PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Greetings -

I am putting together a CW sys in a mac G4 400 - and have been alterted to the fact that my PCI bandwidth may give out before I actually used X number of SHARC chip. I am considering the Pulsar II and the Power Pulsar.

Does anyone know if the Power Pulsar is too much for this computer - i.e. their is not enough PCI bandwidth to handle 15 chips of DSP?

thanks very much in advance

Ed

well this depends... if you use your 15 DSPs for synths only, you won't have any troubles. if you use a lot of reverb, delays or STS sampler, and lots of asio channels, you might run into problems. these are the system bottle neck devices when talking about PCI limitations.
i hardly have any problems (14 DSPs).

it is as Borg said: PCI bandwidth is only an issue if the card needs temporary Ram on the mobo - and that happens only with reverbs and delays (afaik), the longer, the more intense.
Anything else is processed onboard and even the loading of samples isn't that critical.

You have a great Mac - it's my favoured model in the company - because it will run with all fans disconnected, except the powersupply's

Apple's memory manager must be way ahead of the Wintel stuff, at least the architecture is pretty effective compared to those.
The numbers may read lame, but the performance isn't
Your Mac operates while others rotate in (hidden) waitstates.

cheers, Tom

Thank you both - this is very helpful

when one thinks of mobo RAM it is the same as system RAM - no? This mac has 768 MB

I agree! This is my fav G4 of all of them because it is quiet and runs flawlessly

looking forward to the CW phase of this computer's life

thanks again

Ed