Got a Magma! Great!.... I think?

[lordward]

Hi Guys,

We'll I got a 7 Slot Protools Magma chassis for basically nothing and I hooked it up and all works well. I found I could run the cards to 95% (3 cards) as well as max out my TC Powercore FW to about 96% and use all 32 Slots of my Duende. Check with tracks and all went well, playback was perfect and no drop outs...... However..... when I open an older project where the 3 cards were running about 85% the meter is now showing (with the magma) around %112!!?!?! Is this normal to loose DSP power running off a magma?

Cheers,
DW

 

[Arys Chien]

I wrote an article about the different performances of my two PCI expansion chassis, one Avid and one SBS.

In my setup, the same plug-in uses more DSP power on Avid than on SBS. Yet Akis said that he had the same Avid chassis and there was no such a problem with it.

A not-pro-at-all and only-work-sometimes solution: try turning off and on each plug-in. SOMETIMES doing so will free up some DSP power. I really don't understand why....

 

[lordward]

Thanks for this info... very interesting indeed. I will give the plugin \"on and off\" method a try.
I have also found another project that does not show signs of using more DSP and it was a fully loaded project from the past. I wonder if it might have something to do with IRQ sharing?

We'll the other good news is that the problem (that i was having since I've had 3 cards) of the Plate 140 and oftern the Precision EQ giving me an error upon loading (even with a blank project) appears to be gone as well. Hmmm.... Perhaps this \"load balancing\" thing is my issue?

Can't wait until UA finally make an update regarding this.

DW

 

[Mark Edmonds]

In my experience, whenever the UAD meter goes off the scale on a project that previously ran OK, it is a load balancing problem. When it happens, check the loading on each card, not just the global total. As Arys says, switching the plugins off in the host then bringing them back on in decreasing load order can even things out.

Never seen a DSP loss on my Magma with 2 cards, if anything I can load higher than before.

Mark

 

[Guest]

if anything I can load higher than before.

Mark

Same here. If another card is added to the 7 slot Magma, there may be a trainwreck if it's an AGP based mobo. This chassis has two busses. Depending on the PCI slot configuration of the mobo, three of the Magma slots will likely be on one IRQ and the 4 others will be on another IRQ. In my experience with a 7 slot unit, the four card bus seemed to always share IRQ with the AGP. Of course, if this is not an AGP mobo, this may not be an issue. My experience was 7 slot Magma=3 x usable PCI slots for UAD-1 on AGP mobo. 13 slot Magma = 4 x usable PCI slots for UAD-1 on AGP mobo.

 

[lordward]

Still a couple of older projects showing more use of DSP. New projects seem to be equal to that I rember before.

Not a big issue, I just freeze the tracks and continue.

Let's hope the update covers the Load Balancing issue.

Cheers,
DW