PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

I am soon to get an XITE-1 and i have already got a PCI-E USB2 card for my virusTI/monomes/mascine i would like to run everything on one machine now, is there any potential problems?

IRQ and other such issues shouldn't be present on any decently implemented board and modern OS. But electrically the PCIe slots closer to the cpu may have specific implementation issues, or maybe not. When in doubt you can avoid those and use the lower 1x/2x/4x slots, as that will still offer more than enough bandwidth and no potential headaches figuring out what mode to set the slots to in the bios (crossfire/SLI gamer features.) All dependent on the layout of the board of course:

On the x58 chipset the 'northbridge' from s775 is replaced by QPI interconnects that connect to memory, the PCIe bus for the gpu's, and ICH10r. ICH10r also gives (iirc) 6 additional 1x lanes for the manufacturer to implement as they see fit. P55 chipsets for the Lynnfield quads (860/870/750/760 cpu's) have the PCIe implemented directly on the cpu (lower latency than QPI as it turns out) and it's less common to find that split into more than 2 slots (ICH10R still provides 6 PCIe 1x lanes for the manufacturer to allocate...)

So you may find boards that drop the PCIe slots to 8x or even 4x when there's something in the 2nd/3rd slot, which won't necessarily affect audio per se (since it's just dividing the lanes accordingly and 1-4x is plenty for audio) but they may have specific smux features or other settings in the bios/jumpered that will need to be fiddled with and understood. The manual will specify that when the 2nd slot is occupied each slot is 8x/4x etc instead of 16x, or 16x each etc.

The bigger issue is when boards use the nforce100/200 'bridge' chips for SLI, as that can be more of a potential issue for putting anything in the other 'northern' PCIe slots. Technically Intel x58 boards no longer 'require' the bridge chip for SLI so it's easier to spot the "SLI" branded boards that do use the nf200 by checking the product literature for its presence.

The dual PCI-e cards may not have as many potential/possible conflicts as the USB or graphics do on many systems.

In general, as you know, Xite is probably best on it's own IRQ and in a slot away from driver chips and graphics cards, and should definitely avoid sharing IRQ's with USB crud.

But my hunch is that you will NOT have problems.

Greg

Well i thought i was having some trouble because I would get clicks and pops whenever i pressed any buttons on my maschine controller, but after a lot of card swapping and farting about it turns out that it is

1: according to Native instumnets "bad programming in windows/cubase"
2: according to my virus TI and monomes (both also hardware/software over USB) working fine "bad programming by native instruments" which can be fixed by turning off multithreading support of vsts in cubase

but my xite was on the same IRQ as the video card even with one of the single lane slots and it did freeze the computer once when i was changing projects., fortunately the other single slot seems to be pretty much by its self and it appears to be fine now.

What version of Windows, what version of Cubase, what GPU and what driver revision for that gpu?

It is a rather ancient P5W DH Deluxe motherboard with most of the onboard cruft disabled. the CPU is a 2.16 ghz low end quad core xeon. x3210 not overclocked or anything. (tested good with DPC latency checker)

Video card is a little radeon 3450 passive cooled with new drivers (i might have to change this soon, since i want to run dual monitors)

OS is xp x32 all up to date. i have a 32 bit win7 license for that machine but i will wait till i get an SSD before i change it(and reinstall everything again..ugh)

Cubase is 3.1 but i am considering upgrading it to 5.5(still rather on the fence about that i keep hearing stories) thats why i never upgraded to cubase 4, since it was working rather well.

Ah, XP. That's probably why the IRQ was shared, the XP ACPI pool is much smaller than Win7 (which supports APIC 2.0+ controllers for a ton of IRQ's.)

Win7 on the other hand requires apps be updated to the new Direct2D UI calls (GDI+ depreciated) which means old apps will consume more cpu (because GDI+ is emulated on the cpu about 5-10 times slower than XP's native GDI+) so while you gain newer ACPI/APIC support (which that mobo may not even have?) you may find that the ATI drivers give you awful performance. NVidia drivers are (finally) better than ATI for GDI+ legacy calls with cards in the 200-series (GTS250, GTX26/270/285) but you need to know which specific versions are best in terms of DPC issues.

I think it may be time to get a newer motherboard then. does scope5 count as a "legacy" app? cubase 5.5 is probably ok (one would hope) and i expect cubase 3.1 is "legacy"

Well I haven't tried Scope5 but the wxwidgets legacy codebase for Scope 3/4 was always one of the slow points even in XP, I doubt it would be any 'slower' under Win7. However I had heard positive things about 4.5/5 in terms of GUI speedup so it's entirely possible that they're using the newer Direct2D (Aero) calls, or something in place of wxwidgets (which I think was dead) that does same.

Really it's not a *huge* issue but there are dual core Win7 users who complain about using CubaseSX 2.x & 3.x because moving things around onscreen causes playback issues. Any modern X58/p55 based setup shouldn't have any of those issues (but remember to disable core parking for Sonar & Cubase!)

I certainly noticed the GDI+ issues in heavy Illustrator (print) layouts though, got me to upgrade to CS5.

I'm not necessarily the best input on Scope & modern machines let alone Xite as my Scope cards are still in my P4DC6+

But what I do know is what I've seen with hardware I have played with (Core2 & Nehelem era) like my last-gen Core2 Xeon machine which shows me 256 IRQ's under Win7, though it's because the ones that aren't handed off directly from BIOS (00-13) on the ISA all start at 80 on up with my current settings (PCI then PCIe.) On the *same* board if I run Xp32 or Xp64 the most I see is up to 24 (0-23) under that OS'es ACPI implementation and this board is FULL of stuff atm. Just the difference in the era of the software... I've got an RME PCIe card, PCI card, 3 networking cards (2 onboard & 1 added via PCI), all usb ports in use, a gaming class GPU with constantly updated drivers and etc etc. No issues here, though it did take fiddling under Xp32 last year I haven't bothered with even my low-level (enhanced mode) mapping of IRQ tables since dropping XP.

Any i7 (p55 or x58) era machine I've built so far has had either 0-127 or 0-190 listed for it's "Microsoft Class ACPI System" IRQ table entries under Win7.

So I wouldn't be surprised to see your IRQ sharing results improve in the future, when you do update to a new OS or newer hardware (or both) if you're using Xite.

But most important is a machine that works! And it seems yours is now, so I'm being overly pedantic perhaps.