Magma & Ricoh hell

[capacitor]

I'm the (not quite yet) proud owner of a used 2-slot Magma with CardBus & Dec + Pericom chipset. Installed and running, but barely. I can get a single channel strip & two I/O working at 48Khz.

However, a 1-voice Minimax gives me the PCI limit message I need help.

This is one of the cheaper Lenovo Thinkpads: model R61i, with a newer Ricoh cardbus controller (I know, I know...but bear with me) and PCI-E graphics (Mobile Intel 965 Express). USB and the other typical stuff.

I figured "PCI-E graphics! Cool - I won't have to worry about IRQ conflicts with the graphic chipset." WRONG.

Lots of stuff rolled into IRQ 16: Pulsar II, Ricoh 5C476, USB Universal Host Controller, and "Mobile Intel 965 Express Chipset Family" (checked & it is in fact the graphics chip)

I know I can disable the USB (I lose 2 out of the 3 ports, and I don't gain anything PCI-wise). Can't disable the Ricoh CardBus controller of course. Resource changing is not allowed within Hardware/Devices (everything greyed out).

I have a patch installed that gets the Ricoh bandwith back to normal. This is something recent, and was independently verified & was a BIOS update from Lenovo.

I'm hopeful that my problem isn't still the Ricoh chipset, but instead he combination of graphics+USB+Pulsar on the same IRQ.

I'm good with PC configuration, with the exception of assigning resources. The BIOS doesn't have any obvious way of reassigning the IRQ for the graphics chipset. I'm expecting this to be nasty

So, here's a question for the Magma/CardBus folks: anybody know if IRQ sharing the CardBus controller with a Scope card is a performance problem? Or, is that normal, or even mandatory that they share IRQs?

I'm looking for advice on tactics Reinstalling XP is definitely doable (ACPI?)

Also, if there's any way of measuring the performance to rule out (or in) the CardBus controller, I'm all ears!

[darkrezin]

It's normal for everything to share IRQ on a laptop, and also for the Scope to share with the Magma.

Sorry to say but it's probably the controller. The onboard graphics probably isn't helping either. It's worth trying an XP reinstall with ACPI though ('standard PC' mode won't cut it for new PCs).

Also it could be worth trying a tool that limits the bandwidth of all devices on the PCI/PCI-e bus.

[katano]

Well, if I remember wright, the rico cardbus controller is crap when it comes to pci performance and is not recommended to use with magma and scope. Cardbus controllers from Texas Instruments are working best. However, I sold my Magma after just one life performance/recording, as I came to pci overload very quickly...

Not really helping, I know, sorry...
Cheers
Roman

[capacitor]

Saying "it sucks, I know" actually does help

Here's some reading - an article about the Lenovo update, for this particular Ricoh chipset: http://2xod.com/articles/Lenovo%20T61%20Slow%20PCMCIA/

In it, they claim measuring a 500% performance gain. I'm not sure if I need to update the Windows XP driver - I only applied the BIOS update (the above BIOS fix was also made available for the R61i).

I'm now doing a full backup because I have somehow achieved enabling BOTH of the Standard PC and Multiprocessor ACPI drivers Yep, it runs - but am not going to reboot, even, until I have this sucker backed up.

Also: looks like Lenovo has a new support forum! The bios appears to only work on some models, but not others (all w/same Ricoh controller). So this is a work-in-progress for Lenovo.

[Tau]

Ah, magma...

Capacitor, with Cardbus on a laptop, it's normal to have IRQ sharing, at least, in every experiment I did, that happened, but I got a nice performance anyway. What could be causing you problems is the Cardbus controller - it's a Ricoh, but it would better be Texas Instruments, as those seem to work better with Magma.

But I don't quite understand your sentence "Magma cardbus DEC-Pericom". Which one is it?

Finally, you can also try to move the Scope card to another slot on the chassis and see if it works better. Beware that you may have to reinstall drivers or even SFP after you do such a thing, but it sometimes made a big difference.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

T

[capacitor]

The DEC & Pericom devices were confusing to me as well.

When installed & powered up, two entries appear in Device Manager/System devices:

DEC 21150 PCI to PCI bridge
Pericom PCI to PCI bridge

The DEC entry is for the CardBus card, and the Pericom entry is for the controller within the Magma box itself. I'll post a pic.

I moved the Pulsar to the 2nd slot with no side effects whatsoever

[capacitor]

Looks like I'll be offline for a few days. Typing this from another computer, which I'll not have access to after Thursday am.

My system is hosed - it hangs on ntdll.dll during safe mode startup.

Gonna reload & try again

I'm not ruling out this setup just yet. In particular, the CardBus card should not use the DEC driver according to some Magma install docs I ran across.

Unfortunately, the system hung right after I switched drivers...grrrr This system was due for a reload anyways.

[capacitor]

This particular system is also equipped with Expresscard/54. I've lost every bit of my geek creds by not figuring it out till just now

I *assumed* the upper slot was simply space for a type III Cardbus/PCMCIA device. Just took a careful look with a bright light. Lenovo was vague on the specs, but that's a lame excuse.

So - time to trade off/sell off some otherwise like-new Magma equipment for a EC54 card. I'll post in the for sale/wanted section this weekend.

Just an update to anyone who might be following along.

-cap