Thanks for your advice losguy ihave another question though. I cant afford a new sytem but i can afford a new soundcard.

Would i still encounter the same problems if i used a firewire soundcard and connected thru the IEEE 1394 port? Does firewire travel down the PCI bus?

The SATA drive is my only drive and i dont think i can boot from usb. Dont really wanna do that.

Other option is to use a USB soundcard say Edirol ua-25??

Can u recommend any mobo`s for pro audio given that im an archaic PCI card user not PCI express?

Stuart

Just tried out Powerstrip....

I'm going MAD because I can't find the place to adjust my PCI Latencies.


PLEASE HELP

You're right. I'm using a PCI Express Video card. If this is the case, what would the probable share between my M-Audio Audiophile 192 sound card and other resources be, regarding PCI latency?

I'm running WinXP Pro on an AMD Athlon 64 X2 5200+ processor on a Biostar TForce 590 SLI Deluxe MOBO with my GeForce PCIe graphics card and M-Audio Audiophile192. I'm considering getting the Seagate Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3.0-Gb/s 250-GB Hard Drive [ST3250310NS] for my audio files...

Any suggestions of where I can sqeeze more juice out of my machine?

Thanks for a great post, losguy!

I've been struggling with clicks, pops and deafening squawks for ages - paradoxically it got worse after I got a new laptop (dual core, 4GB RAM, SATA drive).
I'd heard of PCI latency and had tried to tweak using DoubleDawg and one or two other utilities - none with any noticeable difference.

Then I read your post - then reread it several times and a lot of things became clearer. I downloaded PowerStrip and set to work . . .

I'm using a Novation Speedio USB interface via a Belkin USB2 cardbus adapter. Powerstrip identified the NEC USB controller (which is what the Belkin is really) and showed a latency of 64 which I felt was a bit low, so I upped it to 144 - clicks and pops GONE and running at 4.5ms latency!
Powerstrip is the only utility I've used which has identified the NEC controller as a device capable of having it's latency adjusted. Since it's what Speedio plugs into it figures that more bandwidth must be a good thing.

The only other significant tweak has been to use ASIO4ALL instead of the Novation driver, which seems to produce a few clicks still.

So, thanks to your sterling efforts, my laptop is now usable for SONAR (at least until I build a dedicated DAW).

Thanks again!

If it was PCIe, then it would be remarkable to find that tweaks down on the PCI bus would be able to make a difference.

Hi Losguy,

The Latitude D620 has the Intel 945GM Express Chipset - according to the spec on the Intel site the graphics are "PCI Express x16" so I guess that means PCIe. I was actually quite surprised that the tweak I described made a difference, but it did.
I can bring back the clicks, pops and squawks by changing the latency on the USB interface back to 64, which was where I found it - then put it back to 144 and they go away. Very repeatable.

ORIGINAL: Luteman
The Latitude D620 has the Intel 945GM Express Chipset - according to the spec on the Intel site the graphics are "PCI Express x16" so I guess that means PCIe. I was actually quite surprised that the tweak I described made a difference, but it did.
I can bring back the clicks, pops and squawks by changing the latency on the USB interface back to 64, which was where I found it - then put it back to 144 and they go away. Very repeatable.

(Hey Luteman... sorry for getting back so slowly, but it's been a long week...)

Well, now that you mention it, I haven't ever bothered to try out a PCI Latency utility on my Dell Inspiron... partly because I haven't tried to push it with low latency yet, and partly because of it being PCIe also (I figured that it wouldn't even be worth the bother).

I do see that you used a cardbus adapter for the USB2 port. I wonder what made you decide to go that route, as opposed to the "normal" thing to do, i.e. just plug into the laptop's onboard port(s)?

Lots of folks get a PC card for Firewire, in order to fix the TI chipset problem. I do suspect that the onboard USB2 ports may not show up as adjustable under PowerStrip. Is that true?

Great work in getting your problem solved this way... even long after most would have said that PCI Latency adjustment was irrelevant. So, here's a...

..\D

hat-tip from the losguy. It's an award of semi-dubious esteem, but nonetheless... feel free to search the forums on that term. You'll find what I consider to be gems of tips on the forum.

Edit: Oh yeah, one more question. I assume that Belkin USB2 card was a PC card, and not an express card, right?

Santino, since you're planning to do multi-channel recording, the first thing I'd do is get a second hard drive for your audio tracks and CW projects. You never know when the OS is going to need the system drive for something, and you don't want that heppening when the recording process is putting demands on the drive head. If you can, get one of the new perpendicular-recording drives like the Seagate 7200.11 (or the 7200.10), or equivalent from Samsung etc., and get the biggest cache that you can afford (16M is a "sweet spot" for performance value).

On the video, you may want to check your CPU usage with the onboard video, especially when you're doing anything with the GUI (e.g. moving/resizing/minimizing/maximizing windows, pushing buttons, running spectral graphs, etc.). If the onboard accelerator isn't very good, it will take juice away from your CPU to do its job. The PCIe card will be fine on that front, but then it may be huge overkill too, and it also may swamp the i/o bus with traffic. So, if your CPU is OK with the onboard video, then you may very well leave it alone.

Well

Mr. Luteman, it appears that your PCIe chipset gives enough priority to the legacy PCI bus to actually be responsive to PCI latency adjustments on the legacy PCI bus. So, while PCI latency cannot be used to tame down a PCIe graphics adapter, it can still be used (in at least this one instance) to give some more time-bandwidth to the audio interface. And remarkably, more than it had when it was connected to the onboard USB2 port, which is hanging off the chipset, probably right at the PCIe level.

This could possibly be applied to other PCIe systems having the audio interface sitting on a legacy PCI bus. It may not work all the time, as I'd expect it to depend on the degree of relative priority given to the legacy PCI bus (just another node of many on the PCIe bus). Nonetheless, this gives at least one knob to tweak where there (apparently) used to be none.

So, this confirms the first useful PCI latency adjustment on a PCIe system! A gold nugget to be sure, and I would say that your hat-tip is very well-deserved.

Thanks for your answer....
This week I'm buying the seagate you mentioned plus another hard drive, both IDE, so all the hard drives will be IDE...., no more SATA on my PC.... I'm buying IDE 'casuse I've heard that everithing's gonna work better....Also, I'm buying 2gb+ ram so the final configuration will be:

AMD athlon 64 x2 4600
mobo ASUS M2N-MX SE plus
4 gb ram 800mhz
Seagate barracuda 7200.10 320gb 16mb buffer IDE (audio drive)
WD 250gb 8mb buffer 7200rpm IDE (System drive)
Video: -onboard GeForce 6150 set to 512mb-
PCI M-Audio Delta 1010LT

(I'm gonna move the sata 160gb to another PC that I have...)

you think it's fine?? or would you change/add anything??

ORIGINAL: Luteman
While we're on the subject of fictitious awards, I am pleased to endow you as the first recipient of the Luteman International Award for Bestest Advice Ever and being an all-round Top Bloke.

Well, now I truly feel honored! (That's the sort of accolade that you could expect to find only in the Old World. Very classy. )

OK, sorry if it's confusing. My first post this thread started back in January 2004. Back then, chipsets were just barely starting to come out that had the SATA interface built into the chipset. So MOBO manufacturers, in order to feature SATA ports on the MOBO, used a workaround: they tacked a SATA interface chip onto the PCI bus. Even though it was hardwired onto the MOBO, it was still just the same as plugging a SATA interface board into the PCI slot bus. (Well, almost as good... you were stuck with that chip and whatever drivers you could get for it, and if you didn't like the interface, well, you couldn't just rip it out of the bus like a PCI card, could you? All you could do is disable it, but I digress...) Hence, the need for being mindful about bandwidth hogging on the logical bus.

Those days are long over, at least as far as SATA is concerned. Mind you, some MOBOs still try to add SATA ports by using a tack-on SATA controller, so it's still a good idea to check that the SATA ports do indeed hang off the chipset (looks like they do on yours), and to plug your drives into those ports.

Santino,

I checked when I was typing my last post. As I said, it looks like they are OK. In fact, it appears that your MOBO only has the two SATA ports hanging off the chipset.

Blessings of the Kingdom to you,
Carlos

hello losguy.
i see that you're guru of this post :-)
yesterday i found your post in the internet and i read it.. try everything, but no results.
let's begin.

i bought esi duafire (firewire audio card) 4 months ago and i'm figthing with a clicks in asio drivers and directx also.
i play only one audiotrack in my sequencer and i listen sometimes clicks..sometimes beetween 20 seconds, minute, 2 seconds... randomly i can say.

configuration:

laptop toshiba satellite a100-36 with windows xp - sp2 + 1394 patch fix -> KB885222
firewire controller - texas instrumens - i heard that is a good controller and people haven't problems with it, but i have :-)
->

http://gulf.computers.toshiba-europe.com/cgi-bin/ToshibaCSG/jsp/SUPPORTSECTION/discontinuedProductPage.do?service=AE&DISC_MODEL=0&highlightOption=94688&com.broadvision.session.new=Yes&PRODUCT_ID=125123

i lalso tried everything on my desktop pc:

motherboard gigabyte GA-K8NS
amd sempron 2600+
i bouught 1394 controller to connect ESI duafire - controller chipset VIA VT6306 ( standard IEEE-1394
ati radeon 9550
2 sata hard disks:
- samsung 250 gb - sata150, ncq, 16 mb cache
- wd 250 gb - sata300, 7200rpm, 8mb cache

should i add something more ?
what i should do to eliminate clicks in audio ???

best
/michael

ORIGINAL: Santino
Thanks for all the help....You are the man!!!

Just FTR, JC is the man (follow links in my sig), and I'm just the servant! But definitely, I'm glad to help.

It's worth a try. Some people havfe been helped by it, but it's just a guess. It is still unsure because your laptop already has a TI FW chipset. Just the same, be sure the cardbus adapter also has a TI chipset... that will help to eliminate some variables from the experiment.