is currently running the control room at the studio on a brand new system that I built for the studio.

I’m a traveling producer, that card was taken out of a machine in my traveling rack.

I convinced the studio owner to go with the pulsar card after trying mine, and building this system for him….. Now, the brand new card, out of the box, which he bought, won’t do a thing in his new system.

Ideally, I’d like to leave town at the end of producing the record that I’m working on there, leaving him with a brand new spanky system that he paid for, working in optimum shape, and take my card back, and slap it in my travel rack.

Silly I know, his new card works in my machine, my old card works in his, we really should swap, and leave it at that, but I don’t feel like it’s fair to him, and, it’s really not getting to the root of the problem, I really want to know what the deal is, owning 2 of these systems myself, endorsing them to others, and occasionally building them into systems at studios, I’d like to trouble shoot this issue, and figure out the incompatibilities, and perhaps the quality control issue of each card reacting to systems differently.

SuperReverb

true. sounds like a redo..........
i'll try to be more help in the future......

Problem Solved...

Due to My Lack of attention span, and EarlyFirst's super charged Pulsar Brain, The following has come to light.

The old cards that work in this machine are 1.0 cards, the new card is a 1.1 card.

The hardware revision on the new card unleashing the true deamons of the VIA Chipset in this peticular mother board.

VIA BAD....PULSAR GOOD.....FIRE BAD.....PULSAR GOOD !

I'll be sure to research all of the details before I build another system, from a few different sources, of course the ASUS write up's of their own product is going to be full of praise.

Pulsar wins again.

SuperReverb