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Subject:Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Posted by: suprox
Date:2/7/2003 2:19:38 AM
Current System: P4 2.4ghz Asus P4PE mobo. Gina Echo sound card. Problem: Playback studders, chokes up and pauses momentarily in places. Sometimes the same place over and over again. Files open slowly, sometimes stalling and hanging for 4-5 seconds when "building peaks". Low performance over all. Tried so far: Swapped sound cards, Echo Gina and Aardvark Q10 direct. Reinstalled Acid. Reinstalled All drivers. Checked for any conflicts. Re assigned IRq's . Disabled plug n play os, Enabled plug n play o.s. Took Out all FX on all traks. Installed new sound card drivers. Applied Windows XP Service Pack 1. Applied Acid Service pack B. Tripple quadruple checked for conflicts and disabled all unecessary Devices. REINSTALLED WINDOWS.... Weeks of poor performance. I want my Athlon back. Anyone? What else can I try? |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: dkistner
Date:2/7/2003 6:27:33 AM
Check here and see if this is not part of the problem. This discussion may be of interest to you, too. Although I have to say that I have a P4 and my plugins, run in Chainer, are not giving me this problem at all. That may be because of the kinds of things I am doing don't push my CPU to denormalize. HTH Diane |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: liquid
Date:2/7/2003 9:04:37 AM
Dude, I hate to tell you this, but I just had the exact same problem as you're havning. Look into the well documented de-normal mode problem many of us are havning. You can use a plug-in to take care of the problem, but it's really just a patch to a major gaping wound. I went back to the store where I bought my computer and raised some hell and got them to take it back and exchange it for an AMD. I have none of the same stuttering problems with the amd. NOw I know some of the people think that I'm dumb to blame my problems on Intel, but the reality is as soon as I got rid of my P4, all my problems went away...go figure? |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: vanblah
Date:2/7/2003 9:33:37 AM
liquid - Please post what motherboard and chipset you have ... it doesn't help to just say that P4 is better/worse than AMD. Everyone else: anyone using this board: Asus P4PE or this chipset: Intel 845PE ? Some of the reviews of this board/chipset have mentioned graphics problems and memory problems. I personally wouldn't trust hyperthreading in the home PC world just yet either. Go to a search engine and look for reviews of this chipset. Doug |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: dkistner
Date:2/7/2003 12:31:36 PM
I have the 850 chipset and am having no problems. And from what I read about the denormal problem, it's something that software developers can control for. If you're having a problem with a particular plugin, and you've determined it's due to a denormalization problem, (nicely) write the developer and ask if it can be corrected in the next release. And needless to say, everyone needs to stay on top of downloadable updates to their chipsets. That can solve a lot of problems without driving one to throw the computer out a six-story window. Diane |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: HoFS
Date:2/7/2003 1:26:00 PM
I have a P4 and I have never had any problems with it... knock on wood. It could be your motherboard... or maybe you might want to invest in some more RAM. Just a suggestion. It's a hell of a lot cheaper than a new motherboard. |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: suprox
Date:2/7/2003 4:43:01 PM
Thanks everyone for replying. Yeah, ive tried updating the bios and all the chipset drivers. still no go. perhaps all the p4 people havent experienced the Athlon to accurately judge the performance of your p4's , you know? perhaps its not as smooth as you might want it. Or im just expecting way too much. Plus I just heard that when you go with a p4 on a ddr platform alot of the p4 bandwidth is left unused due to the limitations of ddr. So even though you have a spiffy 533MHs FSB on your proc your ram is still running at 266 or 333 or what not. My friend has an Athlon 1.7 . He can retriger playback with the number keys in diffrent parts of the trak as fast as you can push the keys, litteraly all 8 fingers on the number keys typing as fast as possible. No hang ups , stalls , nothing, just BRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRR. Its unbelievable. with this P4 when I try the same thing I get a few retriggers now and then, it stalls, playback stops and over all retriggering is not as fast. Not to mention the hundreds of other problems ive been having. Also , You gotta ask yourself this; why does the P4 require 500mhz more than the Athlon to get the same amount of work done? Had I achnowledged this before I would have just stuck with the trusty steed. |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: suprox
Date:2/8/2003 5:02:01 AM
Still no go? Anyone else got any Ideas.? Problem: Playback studders, chokes up and pauses momentarily in places. Sometimes the same place over and over again. Files open slowly, sometimes stalling and hanging for 4-5 seconds when "building peaks". During all this I noticed that my cpu meter goes to 0%. Tried so far: Swapped sound cards, Echo Gina and Aardvark Q10 direct. Reinstalled Acid. Reinstalled All drivers. Checked for any conflicts. Re assigned IRq's . Disabled plug n play os, Enabled plug n play o.s. Took Out all FX on all traks. Installed new sound card drivers. Applied Windows XP Service Pack 1. Applied Acid Service pack B. Tripple quadruple checked for conflicts and disabled all unecessary Devices. REINSTALLED WINDOWS.Reinstalled chipset drivers reinstalled motherboard drivers. Flashed bios... Weeks of poor performance. I want my Athlon back. Current System: P4 2.4ghz Asus P4PE mobo. Gina Echo sound card. What else can I try? |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: dkistner
Date:2/8/2003 8:05:17 AM
I went from an Athlon to a P4 fairly recently. I didn't do the test you suggest on the Athlon. All I know is I'm not having the problems with my P4 that some are reporting. I think there are a lot of factors involved, and it's going to vary from system to system. I've got a Mia, btw. Are you installed as Standard PC or ACPI? How did you reassign the IRQs? |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: suprox
Date:2/8/2003 8:27:35 AM
I reassigned the irq in the bios just to test its effects. Nothing changed. DeviceManager --> Computer --> ACPI Uniprocessor PC. Is that what you mean? When I go into bios settings there is also interupt mode. APIC and PIC . With the PIC setting I cant even boot. If it were IRQ problem should device manager tell me about it? Device Manager sais there is not conflict anywhere tho. Just now I Also tried disabling my Gina and Enabling the AC97 Onboard sound in the bios. Acid now sees the Onboard sound card and plays through it. This step had no impact on performance. It still lags up. Its super weird. It stops playback in the same spot over and over and the cpu goes to 0% during the studders. Also durin "building peaks" CPU drops to 0% and ACID just stalls for 4-5 seconds. |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: suprox
Date:2/9/2003 9:33:16 AM
Anyone? Bueller? It stops playback in the same spot over and over and the cpu goes to 0% during the studders. Also durin "building peaks" CPU drops to 0% and ACID just stalls for 4-5 seconds. |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: dkistner
Date:2/9/2003 9:43:54 AM
I forget. Are you running XP? I'm not a techno-geek, but what I've read is that if you're in ACPI mode, you'd better not try to change the IRQs yourself; XP really does not like that and will get very passive-aggressive on you. In Standard PC mode you can do it, but I did not install in Standard PC after reading the recommendations at musicxp.net. Speaking of...I'd gone through and done all the tuning tweaks they recommend at musicxp.net. My system was running like a top! I just couldn't believe it! I was right on the verge of making a "primo ghost" but thought I'd better go on and get the latest critical updates from Microsoft first. Then I ghosted. Well, talk about a completely trashed system! So I had to go back to an earlier untuned ghost and leave it at that. It wasn't really broke, so why did I try to fix it? :) |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: Laurence
Date:2/9/2003 11:20:12 PM
The "denormal" problem is pretty easy to identify. Just solo your tracks one by one to see which tracks have plugins which take a lot more CPU to do nothing that when they are actually playing back audio. I have a P4 2.4 and I ran into this with 2 vst audio plugins. Actually Athlons have the same problem, but it is a lot less severe. What's going on is that when the floating point math processor starts to output a lot of zeros, it assumes that you are working on a very small number and tries to calculate it's answer a lot more accurately. Waaaay more accurately - dozens of zeros past zero accurately!!! All that a programmer needs to do to avoid this is to specify the correct degree of accuracy that a given program needs, but since it's a new step unique to P4s, not all programmers have figured this out yet. The good news is that if you have the latest updates of all your plugins, you'll find that most are now free from this problem. If you get your software on Kazaa or just haven't bothered to download the latest versions, you are probably experiencing atrocious performance on your P4 however. A plugin with denormalization problems overdrive your cpu like crazy. One of my undenormalized plugins generates 50% CPU usage while processing silence! Any sequence it is used in will sputter and glitch like crazy. On the other hand, an SSE optimized plugin like the Jeskola XS-1 soundfont player will make a P4 really shine. The XS-1 can do a two fisted sustained pedaled stereo piano with hardly a blip on your cpu meter. To me that more than makes up for having to avoid the occasional plugin. Laurence Kingston |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: suprox
Date:2/10/2003 7:01:43 PM
Well , The weird thing is that during these symptoms I notice that the cpu goes to 0% and not over drive. Even during the mix the max it ever hits is like 10-20% What could this be? |
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Subject:RE: Last ditch effort before sending P4 back to hell. Help..
Reply by: suprox
Date:2/10/2003 8:37:50 PM
Weird Discovery: I noticed that when I copied the acid file that is studdering along with all the wav;s that it points to Onto a diffrent harddrive the symptoms almost vanish. When I open the same file from a diffrent harddrive the symptoms vansish. ?? |