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.....by changing the pci latency time of your graphics and network card. a lot of these are controlled by the system at startup and are usually set anywhere upto 248. having them this high will cause dropouts in audio as your soundcard will be set much lower. In other words, the video card and network card could easily hog the PCI bus to the point whereat my sound card might not be able to keep up with the load.
even an agp card will affect the loading as this has a conection to the pci buss.

hope this is some help to anyone
regards

Hi elliot

Sounds like a good tip!

Is this done in the BIOS or through the control panel (windows)?

TIA,

Royston

it can be done in the bios but i dont think this applies to all, personally i do it from windows with this little tool :-

http://mark-knutson.com/t3/

its freeware which is a real bonus

regards

just out of curiousity has anyone tried this? had any results?

regards
elliot

What would be the optimal value for these settings?

Hey Elliot,
yeah, I've done a lot of tweaking of the PCI latency settings. I never found any noticable difference, except for very small or very large values of the latency timers. Small values (16 and below) result in stutter, high values seem to cause hangs of the system.
When fiddling with latency-timers it is good to realize that both sides on the PCI-bus have a latency setting: the PCI device AND the PCI bridge, the latter being one value for all attached devices.
When there's clicks and pops I found it rarely to be caused by hardware. Most of the times it was software (incomaptibilities), or unoptimized windows. Ever thought about buying some more RAM and then completely disabling the SWAP-file? This does wonders to your DAW
Cheers,
Rob

thanx for the replies, ive got a gig of ram, is this enough to change the swap file values?

regards

hi
Some discussion going on here:
http://www.cakewalk.com/forum/tm.asp?m= ... Cglitching

I haven't tried these tweaks, because Matrox seems to be ok.

@elliot: For me 1Gb is enough.. Guess it all depends on how hungry your sequencer program is (I use Logic Gold 5.5 PC) and how big your sample-pool is that you use.
Try it and you know it
Cheers,
Rob

Any chance you could tell us ignos a bit more about what the SWAP file is and how to change it ?

Cheers.

Will.

Control Panel/System/Advanced/Performance Settings/Advanced/Virtual Memory/Change

(Win XP)

Virtual memory best reserved on a differnet partition of your Audio Driver or Win XP drive.

rule is Virtual memory be allocated at least 125 % of your physical RAM as Swap file

I don't agree on the VM guidelines... I completeley disabled VM, since I thought I have enough physical memory (1Gb).
I use Logic, SFP, and occasionally FruityStudio. Don't use huge samplebanks.
It's the best swapfile optimization there is

Cheers,
Rob

Theoretically, if you have enough physical memory to get away with disabling VM completely, then the system wouldn't have been using it when it had been enabled.

On 2004-12-09 21:56, narly wrote:
Theoretically, if you have enough physical memory to get away with disabling VM completely, then the system wouldn't have been using it when it had been enabled.

..and that's where the Windows and the Gates come into play. Windows uses it's VM regardles of the amount of used physical memory. Now this VM usage can be tweaked, but if, as you say, VM isn't needed at all, the simplest and best tweak is to completely disable it. It works, try it!
Cheers,
Rob

on mac the advise is always loud and clear:
turn it off!!

somr offline functions are not supported without vm, so beware, some apps may cease to work properly. you can always try it, it won't break anything, but don't try it 5 minutes before a client arrives......