dell sucks for DAW! need help

PC Configurations, motherboards, etc, etc

Moderators: valis, garyb

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rafafredd
Posts: 83
Joined: Mon Apr 29, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Brazil

Post by rafafredd »

Hi all!

Have a dell dimension 4300 series(dont laught! - I was kind of ignorant about hardware when I bought that). It´s configured as folows:

p4 1.5 / 256mb sdram 133 / 40gb 7200seagate / 40gb 7200 maxtor / nvidia gforce2 / intel 1845 chipset/ LUNA II and luna2496 io box

I can only get it to work with asio drivers without clicks at 14s ulli and still with pci capacity erros sometimes. No shared irqs.

Use it mainly for multitrack recording with native dx and vst stuff. Only runs some equalizer or compressor on the incoming signal.

I´ve heard of a little aplication that can set pci latency time (note that my bios has almost no options and configurations). Do you know if it can be used with my chipset?

Considering selling this computer and make my own. Wich motherboads are the bests for an athlon xp processor?

Somethig about SOYO dragon plus (this uses the via kt266a)? or may I go on asus? or msi kt266pro2 / kt3 ultra... I dont know. Any suggestion or help will be greatly admired.

Thanks on advence!
subhuman
Posts: 2573
Joined: Thu Mar 29, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: Galaxy Inside

Post by subhuman »

Definitely do not buy any board with a VIA chipset period.

You actually have decent hardware, but I am sure there are tons of extra stuff Dell installed for you. If possible, format your drive and do a clean installation of Windows (if Dell provides a 'real Windows' CD without their extra stuff...) then go apply all minor tweaks from Optimize your Win9x (or 2000/XP) box from the Tips & Tricks section...

You might still need a few more tweaks specific to your machine after that, so post if you still have problems.
rafafredd
Posts: 83
Joined: Mon Apr 29, 2002 4:00 pm
Location: Brazil

Post by rafafredd »

please subhuman, can you help me with this?

I´m using a clean installation of win 98se with all the startup bullshit disabled. The only thing that stays on air is the Luna !! icon. My system is tottaly dedicated to CW.
I already tried several tips and tricks.
After doing everything that the online help of creamware says, I disabled the usb, parallel and com ports. Luna is on a irq of it´s own. I don´t know, everything seems to be fine, but I can only work with asio at 14ms (this is a lot of latency for a ulli) and sometimes I get the PCI capacity error.
My bios don´t have any pci latency parameter.
Do you know something about little aplications that can change the pci latency?
Is there any trick that I can try?
The more dx and vst stuff that i run, more the PCI errors apear. Can it be not enought RAM?

Thanks, man...
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garyb
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Joined: Sun Apr 15, 2001 4:00 pm
Location: ghetto by the sea

Post by garyb »

ram helps........still it's probably a config issue.
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