hello there,
i have bought a scope pro card which is on its way to me right now which is great, but ive noticed on these boards some talk about the cards not being compatable, or giving problems with motherboards that have the 'via chipset'. i have a dualcore pc with this [http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_sp ... lass=mburl] board which has the 'via chipset' - what can i expect from this setup? will it work with poor performance, or not at all? to be honest im not too learned on pc hardware, so any advice/help here is very much appreciated. im very much looking forward to getting this all up and running!
btw i lurked here a bit before making my purchase and it seems like a good community - definately encouraged me to make the decision (creamwares site alone is not so convincing, unfortunately) - so thank you people
new scope user - motherboard question
well, VIA isn't as horrible as during the days of their infamous KT133 boards regarding PCI performance (I have a small epia myself), yet it doesn't make much sense to put a $1k pro audio processing card onto a $40 device of unknown performance.
Intel does make traditionally good chipsets in this domain, the rest of the industry simply doesn't care because it's not relevant for 95% of all customers.
It may even work well, but under no circumstances could you expect VIA has put any (extra) efforts into that part of the board.
A top of line performer is about $100 more expensive, but then you can rely on it and you'll have few concerns (if any at all) tweaking it to your needs.
If you'ver read this board for a while you may have noticed that PCI performance is essential for samplers, delays and reverbs. In particular the high quality versions of the latter require high bandwidth access to the motherboard's RAM for 'scratch' memory as there's not enough on the DSPs itself.
welcome and cheers, Tom
Intel does make traditionally good chipsets in this domain, the rest of the industry simply doesn't care because it's not relevant for 95% of all customers.
It may even work well, but under no circumstances could you expect VIA has put any (extra) efforts into that part of the board.
A top of line performer is about $100 more expensive, but then you can rely on it and you'll have few concerns (if any at all) tweaking it to your needs.
If you'ver read this board for a while you may have noticed that PCI performance is essential for samplers, delays and reverbs. In particular the high quality versions of the latter require high bandwidth access to the motherboard's RAM for 'scratch' memory as there's not enough on the DSPs itself.
welcome and cheers, Tom
-
UsedManateeSalesman
- Posts: 69
- Joined: Sat Jul 09, 2005 4:00 pm
from a VIA / AMD64 user.
I'm running a scope pro card on an ASUS A8V deluxe board right now, with an AMD64-3200 proc (and 2gb of ram for the record). Truthfully, one of the biggest issues that kept me from getting the scope card a year and a half ago was I was worried that my hardware would choke on the scope, and by choke I don't even mean poor performance on the pci bus, but not even POST.
I had similar issues with this particular board an an echo Mia 2x2, which were confirmed as a worldwide problem not just a broken board. Needless to say, ASUS never fixed the problem, so although the drivers would load into windows - if you got far enough into put audio through the device, the system would BSOD. And sometimes, it wouldn't even post.
This board runs the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset and at the time was ASUS's top of the line board for socket 939 chips costing a little over $150. There are some weird and unfortunate design issues with where some of the sockets are (had to yank cd-audio and the usb/parallel port dongle to make room for the scope - small sacrifice since i don't use them), but to the one who doesn't know any better the performance off a single card is VERY GOOD. I figure that when I eventually add another card, I'll swap mobos and then any extra performance that I was missing is just a bonus.
So yes, I may be missing some performance here, but not enough to stop the show or even make me question it. Is it optimum, probably not, is it powerful as heck anyway? Oh yes. If the worst that you have to do is swap for another motherboard, it's worth the shot because if you're like me you'll be happy enough with its performance in the current setup until you need to or are able to upgrade.
I had similar issues with this particular board an an echo Mia 2x2, which were confirmed as a worldwide problem not just a broken board. Needless to say, ASUS never fixed the problem, so although the drivers would load into windows - if you got far enough into put audio through the device, the system would BSOD. And sometimes, it wouldn't even post.
This board runs the VIA K8T800 Pro chipset and at the time was ASUS's top of the line board for socket 939 chips costing a little over $150. There are some weird and unfortunate design issues with where some of the sockets are (had to yank cd-audio and the usb/parallel port dongle to make room for the scope - small sacrifice since i don't use them), but to the one who doesn't know any better the performance off a single card is VERY GOOD. I figure that when I eventually add another card, I'll swap mobos and then any extra performance that I was missing is just a bonus.
So yes, I may be missing some performance here, but not enough to stop the show or even make me question it. Is it optimum, probably not, is it powerful as heck anyway? Oh yes. If the worst that you have to do is swap for another motherboard, it's worth the shot because if you're like me you'll be happy enough with its performance in the current setup until you need to or are able to upgrade.
yes, you should be able to use it. another board might be better, but you should be able to get some joy right now. try it. if you have trouble(blue screens, lockups not caused by midi, constant pci overflow messages, reboots), you can always replace the motherboard.
the test is called "the masterverb test". remove all modules from your project and start adding masterverbs until you get a pci overload message. a good result is 10-15 total masterverbs in the project. there is a thread in the tech forum for posting the results.
the test is called "the masterverb test". remove all modules from your project and start adding masterverbs until you get a pci overload message. a good result is 10-15 total masterverbs in the project. there is a thread in the tech forum for posting the results.