PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi Guys,

I'm a pro user and at the moment I have a rockstable scopesystem and I need it to stay that way (pulsarII, asus p800, 2.8 2 gig ram,3 maxtor 120G HD's, plextor burner, liteon dvd burner, silent nexus breeze cases, matrox P750 with passive zalman cooling with 3 19" monitors).

Right now I'm working on a danceproject and I need to load a lot of video in my computer. The material is on DV-tapes so I was thinking about adding a firewire card to load the video directly from a DV-camera in my music-computer.

Will adding a firewirecard give problems with my pulsarcard? (Pci bandw.and pci errors etc)
When I don't need the firewirecard (thats most of the time) can I disable it (in the bios and uninstalling drivers in XP)or will it still interfere with the pulsarcard?

Like I said my system is now rockstable and I need it to stay this way and I don't want to take any risks cause I'm busy with several deadlines (but I also need that videomaterial).

Has anyone experience with adding firewirecards? what brand, wich pci slot etc.

thanx,
Jerome

Hi, I just upgraded to a p4, but I had a stable p3-933/512/asus cusl-2 mobo with a 15 dsp Scope and added a pci firewire card (because it wasn't on my mobo). I never had PCI bandwith problems (smart idea for the p750, because I have 3 different videocards in 1 pc, kinda bandwidth-eating..).

When I started a 100gbyte copy from an internal disk to an external disk (through the firewire-card) I didn't experience problems with the Scope (only Logic stopped playing all the time, cuz some plugins run on the main CPU and the CPU-load was constantly 100% due to the copying process)

Ok thanks for the replies.
Lets try it, hope it'll work.

...
Like I said my system is now rockstable and I need it to stay this way and I don't want to take any risks cause I'm busy with several deadlines (but I also need that videomaterial)

I may be too late, but I really wouldn't do it under these conditions.
A 2nd PC with an exchangable disk or DVD rewriter for the video transfer is more appropriate imho.

anway, fingers crossed, Tom

Thanks for the fingers Astroman
Everything went flawless. System still stable and 80 gig of video in my workstation ready to get some nice music under it.
Must admid that some sweat from my forehead was dripping in my pc when adding the card. Still no problems though

I have a 3-port firewire card too, connecting camera, ext HD, LAN. Never had any problems with it. But if you are on a deadline, it's often a bad idea to start messing w your machine, hence Tom's warning I guess.

The small tool at http://mark-knutson.com/t3/ can monitor PCI latencies for your PCI devices, and you can adjust latency if needed. My firewire card has 48cycles latency, no need to interfere there

Have fun!

My OS is XP. Under Win 98/ME I wouldn´t have tried it under this conditions (deadlines and so). Indeed, I used the mark-knutson tool to see how the firewirecard was doing latency wise. And I thought when things don´t work well I always can get the firewirecard out again.

By the way, recording several audiotracks on a external firewire harddisk will cause pci overflows with pulsar?

No problem here, but that is different on each setup. Why don't you try yours - if you have an externel HD of course.

PCI Latency Tool 2.0 - save $10!

http://downloads.guru3d.com/downloadget ... 5674e0dc22

thanx

Great tool!

I discovered that I have Matrox card at 64
Scope (main) and Pulsar2 at 96 and old Pulsar1 at 128.

I'm in doubt if I should lower Pulsar1 value and maybe rise Scope value as it's the main card....

I think for us the main point of using this tool is to ensure that Scope gets enough attention/priority from the PCI bus to do its thing. In order to have a stable system, however, we need to make sure that every device in the system is running smoothly. Every device's priority timeslice must be small enough to not hog the PCI bus, and large enough to get all its work done.

In a "well-balanced" PCI latency configuration, however, you should not be able to notice a difference between a setting of 96 and 128 for one particular device. 96 is already on the high side so just about all other components in the system will have a lower priority by default.

We should also consider that improvements were made to the Scope design and possibly this could account for the newer card requiring less "attention" than the old one to do what it does. In any case, both your cards are probably using updated versions of Creamware's drivers, so their latency values probably conform to some kind of ideal scenario as of <Driver date>. Just as long as the rest of our components follow this scenario as well, we'll all be in good shape. If not, tweak with Latency Tool.

As for the Scopes, I would leave them pretty much alone and simply trust Creamware to know what we're trying to do with our systems - not the video card or network card or even the motherboard manufacturers, but the maker of our sound cards.

hi there!

i have checked this PCI latency tool 2.0,
i also have firewire enable, since i have 2 computer connected together,
about pci latency;
cw cards (3 of them) - 96
radeon 9600 - 255
IEEE 1394 host controller - 96


which values should be there, for better results ?


thanks


matej

The ATI card should go down to maybe 64, and firewire should go down even lower to 32. In a realtime recording application, the firewire interface will be doing the least work (if any), whereas the video card still has to swap around between all those SFP and sequencer windows, so it will be doing some work - but it definitely won't be rendering 3D landscapes etc!

What's ironic is that the gaming latency setting of 255 doesn't even work well for most gaming setups as lots of times this causes serious shortcomings for gaming sound cards rendering 5.1ch surround sound with effects. Again it's the lack of balance that causes instability.


<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: rob604 on 2005-01-27 04:19 ]</font>