ORIGINAL: Jay Stephen
Many thanks again - especially for taking this on.

(BTW, what is the Make and Model of this MOBO?)

I thought it was a common DAW mobo. Its a ASUS P4C800-E.

You're welcome. Common DAW MOBO? No such thing AFAIK.

I have kept USB 2.0 disabled since I built the PC. The mobo allows me to activate 2, 4, 6 or 8 USB ports but they have to be activated in order - HC0, HC1, HC2, etc. So HC0 is activated for my M-Audio UNO Midi connection.

I'd go ahead and enable HC1, if you can do it without upsetting your audio IRQ, and plug your Uno into that one. That way, it won't have to step around your AGP card.

I'm embarrased to tell you that I had a struggle getting that table into the forum. You made it look easy!.

You did all the grunt work (data entry). I just did some formatting.

I understand that A > H is also in decending order of "PCI timing priority" so I had chosen Slot 4 because I didn't need the 1394. I have had 2-SATA drives since I assembled this DAW. I have ordered a Tascam FW-1884 and will remove the Delta-44 when it arrives. The Tascam connects to the PC with Firewire and of course I'll open up the 1394.

OK, sounds good to me. Just remember, if you still want to use the Delta with the Tascam, and you want them to coexist nicely, then you would want to move the Delta to the slots given above.

Here is my dedicated DAW: (no LAN, no WP, just DAW)
...
System Drive: 10Gig SCSI -FAT32 w/ADAPTEC controller
Audio Drives: 80GIG & 160GIG Seagate SATA w/8 MB cache - NTFS
...

You will want to take a look back at the PCI slot advice above, and place the Adaptec card in a slot that does not conflict with anything critical to audio.
EDIT: Even better, rip out the SCSI altogether, and get an IDE system drive. You'll reduce PCI bus bottlenecks, and save yourself an IRQ to boot.

Good idea losguy: Hers the Asus P4C800-E

http://www.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/sock478/P4C800E-DX/e1347b_p4c800-e_deluxe.pdf

Slot Assignments are page 41 of 149.

Wow, what a great message and discussion after. I have been experiencing the same problems with my K8V SE deluxe with the Via chipset using SATA. I haven'b been able to try the info because my computer is in the shop. I suspect I have a bad motherboard, since there are lots of other problems, one of which was that I was unable to get the SATA drives to work on the southbridge built in controller, so I used the Promise chip that is likely on the PCI bus. When I get my computer back, hopefully with a new mobo, I'll use your suggestions to work on the other problems.
By the way, you refered to stuttering problems, which I also have experienced. Do you know what cuases those problems or how to fix. You implied that it was covered elsewhere, but I havent' located it. Maybe it is because I didn't refer to it as stuttering since it didn't occur to me that that was what you would call that sound. Now that I know, I agree, it is a stuttering.
My system:
Sonar 3.1
Athlon 64 3200+
K8V SE deluxe
2-MOTU 828mkII firewire audio I/O's
1 gig ram
ATI9800XT
It should be a great setup for audio, and I'll let you know when I get it back.
Thanks again!
Frank....Frankeyjj

ORIGINAL: miseryshining
In sonar i can't get any acceptable latency's (under 50 ms) when using the asio driver.

Did you try the WDM driver? Is one available for the EMU 1800?

Also, just to be sure, do you have both the audio card and the SiI3112 on their own IRQ's?

The strange thing is that Nuendo doesn't seem to give me any problems at 4ms as long as i don't use my maxtor 120MO sata disk. If i use the mentioned HDD for playback or recording it will start to crackle more and more till it becomes really bad and then the crackling disappears suddenly till it starts again after 30s or so. I've got a Seagate HDD connected to the same controller (SIL3112) which doesn't give this problem. The settings for both HDD's are the same. I disabled all other onboard devices, tried different PCI slots and disabled all services and background processes but it didn't help.

Is all of this true for *both* Nuendo and SONAR? Or, which portion is true for which?

At worst, you could just use the Seagate (Barracuda?) for audio and the Maxtor for backup.

I hoped that i could solve the problems in sonar with the PCI latency settings but whatever i tried, it didn't help. My soundcard is an EMU 1800 by the way and my mobo an Epox EP-8RDA3+ (NForce2 Ultra).

What settings did you try?

For others who are changing their Latency settings with powerstrip, i found a convenient freeware tool that does the same and is easy to use: LatencyConfig

Of course, I can't read Polsh, so I would have never found this utility by myself. Thanks for the tip. Did you confirm that this utility is actually doing what it claims to do, using a separate tool, like SiSoft SANDRA?

ORIGINAL: miseryshining
Yeah they do have their own IRQ's, the EMU had 18 al for it's own.

How about the SATA controller?

i'm sorry i wasn't quite clear there. It's at least true for nuendo, but at sonar the pops and clicks are so bad that i don't really hear any difference.

Now, that's interesting. How about other apps, like Media Players or audio editors? Besides the interaction with the audio card driver, I'm not sure why a particular app would sork better than another. Was Nuendo buffering differently than SONAR by chance?

What settings did you try?

88 for graphics (even lower but you get error messages all the time then)
NIC at 32 or 16 (from 128 default)
SATA at 16 (from32)
EMU at 64 or 128 (from32)
firewire at 8 (fron 32)

If I'm reading this right, it looks like you have an awful lot of PCI cards plugged in. Is there any way that you could pull any of these to see if that will get it working?

ORIGINAL: miseryshining
the settings were the same actually. A strange thing just happened though. Sonar works fine now it seems. I created a new project instead of trying the project i'm working on and after loading amplitube and some effects it works perfect at 4ms... Hope it'll remain this way now. The problem with nuendo is still there though, but i can live with that.

It may be strange, but if it works then it's a welcome change! Perhaps it's something with the old project? Maybe some old audio that got recorded with clicks? Anyway, glad to see that you're getting it going.

The beeping in sonar btw was caused by directiXer (a VST wrapper) which sends beeps if you use the unregistered version. Very nasty protection because if you don't know you will have a hard time to find it out.

Good to know.

Well, it's just my mainboard.. it seems to have a lot of stuff on the pci bus (firewire controller, network adapter and the sil3112). It's pretty messed up i guess, and they don't even list them in the list of irq sharing. I have another graphics adapter for my second monitor but i removed it for troubleshooting At this moment i have the firewire controller disabled so maybe that was causing some problems.

Yeah, it's hard to tell for sure unless you eliminate each device one by one. Could be sopmething to keep in mind if you hear the glitches again with the FW enabled.

ORIGINAL: Opethfan

Hello all... I too have been having problems with my SATA audio setup (pulling hair out)and thought that before I go back to PATA I might as well post and see if there's something I didn't try.
...
I wish that I could set fire to the Audigy but I am a gamer in addition to a recording artist, and so it's neccessary. I hear clicks in audio when recording about every 2 seconds, and the clicks are louder when strumming or sustaining notes on the guitar than when playing single notes or silence. These problems occur in both Cubase SX and Sonar 3.1. I have tried, without luck and in no particular order: -swapping cards for different slots -isolating irq's -installing windows without ACPI -adjusting latency values in powerstrip

Hey Phil, sorry to hear about your troubles. Yes, some systems are just plain uncooperative in this regard, even after trying everything (and you certainly have tried a lot). FYI, I recall seeing some unresolvable issues with the Audiophile 2496 and the nForce2. However, I may not have been told (or remember) the successes, so it may still be OK.

Intersting about the clicks being louder with certain material, and nonexistent during silence. I've noticed the same thing, that they are particularly bad on piano too. I think the underlying problem is buffer over/underruns due to bus timing problems not accounted for in the drivers or in SONAR. I say this last bit because changing the buffer depths in SONAR and the drivers has no reliable effect (though I haven't done exhaustive tests at the driver level... maybe we all should). Some drivers may be better at dealing with this problem case than others, but I'm led to believe that the driver writers are assuming something in the PCI spec, perhaps about the time availability of the PCI bus, that is just plain being violated. Anyway, I don't think that the clicks are actually being generated, but are like badly-placed loop points and so depend on the material as to how audibly bad they will be.

-changing default pci latency in BIOS

Usually has no effect, since the device drivers typically overwrite these values.

-disabling the onboard SATA and using a PCI card with a Promise controller

Does the PCI card come with a driver that allows access to its bus timing? They may provide a GUI utility, or maybe it's an Advanced tab ot button in the Device Properties window. This may give you a direct way to adjust the PCI latency timer, but may also provide more options like FIFO depth, etc. If not, I really see no added benefit from having it over the onboard SATA controller.

Each soundcard is on it's own irq and the SATA controller is shared with a USB host controller which shouldn't pose a problem.

Not necessarily true. Just for good measure, try disabling that USB Host Controller if you can (you'll lose the two USB ports associated with it). Or somehow other, isolate the SATA controller.

Current config of the pci latency timers is as follows.
ati display controller - 88
ati display controller (auxiliary) - 88
audiophile 2496 - 32
sata pci card - 16

FWIW, I currently have my displays down further (64 I think... not in front of my studio machine right now) and the Terratec bumped up to 144.

HTH, and I sincerely hope that you can get your SATA audio drive working.

Hi losguy and everyone else

I'm putting together a PC for Sonar and I decided to build it myself so that I could try and put together a fairly quiet and high performing pc. Well I talked things over with a friend who I consider to be fairly knowledgeable in these areas and started buying the pieces. While I've been waiting for the last few parts I've been doing some extra research online and I'm starting to think that almost every purchase decision I made was wrong :/

Here's what I've lined up
ASUS P4P800S (manual: http://www.asus.com/support/download/selectftp.aspx?l1_id=1&l2_id=15&l3_id=25&m_id=1&f_name=e1398_p4p800s.pdf~zaqwedc)
Pentium P4 3.0 GHz Prescott (big time buyers remorse here, going to see if I can exchange it for a non-prescott)
512 MB RAM
Samsung SilentPoint 160 Gig SATA drive
Sony DVDRW (reads and writes pretty much everything)

I've been reading through this thread quite a bit, initially because I've been planning to use a SATA drive, but now I'm becoming even more concerned that I've got the wrong board.

Here's the IRQ scheme
...................A B C D E F G H
PCI 1..............- - - - - S - -
PCI 2..............- - - - - - S -
PCI 3..............- - - - - - - S
PCI 4..............- - - - S - - -
PCI 5..............- - - - - S - -
AGP................S - - - - - - -
USB 1.1/2.0.....- - - - S S S S
Onboard LAN...- - - - - - S -
Onboard Audio.- - S - - - - -

(not having much luck with the table, page 1-16 in pdf manual has the goods)


So if I've been understanding the gist of this post so far, it looks like I don't have a problem with the SATA controller since it's not even listed? Which sounds pretty good until I start to consider where I should put my sound card (Echo MIA). I should also mention that I use a midiman USB midi interface. This is where I start feeling a bit sick in my stomach. From what you've said above it looks like any attempt to use my USB 2.0 will mean not using PCI 1, 2, 3, 4, 5! hmmm, not looking to good there... So if I put that aside for the moment and consider not using USB at all, then I can use either 1 or 5, 3, or 4? Am I getting it right or am I hopelessly lost? Finally, I notice that B and D aren't used for anything. Does this provide any help for me at all? Is there any way to assign them to oh I don't know say USB so it's not shared with everything and perhaps assign the other to be used solely by the PCI slot of my choice and put the sound card in there?

If I've just displayed an amazing amount of misunderstanding and ignorance, I appologize. Any help or advice is greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Scott

Thanks for the quick response!

Well good news on the SATA drive I guess. I have a very nice quite Samsung SilentPoint 120 GB SATA 8MB cache drive ordered that should be very quite. It was highly recommended at silentpcreview.com.

I think I'm going to try and exchange the motherboard though. I talked it over with my friend and he had a similar suggestion to yours of trying to disable some of the USB controllers.

Hopefully, your BIOS will allow Disabling of separate USB controllers. Since they're occupying four whole PIRQ's, I'm assuming that there must be four of them, for a total of eight USB ports. Maybe some people need that many, but not for a DAW, not really. What I would do: In the BIOS, Disable three of the ports if possible. That should will free up all but one PIRQ. Then find one of the slots that doesn't share the USB port that's left. This will be hit and miss, but your chances will be very good at that point.

My friend has exactly the same motherboard alredy installed in his machine so I asked him to check into this for me. Even though the manual indicates that it is possible to disable some of the USB ports it turns out that the only option available is enable/disable, despite what is shown in the manual!

So I looked through a few other boards listed from the shop where I bought mine. Fortunately I haven't installed it yet since I'm still waiting on some parts to be shipped. I'm going to try and exchange both the board and the processor. For a board I have to admit I'm disappointed with the offerings available and what options they provide for resolving these IRQ conflicts. Right now it looks like my best choice will be ASUS P4C800 Deluxe. (manual: http://www.asus.com/support/download/item.aspx?ModelName=P4C800%20Deluxe )

From the chart on page 2-15 I think I can put the sound card in PCI 5 and leave PCI 1 empty. PCI 2 and the Lan are shared; PCI 3, USB 2.0 controller, and SATA controller are shared :/ and 4 is shared with 1394. I'm thinking that my audio concerns should be resolved by having the sound card on its own IRQ and I'm hoping that sharing USB 2.0 with the SATA controller won't be a problem. Any thoughts on this?

Alternatively I could go with a completely different motherboard. I'm interested in any suggestions that others on this forum might have. What boards are working well for everyone? I'm looking for something with onboard SATA, USB 2.0, AGP 8x, 1394 would be nice to have, don't care at all about onboard audio or video but seems like most boards have at least onboard audio these days. Any suggestions?

Thanks again for the help!

Scott

Losguy:- Do you have any Athlon 64 mobo recommendations? I am considering the Asus K8V-SE Deluxe and a AMD64 3000 2.0Ghz 512K 400fsb proc.

I'm pretty much an Intel guy, so I'm still trying to find a motherboard that will be a good choice for a P4 chip.

I'm looking at motherboards from several other manufacturers and one thing I'm encountering is a different presentation of the interrupt request information. For example I'm looking at an MSI motherboard (manual: http://www.msi.com.tw/program/support/manual/mnu/spt_mnu_detail.php?UID=554&kind=1) and on page 2-23 there is a PCI Interrupt Request Routing table that looks like this:

 XXXXXXXX ORDER 1   ORDER 2   ORDER 3   ORDER 4
 PCI SLOT 1 INT A#      INT B#      INT C#      INT D#
 PCI SLOT 2 INT B#      INT C#      INT D#      INT A#
 PCI SLOT 3 INT C#      INT D#     INT A#       INT B#
 PCI SLOT 4 INT D#      INT A#      INT B#      INT C#
 PCI SLOT 5 INT B#      INT C#      INT D#      INT A#
 

Any advice on how I can interpret this information? Is there a way for me to convert this to a table that looks like the ones used earlier in this post?

Thanks again!

Scott

Thanks for the break down! I also noticed that there were no entries for other onboard controllers like USB, AGP, SATA, etc... I wish that I was holding out, unfortunately that's all that was listed in the manual. I suspect that the documentation is incomplete in this area. /sigh I'm a bit surprised that something so important to the choice of motherboard is so difficult to easily locate and compare. Seems like this would be useful information to hilight right up front along with the general board specs. I guess for most users these issues just don't exist.

I'll continue my search and let you all know what I wind up with.

Scott

Thanks for the suggestion about the Asus SK8N Mobo. That mobo has a socket 940 so will only accept an AMD64 FX proc and wow! they are pricey. It will also accept Opteron but if the goal is a AMD64 I think I'd better wait a year.

Well Losguy, I'm back again with a BIOS question. My ASUS P4C800-E mobo has a section in the BIOS called PCI/PnP Settings. In that section there is the option to set the "PCI Latency Timer". Choices are: 32,64,96,128,160,192,224 & 248. It seemed to default to 64. In my dedicated DAW I am running S3 and a Tascam FW-1884. I would appreciate your guidance for setting the PCI latency timing.

Blessings,
Jay

I also recommend that you read up on how to use the PCI utility. Good info here, and PowerStrip has a user forum. Generally, the philosophy is to set the latencies high enough to get the needed performance, and no higher. To give you an idea, the default bootup timer settings on my system were as follows (as conveniently reported by PowerStrip):

RADEON 9000 Output 1: 248
RADEON 9000 Output 2: 32
Terratec EWS88D: 32
SiI 3112 SATA: 32

OK, this may be just my problem - and I am using this not for a SATA problem but with a clicking problem I have been looking that - but I loaded powerstrip on my box and I can't for the life of me see where in powerstrip you can see these values.
Sorry if I am just dense - but I would appreciate a tip on this one.
thanks much