I wanted to pass my experience along in case it might save someone else some grief in the future.
Win XP SP1a (ACPI enabled)
ASUS A8V-Deluxe mobo
AMD 64 4200 X 2
2G Crucial XMS PC 3200 CAS2.5
Matrox G450 AGP
Matrox G450 PCI (in PCI slot #1-I've gotta' have 4 displays or I will die :lol: )
Magma 32 bit/13 slot (host card in PCI slot #1
2 x RME HDSP 9652 PCI
1 x RME Multiface PCI
4 x UAD-1's (v4.0 software)
Cubase SX 3x
First of all, my ASUS A8V-Deluxe is kinda quirky when
using an older Matrox G450 PCI graphics card along with a G450 AGP card. If you intend to try this....DO NOT load the VIA AGP driver that comes with the mobo. It's OK to load the rest of the VIA drivers. If you load this AGP driver under these circumstances (ie..using the Matrox cards) you might as well do a clean install and start over. Removing the VIA AGP driver using the uninstall feature doesn't clear up the problem and your life will be a living hell until you surrender and restore your original clean install that you Ghosted........you did remember to Ghost,,,,,,didn't you? ;o)
Secondly,. if you're using removable drive caddies and you remove the system drive, you will get a system drive error (as in-invalid system drive/coronary arrest ) when you reinsert it into the caddy unless you remove the other drives from their caddies first, insert the system drive solo, then reboot on the single system drive, get a good load of Windows, then shut down, reinsert all of the other drives and then reboot again with all drives loaded in the caddies. This was a repeatable scenario.
Also, with as many PCI cards as I'm using, (3 x RME's and 4 x UAD-1's in a 13 slot 32 bit Magma) the IRQ less than equal BSOD can rear it's ugly head. The trick is to turn off the Magma (or pull the PCI cards from the mobo slots if you're not using an expansion chassis), reboot until
you get the system happy again, then shut down, reinstall the Magma host card (or the PCI cards in the mobo) and reboot. The 4 x UAD cards are the issue in mine. It takes them a while to get all of their addresses sorted out it seems. Eventually everything stabilized.
Lastly and most incredibly distressing/annoying for me was getting the Houston controller to work with Cubase SX . I finally figured it out.....at least I figured it out on *my* system. In my particular scenario, Cubase SX has to be loaded before the system ever sees the Houston driver. It wouldn't do to uninstall/reinstall the driver if the Houston driver is loaded before SX is installed. My experience was that SX will *never* see that driver and the controller will not work unless SX is loaded before the controller driver. Took me a whole day and much wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments to figure this one out.
I'm humming along now with both CPU's clocked to 4425MHz palying back a 40 track project with the VST meter reading between 10-12% with the buffers set to 512k. CPU usage at 64k is running around 30%. I still don't have all non-essential services turned off and I haven't yet done the in-depth registry tweaks to streamline this system. I also don't know if I have SX set to use dual core processors because I can't locate the area in the application where this is enabled/disabled. If it's not enabled, then I'm expecting even better things once it's enabled. I've got a post up on the Cubase forum right now.
I don't poost here much but I lurk a bit and I've been using UAD-1 cards since Sept 2001. Ive just had very stable systems in the past so I haven't had a lot to say here but after jumping through the hoops I encountered over the weekend, I hope this info helps someone to aviod a few pitfalls.
Cheers,
_________________
DJ
Animix Productions
Durango, CO
Win XP SP1a (ACPI enabled)
ASUS A8V-Deluxe mobo
AMD 64 4200 X 2
2G Crucial XMS PC 3200 CAS2.5
Matrox G450 AGP
Matrox G450 PCI (in PCI slot #1-I've gotta' have 4 displays or I will die :lol: )
Magma 32 bit/13 slot (host card in PCI slot #1
2 x RME HDSP 9652 PCI
1 x RME Multiface PCI
4 x UAD-1's (v4.0 software)
Cubase SX 3x
First of all, my ASUS A8V-Deluxe is kinda quirky when
using an older Matrox G450 PCI graphics card along with a G450 AGP card. If you intend to try this....DO NOT load the VIA AGP driver that comes with the mobo. It's OK to load the rest of the VIA drivers. If you load this AGP driver under these circumstances (ie..using the Matrox cards) you might as well do a clean install and start over. Removing the VIA AGP driver using the uninstall feature doesn't clear up the problem and your life will be a living hell until you surrender and restore your original clean install that you Ghosted........you did remember to Ghost,,,,,,didn't you? ;o)
Secondly,. if you're using removable drive caddies and you remove the system drive, you will get a system drive error (as in-invalid system drive/coronary arrest ) when you reinsert it into the caddy unless you remove the other drives from their caddies first, insert the system drive solo, then reboot on the single system drive, get a good load of Windows, then shut down, reinsert all of the other drives and then reboot again with all drives loaded in the caddies. This was a repeatable scenario.
Also, with as many PCI cards as I'm using, (3 x RME's and 4 x UAD-1's in a 13 slot 32 bit Magma) the IRQ less than equal BSOD can rear it's ugly head. The trick is to turn off the Magma (or pull the PCI cards from the mobo slots if you're not using an expansion chassis), reboot until
you get the system happy again, then shut down, reinstall the Magma host card (or the PCI cards in the mobo) and reboot. The 4 x UAD cards are the issue in mine. It takes them a while to get all of their addresses sorted out it seems. Eventually everything stabilized.
Lastly and most incredibly distressing/annoying for me was getting the Houston controller to work with Cubase SX . I finally figured it out.....at least I figured it out on *my* system. In my particular scenario, Cubase SX has to be loaded before the system ever sees the Houston driver. It wouldn't do to uninstall/reinstall the driver if the Houston driver is loaded before SX is installed. My experience was that SX will *never* see that driver and the controller will not work unless SX is loaded before the controller driver. Took me a whole day and much wailing, gnashing of teeth, rending of garments to figure this one out.
I'm humming along now with both CPU's clocked to 4425MHz palying back a 40 track project with the VST meter reading between 10-12% with the buffers set to 512k. CPU usage at 64k is running around 30%. I still don't have all non-essential services turned off and I haven't yet done the in-depth registry tweaks to streamline this system. I also don't know if I have SX set to use dual core processors because I can't locate the area in the application where this is enabled/disabled. If it's not enabled, then I'm expecting even better things once it's enabled. I've got a post up on the Cubase forum right now.
I don't poost here much but I lurk a bit and I've been using UAD-1 cards since Sept 2001. Ive just had very stable systems in the past so I haven't had a lot to say here but after jumping through the hoops I encountered over the weekend, I hope this info helps someone to aviod a few pitfalls.
Cheers,
_________________
DJ
Animix Productions
Durango, CO