PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

wow! are you saying with magma I could use 6 scope cards ?

how will this work ? 2 seperate scope enviroments with all 45 DPSs ?

Well,
Magma is not a computer inside computer.
Consider it as a PCI ports extender.
Instead of having "only" 4 or five (ore less with newer boards) pci slots you will have another 13 pci slots.
The pci overflow problem remains the same.
if you are able to work with four or five pulsar cards on your mainboard then the same applies for magma boards.
I would like to have an extra pulsar to try the 4 card thing to see if it appears in dsp count and in/out config.
Regards,
Dimitrios

More interesting than how much Masterverbs you can load in this setup, is how much traffic can be going on between Magma box and PCI bus...I've read on Planetz before that one card in a M. box works great, but the more cards or DSPs you have the more bandwidth is required...and not offered by a regular system
correct me if my suspicion is untrue.

musurgio wrote:...
The pci overflow problem remains the same...

in fact it gets worse, as the PCI bus extension has to be managed in some way

I never could verify my assumption but anyway, here it goes:
today (...rather the previous generation...) most PCI controllers serve in units of 3 devices, so if you see 6 slots as your PCI bus ends, the bios sees 2x3
This might mess things on the driver side, so CWA suggests to use only 3 cards, which is reasonable as verified by Scope4live. The last 'DSP block' seems to suffer significantly from administration tasks.
I know for sure that this 'split bus' situation DID make trouble on earlier PowerMac models, where you where supposed to avoid certain slots.

Nevertheless there were mobos with full 6 PCI slots on 1 bus, and probably CW's ...ask tech support, if you want to use more than 3... hint in the manual was intended to direct the customer to a certain brand, in case it was required.
This is just my own reasoning, no idea if CW had the same viewpoint.

In case you ask '...wtf do they mess this 3/6 thing?'
it's significantly more difficult (read expensive) to 'keep the long bus clean'
to deal with the hardware is much more complicated than it looks - it's definetely high frequency and sensitive as such.

As suggested a PCI-e Magma extender (by it's supposedly higher bandwidth) might in fact be the proper solution for remote PCI cards with a similiar bandwidth as 'local' cards would have.
That it could adress more than 3 cards in a row is a side-effect imho, very useful for system's like DJ's which are IO oriented, but probably not for hyper-synth-processors with tons of audio devices

cheers, Tom

hubird wrote:More interesting than how much Masterverbs you can load in this setup, is how much traffic can be going on between Magma box and PCI bus...I've read on Planetz before that one card in a M. box works great, but the more cards or DSPs you have the more bandwidth is required...and not offered by a regular system
correct me if my suspicion is untrue.

There is some validity to what you say. I have been experimenting with configuration options with my particular mobo for about a year. The reason I chose this mainboard is because it had proven to be compatible with AMD dual core CPU's and multiple UAD-1 cards. *At the time*, there was only one other mobo that was similarly compatible, the Gigabyte GA-K8NS Ultra 939 (and I have one fo these too though I haven't used it yet) and there was a partiular reason I wanted the VIA chipset because I wanted to use a Matrox P750 AGP card and I had previously had great success with Matrox drivers and VIA chipsets. Unfortunately, this particular chipset was a disaster with the P750 but it worked great with NVidia GE force video cards which had proven to be terrible with a previous system I built with an older ASUS A7V8X mobo......but anyway..... .................as I started testing this system I had all 4 x of the UAD-1's in a 13 slot Magma on IRQ 19 and I had 2 x HDSP 9652's and an HDSP Multiface PCI and a 7 x slot Magma. I could only load two of the HDSP cards in the7 slot Magma and keep them on free IRQ's and I could load the third HDSP card in the Magma with the UAD-1 cards and have the HDSP cards sharing IRQ's 17 & 18 while having all of the UAD-1 cards on IRQ 19. Unfortunately, the bandwidth on the 13 slot Magma with the 4 x UAD-1 cards and a single HDSP card was apparently choked by adding the HDSP card to that chassis because I got a lot of crackling and popping, no matter how I set the buffers and manipulated the PCI latency settings, etc. I solved this problem simply by taking the HDSP card out of this Magma and inserting it directly in a mobo PCI slot. Luckily, I had one still available that occupied IRQ 17 so I still had all my HDSP cards on IRQ 17 & 18 while having the UAD-1 cards on IRQ 19. The pops and crackles went away. so it appears that the bandwidth was exceeded for the PCI pipeline in the 13 slot Magma when the HDSP card was added.

I'm very curious and hopeful about the PCIe adapter for the Magma. Now that PCI slots are going away, unless someone comes out with some kind of universal PCI>PCIe card interface, then a Magma with a PCIe >PCI adapter may be the only solution for PCI card users but hopefully there will be an upside to this and the PCIe bus will make bandwidth issues go away.

Regards,

DJ wrote:

TCB wrote:For those of you new to Deej, he's a sick, sick man. I've been trying to get him help for quite some time.

Waiting for my Scope card . . . .

TCB

I think you many need to write one of those books of yours on this platform......I'll help by providing the material for the "do not try this at home" chapters.

I have become a bit sicker overnight. It's been getting cold here in the frozen mountains, my hut has become uncomfortable and the dogs have invaded my bed to stay warm so I need more CRT monitors. I just scored a 4 head Colorgraphics Xentera AGP card that I am going to try to integrate into the Pulsar DAW. Since I'm running 4 x displays on the Paris rig and only two displays on the Pulsar rig, I've decided that if it is possible to have two more CRT displays on the Pulsar rig and I don't do this and therefore achieve 8 x displays, I might freeze to death or be suffocated by puppies.

stardust wrote:Hmmm and what about the PCI performance of PCI versus PCI e now ? Any results to that test ? Would be very interesting if there is a step forward.

I don't even have a mobo here with PCIe slots or a PCIe>PCI card adapter. For me, this will happen after the holidays, probably in February or March realistically. Perhaps someone will beat me to this, which would be fine by me.