I run a bizarre mix of stuff. rme 9652 card feeding a focusrite octopre LE and a behringer (!!) ADA8000. I can get under 2 ms latency without loading anything up to much and the sound is excellent.
The only reason I can see for leaving PCI is if you are using a lappy.

Mind you, I still have to persuade Sonar  8.5.3 to run all six cores in my AMD box evenly.. it does seem to like core 1 to the exclusion of anything else at present.
Back to the drawing board...
 
 
Forgot to add that I am already USB3 ready - we shall see what we shall see.
SATA3/6gb is da bomb though!!

M-Audio Fast Track Ultra here as well - no problems. In fact the only thing that seesm to cause problems (freezes on exit) is my firewire connected Liquid Mix 16 - the dedicated W7 drivers don't seem to have emerged? Have to use legacy firewire drivers.

I know this isn't in-line with the orginal posters request but I'm running a MOTU Traveler MkI under Win7 64, works great.

The only issue I've had is that I needed to run my Duende unit on a separate Firewire bus as it requires Win7 to run it's Firewire Drivers in Legacy Mode ... this might be worth trying with the FF interface the OP is having problems with.

Mackie 1200f with a Mackie 800r connected to it via lightpipe. No issues so far...

ivanSC
 

Mind you, I still have to persuade Sonar  8.5.3 to run all six cores in my AMD box evenly.. it does seem to like core 1 to the exclusion of anything else at present.
Back to the drawing board...

Set the "ThreadSchedulingModel" in the AUD.INI file (under the "[Wave]" section) to 2.
 
HTH

Philip



MOTU UltraLite MK3 Firewire USB Hybrid $549, Wow!

Philip - I'm with Jim on this - I'd definitely try REALLY REALLY hard to work out the problems with your FF400 before spending money on another soundcard.  returning to RME and/or rolling back the drivers sounds like a plan to me.
 
if not, I just wanted to chime in on this card above.  I just received mine as a replacement for my dying Delta 44 (had it for 5 years in 3 different machines but it's in need of repair now so I'm moving on).  so far I have not had a chance to record with it, but playback for mixing I have done and there's a MARKED difference in what I hear between the MOTU and the D44!!!  I hear things in a project I'm mixing that I didn't hear before (and need to fix!!).  so far I'm a satisfied customer of the Ultralite hybrid!
 
I did have some problems with the firewire card and I'm sending that back (PCIe to 1394A/B) but it's working flawlessly in USB for now (the VIA chipset onboard firewire wouldn't work without stuttering and dropout).

I am amazed to learn that FW is not hot swapable.

What were they thinking?

Hey Phillip,
If you already have pre's and price is no barrier you can do what I did.  I have a MOTU 896HD with B.L.A. mods that I liked OK but was sick of some of the driver games that MOTU was playing with for a while.  I ended up going with a Lynx PCI-e, Lynx LT-Adat and a Lynx Aurora16.  If you did that, you could function essentially how I do:

1. stand-alone pre's go directly into the Aurora
2. Old sound card (MOTU in my case, FF400 in yours) operates in stand alone mode and connects to the PCI-e card either via inputs on the Aurora or via optical connection to the LT-ADAT.  I THINK the ff400 will do that, but make sure before you do anyting.

If you went that way, you could still keep the pre's and I/O on your RME, still use your existing pre's and just update to a top end card and converter. 

One more thing about the Lynx stuff, it words perfectly with Win7 64 and the support is fantastic.  When I was having some problems I had the owner of the company (who also is a software developer) start a WebEx with me so he could see what was not working and help me fix it.  I didn't ask for that, I didn't raise hell to get it, I posted on their support forum and he emailed me, then set up a time for a phone call and a WebEx session.

Anyway, it's not cheap, but if the FF will work for you it's a way to upgrade without losing much.

Good luck
Dean

BTW, always a good idea to llsten to Jim Roseberry's advice also.  I bought my PC from him and then he helped me troubleshoot it and get it fixed when it had a problem.  He REALLY knows what he's doing and is a fantastic guy as well.

I'm still using the same 'ole Frontier Dakota card that Jim Roseberry sold me many years ago.  It's been through Win 98, Win Me, Win XP and now Win 7 x64.

Hi Dave,


So, which driver version are you using under Win7? Did you have to use the msconfig trick to disable the DakotaTray.exe app? 

What driver mode are you using? Under XP I use the 24 bit WDM and they work fine, but I have heard that under Win7 x64 that there might be issues with some of the Beta driver versions. 

Any words of wisdom would be appreciated. I just pulled the trigger on a new DAW build, the parts should arrive by this Saturday.