Intel goes consumer - 3 PCI slots DH67CL

[astroman]

wouldn't have expected THAT, but in fact it turned out a complete desaster.
Installed the 32bit version of Scope 5.1 under Win7.
PCI overflow at the 7th Masterverb, a bunch of other errors and a system, that disintegrated itself within an hour.
Haven't seen a blue screen for a while... but today had my share ...
All CPU and energy tweaking off, tried a 6 DSP solo and as combo with a 14 DSP board.
No matter if onboard video or PCIe (GF8600).
OK... possibly the board was dead on arrival... but then I had it installed and used a day without Scope without complaints.
I remember I've suggested that board a couple of weeks ago as a 3 slot solution
... which I turn into a BETTER BEWARE (!) now, sorry.

As I had a 2nd system at hand, I gave it a shot...
to be honest I even was seriously worried the Scope card might be dying.
That was an ASUS P8P67-M, a bit crammed with a RevoDrive in the outer 16x slot, Scope in PCI, Canopus Spark in 1x, GF8600 in the other 16x.
This one ran under 64bit and performed much better, in fact surprisingly well - as Scope shares with GForce AND the RAID controller of the flash drive :O
Of course bandwidth was exhausted with the 4th Masterverb, but it managed an Ambience and a Chorus Delay (or Plate or so)
... ooops... supper's ready... later

cheers, Tom

[garyb]

wow, i think i've had success with that board before...

[astroman]

to be honest I'm quite irritated - worst install of the last decade - hands down...
I don't mind 64bit or not, but would prefer Win7 for it's more forgiving 'attitude' when you turn stuff off.
And the i5 is definitely nice to have.
I missed the details... possibly this board suffers from those P67 chipset problems. Dunno - I'll return it.
The Asus is stunning.
Scope crashed a couple of times while some energy saving stuff was still on (they have a ton of this spread all over the system...), but that's what you'd expect anyway.
At least control of the system was retained - log off/on the most 'dramatic' action required.

Seems I've got it sorted out, as Scope runs idle for a couple of hours now - still healthy.
I'd never expect sharing with a graphic card and a RAID would give even one single tone without crackling.
Btw on the Intel the innermost PCI slot seemed to share with the graphcard - resulting in a hanging system followed by a blue screen.
You could only use all 3 slots with onboards graphic. At least in my case it made no difference in (meager) PCI performance.

cheers, Tom

[fokas]

Sandy Bridge with no Native PCI support is still under investigation I guess .... PCI Bandwidth is an issue and asus as far as I know uses the Asmedia Chips for pci .Dunno what Intel uses ...
Im hopping I have the time to go for it myself on one of The Full ATX Asus mother boards

Daniel

[garyb]

yeah, Sandy Bridge isn't my first choice for a pci system.

[dawman]

As long as we all keep in mind that we are very low on the priority list of manufacturers, and most of the software we use is not mainstream and has little Quality Control, if any.
So keeping it simple and at least a year behind the Hooplah is usually a safe bet.

I bought my first i7 1 1/2 years after watching many here, and on other platforms suffer with early released products.
THe PCI-e chip used caused major havoc with PCI-e soundcards from RME to S|C....

An ATX w/ 3 x PCI 32bit slots is perfect for Scope Card owners, but after seeing the CES show here for the last 3 years, and then seeing even Intel releasing products that " slipped " by the Quality COntrol guys is bad news IMHO.

I remember when buying an Intel board was a must as they were mission critical, and lean.

Watching them spend millions on keeping their user base happy with " fix it later " solutions, is a warning to all, that if your rig works.................Leave it alone.

I am waitng for the X68 chipset, that should be late this year, so that means I will get it the month Obama gets run out of town.............

[valis]

Intel's getting more confusing...X68 has been turned into X78 which is now supposed to be for Sandy Bridge-E (SNB-E) which will be on LGA-2011. This is because H67 & P67 now have 'Z68' as the 'high end' Sandy Bridge chipset which supports (up to 4 ddr3 slots and) SSD caching (using Intel's little 315 SSD's.) I think Intel is bringing lower end boards to market to soak up as many sales as they can before bringing out higher performance parts, which is in contrast to X58 where high end came first then lower tiers followed. It seems to be working as my gamer buddies are replacing cpu/motherboard every 6 months if they can afford it (to have the 'best'.)

In any case I was originally (in early 2010/late 2009) thinking I'd be waiting on Ivy Bridge to update my desktop, but things have shifted so much lately it's hard to say what I will wind up doing. 20GB SSD caching isn't going to help me a lot that's for sure, I'd rather have access to 200GB+ SSD's at a reasonable pricepoint (sub $500).

[fokas]

One of my workhorses is an old Q9550 on an asus X38 M/B and its almost as good as my X58 AND MAYBE MORE RELIABLE .Lesson here is that when you have a solid Platform you can play the waiting game and get the best of upcoming technology after it might get the best of you .

Regards to all

[astroman]

I removed the 'trash' attribute from the title, as the 'mess' might relate to a misplaced USB onboard header connection.
Located deep inside the case there's few visual feedback under lamplight conditions and the mark on the connector doesn't prevent it to be shifted one position.
I'm not sure if this was really the cause (nothing connected to it after all, at least most of the time), but anyway...

If you aquire a 3 PCI-32 slot board, you would expect a 'quality supplier' like Intel to have taken care on the slot part of the system, in particular regarding previous experiences.
I HAD TO update the bios, as delivery state was without fan control, making the board a literal hoovercraft.
Afterall (with stuff corrected) it turned out to be completely unusuable together with a sequencer.

The ASUS 'felt' much better in system experience despite it's IRQ sharing of 3 devices , but I wouldn't expect it a sequencer workhorse when failing at the 5th Masterverb.
I'll keep it for developement of CPU intense stuff on which it performed really well.

After the Scope's expediton into Sandy Land it felt right at home on a humble EP41 (Gigabyte), installed into a fairly cluttered XP internet machine. With 9 DSPs it complained with the 12th Masterverb that the chips were filled up - no PCI issues.
Made a sequencer setup with an 8 stereo bus Asio exchange, gave it some load and it worked as expected.
The EP41 is dead cheap and a nice home for some PCI cards.

cheers, Tom

ps: as a sidenote - if you call an Apple MacPro machine expensive, I'll laugh right into your face...

[fokas]

Good luck and thanks on all the info .
Regards to all
Danny

[dawman]

X79 is what I will replace my i7 with.
Quad Channel RAM will ensure that poorly coded, Non-Quality Control Audio apps will run better in this never ending Attention Deficit Disorder society us audio guys belong to.
I must say that NI's Kontakt is way ahead of the game with their on the fly compression techniques. So I was referring to the machine killing apps like PLAY, or other roll your own, unregulated gobblety-goop native crap that's touted as " Pro. "
I am watching guys buying RAID'd SSD's and some are on PCI-e slots using SATA III and still guys are crying that the thousands they spent show little performance.
Its the software that seems to be lagging, not the hardware. But even more bandwidth capable hardware will fix most of these poorly coded scabbyily designed goat fucks that cost thousands.
But even with an X79 chipset due in 4th qtr. 2011, I will wait until 2012 when maturity increases, and prices drop, and the elections are over.
With Obama and the Communists retreating back to their Soviet cubicles, the private sector can recuperate...........

[astroman]

btw... it was you, Jimmy (or rather your talk about the ModIV TapeDelay) that got me into the Scope 5 modern chipset adventure
otherwise I'd probably still be waiting - but curiosity came to an almost boiling level, so I just ordered the stuff.
Which is cool, the Mod IV extensions are even every cool and SC did a good job on optimising the installation process.
The whole package feels more solid and responsive than it's predecessor, it's worth the charge (!).

Actually the consequences according to my experiences are quite simple:
if you're on PCI classic cards, use an 865 chipset with PIV or that EP41 (or whatever it's called) with CoreDuo
the more 'modern' boards won't provide the expected support for the cards. Period.
If you want such a board/CPU get an XITE and everything will be fine.
That's about it

cheers, Tom

[garyb]

regular i7s work pretty well with pci cards, in my experience....

i think you're right about the latest generation though, especially the cpus with the built-in gpu. my guess is that in about 6 months, they'll have those issues more or less sorted out, just in time for the next newest great thing which will have it's own land mines...

[fokas]

So as far as I can see a X58 M/B with a I7 970 IS A NOT SO EXPENSIVE solution that will get you a long way if your a PCI user .And a Piggy Bank to save for an Xite after that . .
Regards to ALL
Danny