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octon · 20th April 2011

Hi,

About a year or so ago I spent a whole bunch of my hard earned cash on what was supposed to be the mothership of all audio machines - in a ditch effort to finally have a DAW that would run pretty much anything without blinking an eyelid and hopefully totally glitch-free.....

$8000 australian dollars and much swearing and stressful months later and I have a pretty serious audio machine... but still having problems with glitchy audio AAAARRRRRHHHH !!!!

My machine is a Dual-quadcore Xeon machine (2 x E5430's @ 2.66Ghz) running on an intel workstation board -( s5000xvn)
4 gig of fully buffered ECC ram,
2 x 15k-rpm Seagate SAS hard-drives running on an adaptec Pci-x SAS controller,
Firewire 800 card with texas instruments chipset,
Nvidia Quadro FX 370 dual head video card,
Windows 7 ultimate 64bit
RME Fireface 800.

the machine runs fine with everything else except intermittant drop-outs and "glitchy" audio which is driving me insane... I just want to be able to focus on producing music and not have to worry about this crap !!!

anyway....
from the research I have done I have found out the following things...

apparently the video card I have is crap - this is evident in windows 7's performance rating which for my graphics card has a rating of only 3.4, according to the service tech at my local RME distributor - Audio programs can still be quite graphics processing intensive - especially on redraws for waveforms etc.... ( I never knew this )
I am happy to upgrade the graphics card, but thats not the only thing causing my audio problems....

it appears that my graphics card, my firewire card and my SAS controller are ALL sharing the same IRQ (16) ... there is also a whole bunch of other stuff sharing this IRQ as well which appears to somehow be related to the PCI bus itself....

Ok so what i can deduce from this is that my audio card ( which runs on firewire) is fighting for bandwidth on the PCI bus with my Hard-drive controller and also my graphics card.... !! I still don't understand how this has happened.... whats more astonishing is that it also appears that I am somehow seemingly unable to change my IRQ settings in either windows 7 (normally in the device manager) or in my BIOS....

I am seriously at a loss as to how I can sort out this fairly simple problem... there has to be a simple way for me to be able to assign these devices with their own interrupt.... ? can I do this by editing the windows registry ? or is there a Patch or Tool for windows 7 that will let me change the IRQ settings in windows 7 ? - note - I can't seem to change from automatic setting to manual - the checkbox in the resources tab is grayed out ....

PLEASE HELP ME (before I give up or blow a fuse !!! )

your help and advice is very much appreciated....

:-)

20th April 2011	#25
octon Gear interested Joined: Apr 2011 Posts: 1	Windows 7 & IRQ's...... !!! Hi, About a year or so ago I spent a whole bunch of my hard earned cash on what was supposed to be the mothership of all audio machines - in a ditch effort to finally have a DAW that would run pretty much anything without blinking an eyelid and hopefully totally glitch-free..... $8000 australian dollars and much swearing and stressful months later and I have a pretty serious audio machine... but still having problems with glitchy audio AAAARRRRRHHHH !!!! My machine is a Dual-quadcore Xeon machine (2 x E5430's @ 2.66Ghz) running on an intel workstation board -( s5000xvn) 4 gig of fully buffered ECC ram, 2 x 15k-rpm Seagate SAS hard-drives running on an adaptec Pci-x SAS controller, Firewire 800 card with texas instruments chipset, Nvidia Quadro FX 370 dual head video card, Windows 7 ultimate 64bit RME Fireface 800. the machine runs fine with everything else except intermittant drop-outs and "glitchy" audio which is driving me insane... I just want to be able to focus on producing music and not have to worry about this crap !!! anyway.... from the research I have done I have found out the following things... apparently the video card I have is crap - this is evident in windows 7's performance rating which for my graphics card has a rating of only 3.4, according to the service tech at my local RME distributor - Audio programs can still be quite graphics processing intensive - especially on redraws for waveforms etc.... ( I never knew this ) I am happy to upgrade the graphics card, but thats not the only thing causing my audio problems.... it appears that my graphics card, my firewire card and my SAS controller are ALL sharing the same IRQ (16) ... there is also a whole bunch of other stuff sharing this IRQ as well which appears to somehow be related to the PCI bus itself.... Ok so what i can deduce from this is that my audio card ( which runs on firewire) is fighting for bandwidth on the PCI bus with my Hard-drive controller and also my graphics card.... !! I still don't understand how this has happened.... whats more astonishing is that it also appears that I am somehow seemingly unable to change my IRQ settings in either windows 7 (normally in the device manager) or in my BIOS.... I am seriously at a loss as to how I can sort out this fairly simple problem... there has to be a simple way for me to be able to assign these devices with their own interrupt.... ? can I do this by editing the windows registry ? or is there a Patch or Tool for windows 7 that will let me change the IRQ settings in windows 7 ? - note - I can't seem to change from automatic setting to manual - the checkbox in the resources tab is grayed out .... PLEASE HELP ME (before I give up or blow a fuse !!! ) your help and advice is very much appreciated.... :-)