Neutron wrote:
PCIe would have plenty of bandwidth.
Just a heads up: magma reccomend the newer "pericom" chip-boards to use with EC and PCI-E. I have tried the Express card interface on an older DEC-chip board, and the performance was similar, if not worse, than the PCMCIA. Then with the Pericom ones, I get a little more bandwith (as translated into Masterverbs), but certainly not twice as much.
I have been struggling with Magma since the Summer, to upgrade my PCI/PCMCIA system to a PCI-E one, hoping for a full-blown portable Scope system, but I keep banging my head on details. For instance, I bought a pericom upgrade kit for my 2 slot, and it doesn't fit the chassis, even though I sent them the serial numbers of all the parts in order to get things right. (and now Magma says I have to buy a new chassis - very nasty they are...)
I decided to build a dedicated PC for Scope only, and it's working great. Now I'm getting an extra board to load on the Magma rack and use it as a portable soundmodule of sorts - maybe get Solaris to run in it!
A couple more things: the 2 slot boxes actually fit 3 cards, so it's perfect for Scope - 2 fans on the front of the cards help to cool things down, and the STDM cables just fit; and I have run a 2 slot with 2x15+1x6 DSPs, using a 120W 12vDC/DC PSU and it runs very well. no difference in performance when compared to the standard AC/DC PSU that comes with it, but a lot quieter - just plug it into an AC/DC adapter, or straight into your vehicles' lighter connector! That is way cool!
Summing up: at this point, PCI-E / EC interfaced Magma boxes have no comparison to the internally mounted PCI Scopes and are just a little bit more performant than their PCI/PCMCIA correpondents. Maybe with the new drivers in SCP 5 things will change... I keep reading from UAD and PoCo owners that the pericoms are much improved than the older DECs, but my Scopes fail to see the difference.
Just my 2 cents (I actually spent a lot more than that on Magma...

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