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Hi,i have just installed my Pulsar 2 card,a Luna with extension board will follow next week.I had an RME Hammerfall card built in before connected to 2 A16 Ultras.This setup worked wonderfull with computer.

ASUS A7V266
AMD XP1500
512 Ram
1 HD for system
2 HD's on Promise PCI Raid controller for audio.
Pulsar2 in XTC mode with Logic 5

Now that i have installed the Pulsar i get the PCI overflow message running only 2 MV's.I removed the Raid controller and could load up to 6 MV's.
My problem is that i need the speed of the 2 HD's on Raid.I'am doing big audio projects with up to 64 tracks,and a single IDE drive can't do the job.
I have already considered upgrading my system with an ASUS P4P800 and using an SATA drive.But are they really fast enough to handle all my audio.Or does anyone have an other solution to this problem.Please consider that i use the pulsar only in XTC mode and that i do mostly audio and use nearly no synths and samplers.Thanx in advance for your sugjestions.

You have a VIA chipset motherboard which is inherently bad. Get an Nvidia chipset athlon board, or a P4-based solution.

And use zlink instead of adat to connect A16U if you can

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: marcuspocus on 2004-03-02 14:00 ]</font>

RAID seems to be poison for the PCI-bus. If you have to make such big audio projects, take a WD HD with 10,000 rpm. Try to install more RAM. Then disable RAID. Should work.

I'am already unsing Z-link with my converters.Is there an alternative to to WD HD because it's really expensive for its capacity.Also would you recomend staying with AMD or to go Intel?

You should try to install this "PCI latancy"-patch:

http://www.georgebreese.com/net/software/#PCI

It has solved a similar problem on both my KT-133 and KT-400-based PC-systems, and runs without any conflicts.

Good luck!
Thomas

I wouldn't use RAID for audio work even on an intel chipset, especially if it sat on the pci bus. Its unfortunate but true that creamware/powercore/uad-1 will all have issues with this. The RME hammerfall is consuming dramatically less pci bandwidth than a creamware card which is BOTH dsp and audio flowing across the pci bus. Try running just 16 channels of asio2 for a while and I bet you'll see the same lack of pci overflows that you saw with your RME.

As others have stated VIA is definately a less than optimal chipset as well. We have a test of pci bandwidth around here that we call the 'masterverb' test. The basic idea is to see how many masterverbs you can load (in SFP.exe, not XTC mode) *without* getting pci overflows.

Also I might add that Logic 5 doesn't compensate for the latency that is incurred when using DSP cards as vst & vsti plugins, I myself (and most others) use the SFP.exe and logic toghether (its definately more flexible for me this way). Users of Sx2/Nuendo2/Samplitude 7 have automatic compensation and seem to enjoy XTC more, but in my opinion its still a lot less flexible.

Incidentally I have both an RME Hammerfall and 2 Pulsar cards installed in my system without any issues.

thanks for the replys,but my main problem still is that i need a decent replacement for my raid card.With the raid i could handle 64 tracks of audio on playback.A single ide drive can't handle them.Now my options are a new motherboard with SATA support with a 7200 or 10000 rpm drive.But i have read that on some motherboards the SATA port is connected to the PCI and so wouldn't change anything about my problem.Another thing is are the SATA drives fast enough?

sata drives are fast enough.with the intel chipset and mobo,sata is on it's own bus.

Singe HD for high trackloads should be fine. I've recorded 50 tracks at once (32-bit/44.1k) and my hd didn't even sweat. I'm using Hitachi drive with 2MB of cache. I could imagine 8MB cache is even better.