I’ve got this annoying problem.
I “bought” a Dell Dimension XPS Gen4 (through Employee Purchase Program).
I slammed my Audiophile 24/96 into it and everything was fine until I turned ASIO on.
Problem is that it’s fine except that it gets a hickup every two minutes or so for no apparent reason.
Has nothing with CPU load to do since it has happened with as low as <10% CPU usage.
I don’t think there is any other guides out there that I haven’t tried.
Funny thing is that the problem doesn’t get better or worse no matter what I try.
I’ve tried 3 different drivers, I’ve tried multiple programs. Renoise, Winamp with ASIO plugin, z3ta+ standalone etc. etc.
I’ve moved the card around to all available PCI slots, nothing changed.
I turned off every service not being used, I tweaked the registry, I changed computer type to Standard PC and MPS Uniprocessor and through all that nothing changed.
Which sounds really weird to me. (and I’m tech by day)
I’ve reinstalled the OS multiple times.
BTW, M-audio doesn’t have a clue.
They can’t even tell me if they have had problems with Intel 925XE chipsets before.
The machine came with an Audigy 2zs (PCI) which have been removed and there is no other audio card on the motherboard.
A friend has the same problem (we work at the same place ) with the same type of card.
Which indicate that the card simply isn’t compatible due to IRQ sharing.
So another question would be if it works with other cards that are sharing IRQ’s with other devices.
I mean which system today (PC at least) doesn’t share IRQ’s ?
Going to Standard PC isn’t supported by M$ etc. etc.
I’m thinking about trying a Motu FW interface but the FW interface require an IRQ at some stage as well.
IRQ sharing was usually impossible with an audio device.
It was impossible in the DOS era because of the direct hardware approach done from within the DOS environment and with ASIO you have more or less a similar situation.
If you can disable your ACPI or set it to manual in your BIOS which allows you to manually adjust resource in windows or there can also be a trigger in your bios for legacy cards (which also require manual assignments of IRQ and DMA resources) try to do something with that and see how far you get.
Trust me: sharing IRQ’s for soundcards is not realy the best idea.
I’m a bit dumbfounded the soundcard manufacturer could not give you such tips or ask questions to pop up the deeper situation.
Well, they did tell me to aim for a seperate IRQ below 16.
Which is impossible since the PCI slots use 16, 17, 18 and 19.
16 is shared with the gfx card so that is not a great idea
I managed to get IRQ 17 to be alone just for the card by turning off the USB controllers, but that didn’t help either.
I have turned the computer type to Standard PC but that was no go as well.
Anyway, I’ll see if another card is better in this regard.
It’s really a bad sitatuation with both ACPI and Std PC. With ACPI you get undesirable sharings sometimes, but the last time I switched to standard I ran out of IRQs. The best would be to use ACPI but be able to set priority to certain devices. Afaik this is not possible…
Found a solution to my problem.
Funny thing is that RME has found something about the problem but apparently not M-audio.
So maybe it’s an RME card next time.
Haha, I read that another person solved this problem as well (using Intel Accelerator Application) on another forum, so I was about to suggest this to you, but I see you found out the same thing.
It was certanly not something I would have thought about since I’m not using the RAID function of the SATA chipset. Which this “utility” mainly is for.
The Intel Acceleration Utility is to change settings for your on-board drive devices made by Intel.
If this is SATA, yes, then this utility is aimed to change your SATA settings.
I still have UATA devices on my board, so for my board the utility only changes the UATA settings.
Don’t use laptops for professional and live audio processing.
It’s good enough to do mixing and DJ-ing (with or without premixed tracks or stems but not for bulky realtime VST audio rendering)
) with the same type of card.
(20 interrupts, who needs those? in the past we only had 7)