PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

problem: all sts samplers have playback problems. seems that there is a problem between motherboard, cpu, memory and my scope card. after 10 masterverb my scope informs me that my pci bus overflows. i heared that amd cpus make problems with scope but intel dual cpus with hyperthreading, too. what do i have to do to get the maximum performance with my scope?

My Hardware/Software:
Motherboard - ASUS A7N8X Deluxe rev. 2.0
CPU - AMD Athlon XP 3200+ Barton
Memory - 2 x 512 MB Corsair DDR400 CMX512-3200C2 (The memory run with 2.5-3-3-6)
Windows XP Home SP2
Cubase SL 3.1.1 build 944
Creamware Scope Professional with Scope 4.0

Quote: problem: all sts samplers have playback problems.
I guess the concept of sampling on a DSP PCI board without onboard memory isn't practical. I managed to crossgrade from ST3000 to Kontakt for € 200,- after negotiating with the Dutch distributor and now (almost) all my samplewishes are fulfilled incl. 6GB of really usable samples.
Quote: after 10 masterverb my scope informs me that my pci bus overflows.
Can you mention an other system at this price that's able to provide you with 10 great sounding reverbs? I never made a production that needed more then 4. So what are the real limits that you encounter in your productions?
Regards,
Marc

i loaded these masterverbs as a benchmark. the problem with this pci latency is of course not the number of masterverbs. for example, i prepared an electro track including ambient from zorg. this plug in seems to inhale the dsp power. the point is that i get this message with pci overflow when i try to load another vst plug in. i don´t have that big projects (maybe a little but this has to be handle) and my pc is not full of other pci devices. this gives me a headache.

Hello dudes,

Nice topicname for a question like mine: my 3 year old DAW needs replacement. For 3 years i've not been looking AT ALL at the pc market, just starting again to do that, since I want the best of the best for the cheapest of the cheapest off course.
Could you guys give me an indication of do's and don'ts, SCSI yes or no, Ultra DMA or DMA, brands, dealers, websites, Celeron vs Pentium vs AMD, wich memory, Scope-compatible mobo's etc? I have 1 Pulsar2 card and work with Cubase and Ableton.

Thank you so much.
Manoah

the ultimate question...with a million of answers

What playback problems are you talking about exactly? I never had any problems with the STS series...

Mibo your system should run great if it's set up properly. We have the same Mobo running only an Athlon 2200XP + 1.5Gig ram + PulsarII + 2xPowersampler (only 12 DSPs) & we can easily pull up 14 Masterverbs (see alfonso's MV test thread)

I notice that you're running a 3200 chip which I assume means that you've updated the mobo's bios & are running at 400mHz fsb instead of 333. If so, this is the main physical difference we have, as our A7N8X deluxe is still running an older chip @ 333mHz fsb.

Spend as much time as it takes checking that your system is setup properly & is Fully optimised to run as a DAW. Strip it right back as much as you can. Our SFP box doesn't even have networking enabled... AT ALL

I have old mv2 850 chipset rdram with on one p4 2.8 northwood
nothing irq condivise i get pci reach after 15° masterverb...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: bronYaur on 2006-02-26 03:26 ]</font>

Allright let me specify my question. Do you guys know if dualcore CPU gives the right improvements, considering the price? Or is audiosoftware not yet ready for it?

maybe start a new thread instead of hijacking Mibo's

@Shroomz: thanks. your post gives me some hope! what i have noticed is that the creamware card, when plugged in to the last pci port, only handles 8 masterverbs. when plugged in to the middle of the pci ports it handles 10. what have you set special for the creamware card in bios / win xp?

I'll come back with our config info for you. How far to go .. that is the question

would be interesting what you have changed from the normal configuration specially for scope. do you had any timing problems with sts or pci latency problems before? well i guess the timing problems here belong to a conflict / overflow / problem between cpu, motherboard and memory. i just can hope that my next upgrade will fix this! but would be cool to fix this pci bus thing.

Im running Pulsar 2 classic, and a SRB board, 12 DSP's in total. I recently gave my pulsar system a upgrade and bought a gigabyte GA-7NVA400 Pro and a AMD3200+

I am now totally sick of having to find compatible parts to run a studio. My new system was working fine then out of the blue i start getting blue screens of death, lockups or reset's. Nothing was consistent.

I steered clear of any VIA chipset and went for the nVidia chipset. I really have no idea if its a fault with the motherboard or the CPU but now i have to go on another journey to find something that is currently on the market and find something that wont give pops, clicks, reboot, reset and actually run with stability.

A good friend of mine has a similar setup but is using a P4 with Hyper Threading. He too has problems with lockups and resets, no blue screen's of death.

Now i'll admit I sourced all the parts individually and assembled the PC but lately I am thinking about buying a dell system. For performance i think any newish cpu is going to perform fine and bus speeds are going to move the data from RAM to the cpu fast enough. The real question here is what chipset/Motherboard and CPU combination works and is stable, thats what i would like to know.

Ok Mibo, I'll start with the bios settings I've made on the A7N8X, although I won't go into CPU & memory timings in much detail, as you have a faster CPU & memory.

A7N8X2.0
Phoenix - AwardBIOS Rev. 1003

Advanced/Advanced Chipset Features/ only settings which 'may' be relevant!

CPU Interface [Optimal]
Memory Timings [Optimal]
AGP 8X Support [Enabled]
AGP Fast Write Capability [Enabled]

Advanced/Integrated Peripherals/ (All settings)

Primary VGA BIOS [AGP VGA Card]
USB Controllers [V1.1+V2.0]
USB Legacy Keyboard Support [Disabled]
USB Legacy Mouse Support [Disabled]
Onboard AC97 Audio Controlr [Disabled]
Onboard AC97 Modem Controlr [Disabled]
Onboard Lan(nVIDIA) [Disabled]
Onboard Lan(3COM) [Disabled]
Onboard 1394 Device [Disabled]
***
Floppy Disk Access Controlr [Enabled]
Onboard Serial Port 1 [3F8/IRQ4]
Onboard Serial Port 2 [Disabled]
***
Onboard Parallel Port [Disabled]
***
***
Onboard Game Port [Disabled]
Onboard Midi I/O [Disabled]

Advanced/Power Management Setup/

***COMPLETELY DISABLED***

Advanced/PnP/PCI Configurations/

Resources Controlled By [Manual]
PCI IRQ Resources Exclusion (all set to 'PCI Device'
PCI/VGA Palette Snoop [Disabled]


On top of that, we're running XP SP2 cut back to have ALL advanced power management (APM) features switched off, all (or most) networking services switched off (disabled in multiple locations including 'SERVICES'. Basically I spent some time switching off anything which I knew for certain that we didn't want or need running ... byby 'Alerter', 'Messenger', 'Update manager', 'Security Center', 'Telnet', 'Network DDE', 'Network DDE DSDM', 'Routing & Remote Access'
... the list goes on & on

The XP install in general, has all the usual performance tweeks, such as 'classic' mode, no fancy graphics stuff AT ALL. System set for 'best performance' etc etc. Just all the usual stuff apart from my frenzied mobo h/ware & XP services disabling

It's been running stable (pretty rock solid actually) for about 6 months, on it's lonesome connection wise, with data being transferred to it via CD & DVD. Works really well. No problems at all until we're really pushing the DSPs or connection count.

Hopefully you can get your system running a little sweeter & not have to upgrade so soon, as it's not a great time to be investing in the 'latest' hardware & be the guiney pig paying for the privilage of beta testing it as ever ...Things are changing fast !!

If you don't have any luck however, I know Garyb recommends a solid, fast & well priced system, which I'm sure rocks, although looking at the figures, I'd say Her Voigt's system built by AndreD running a single Scope Pro & getting 20 MV's will be hard to beat!!

***
[ED] forgot to say we've got a PulsarII with sync plate connected in PCI slot 1, nothing in 2 & two PowerSamplers in slots 3&4 respectively. Scope is slaved to a Yamaha O1V & sends out Wordclock via BNC & sync via ADAT to 4 other digital devices. All runs sweet, although we could use a studio clock that allows for running multiple digital devices at different rates without forcing us to upgrade all the digital hardware. [/ED]
***



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: Shroomz on 2006-02-27 07:52 ]</font>

@Shroomz: thank you very much for your detailed answer! there is not that big difference between our settings. in bios i just changed the memory timings to manual because the automatic settings are not the best and let my system crash from time to time. i visited the website of the memory manufacturer and found the correct settings as you can find in my first post. result stable system.

my win xp is still running since my last cpu and memory hardware. maybe it would be better to reinstall win xp for the newer hardware but not sure. do you have installed win xp as standard pc or acpi? i have tried both (actually standard). i have changed to standard because the creamware card shared an irq with another device. but scope is running with more performance on that irq even if it shares this irq (11). think i will change to acpi again.

what i will try later is to stop some of the win xp services to see if this bring some performance.

life can be so easy but maybe too boring!

@Mibo

Glad you got a stable system. I'm now all out of info for you due to the appearance of a big trout or possibly samll pilchard.