AGP will definately be better, but it's tough to find a simple AGP video card, especially for an older (>1 year!) motherboard. Most video cards seem to be marketed towards gamers, and have a fan which we don't want in our studio. One place to search in the US:

http://arstechnica.shopping.com/xPP-graphics_cards

Select AGP 4x or 8x. I also really like the system building guides at arstechnica.com and usually build their "Hot Rod" system when putting together a new computer.

As far as getting to the BIOS, you can usually access it by repeatedly pressing the DEL key during startup.

You should also look at Control Panels > System > Hardware > Device Manager and make sure that there are no yellow question marks. You may need to install a video card driver.

Thanks Synthetic - I've had this P4 for at least two years, so I know realise it can't possibly have an AGP card.

So my glitches are happening because I'm streaming lots of samples through the same PCI bus as the grahics. Short of upgrading the entire mobo (argh) - is there some way I can use another bus for the graphics card?

BTW, I checked all the drivers are installed - no yellow question marks.

Where do I look for the details regarding mobo, chipset etc. so I can at least tell you guys what I've got?

Thanks for your help so far - much appreciated.

Mike

AGP has been around for a while. Does the slot look different than the PCI slots, and have a little plastic switch in the back? It's usually set further back on the mobo than the PCI slots. That's an AGP slot.

You might be able to find the motherboard model printed on the motherboard. For some reason, they don't always do this. [8-)] Once you find that, you can download the manual for your motherboard. You want to find the list of interrupts. This will be a chart that shows you which components share an interrupt. If your graphics card is on the same interrupt as the PCI slot that your sound card is plugged into, try moving the sound card to a different slot. On my new system, I put my sound card (RME) in the PCI slot that shares an inturrupt with the on-board audio, which I will turn off in the BIOS. Some sharing is unavoidable, but you wouldn't want your hard drives sharing with graphic card or anything.

if it is 2 years or actually 3 it should have an AGP slot (usually brown, whereas the PCI slots are white) - on your motherboard you should find prited in white letters the manufacturer, the type and the revision of your board (eg. ASUS P4B rev.1.3). of course it would be easier to look at/in the manual if you have recieved any.

if nothing works get everest's last free edition - this tool knows more than you like to see [;)]
christian

I would look to your HD and/or controller. RAM only keeps you from loading more articulation patches. Hard drive is the bottleneck of performance in any modern computer for disk streaming samples.

Are they installed to your boot drive? Defrag? 7200 RPM? SATA? Access time? I'd look in that direction. I think the video card issue is a bit far fetched, although if you've actually got a PCI card, there's a problem. UNLESS, as I imagine you have a PCI Express video card which is about the only kind of motherboard video format that's been supported for some years. Try finding new AGP cards. It went away a few years back. Anyway...if it's PCI Express, that's normal and unavoidable.

I'm putting money on the hard drive. Whether it's big strings or big pianos, I can hear my dedicated drives ripping and roaring. And the samples were laid onto the drive in contiguous space. I can't imagine if you tried to install the VSL stuff to a fragmented boot drive.

Thanks for your suggestions Popman - I'm prepared to look at any aspects.

1.No, I have seperate boot drive. Drive C is Windows & progams, Drive D is VSL Special Edition. 7200 rpm Seagate IDEs.
2.I defrag regularly - drives are healthy.
3.Could you elaborate on the IDE Controllers you'd like me to check? What do I look for?

Synthetic:
1.Yes, one of the slots is brownish colour with little plastic switch, others are white - so it looks like I have an AGP slot after all .
2.For the life of me I cannot see any markings on the mobo re model number, etc (god, I feel foolish)

I will try an AGP card. If that fails, I will look at the HD.

CM:
1.I checked all the BIOS settings. Nothing unusual, but HyperThreading was disabled, so I enabled it.
2.Couldn't find anything that suggested "mirror VGA memory"

Thanks guys!
Mike.

Serial ATA drives? Honestly, if you've got it on it's own 7200 rpm, you should be relatively fine...if they're NOT SATA, though, you may want to check the IDE controlllers in device manager--make sure the DMA is enabled.

Yeah...if you're using a real (old) PCI graphics card on a system meant for AGP...that is a likely cause of issues. I don't know where you even found one of those. I was recently looking fora PCI Radeon for an old Mac, and I had to turn over quite a few online stones to find it.

The video memory thing is also called "VGA shadowing"...I really don't see that causing any more problem than you have 32-256mb less RAM to work with, though.

Popmann - the reason this thread is focussed on the graphics card (rather than HD issues) is that there is a definite link between an open VI GUI and pops & glitches - so it must be a graphics issue (of some sort).

I agree with you that it's unlikely to a VGA shadowing issue - because RAM is not the problem (only 550 MB after optimizing).

It's also not a soundcard issue either, because it still happens with a buffer size of 1024!

Frankly, I'm really pinning my hopes on simply replacing the graphics card - perhaps naively.

Would a 128MB 8x AGP suffice?

Many thanks,
Mike.

AGP--whatever max speed your mobo supports. It will autodetect. Usually the cards are backwards compatible...so, if you get one faster than you mobo, it will just kick it own in speed, which is fine.

the speed of AGP and video RAM and what not is not really that useful. You just want it off the PCI bus so it doesn't get in the way. I don't think there have been significant 2d performance gains in video cards in years. Go cheap, IMO. stick with ATI or nVidia chips, though.

not knowing which motherboard it is i thought i'll mention AGP versions, since AGP 2.0 (4x or higher) voltage is 1,5 V, below it is 3,3 V - both versions are not compatible and not all have the correct notches to prevent mismatch.

AGP 4x - 8x are compatible (in both directions) but i've not found a reliabl compatibility matrix for 16x - 8x - one should assume it's similar there.
christian

OK - finally, here are my specs - sorry for the delay.

Intel Pentium 4 CPU 3.00 GHz (Socket 478 mPGA)
Bus speed 199.5 MHz
Rated FSB: 798.0 MHz
Cores: 1
Threads: 2
L1 data cache: 8 KBytes
Trace cache: 12 kuops
L2 cache: 512 kbytes
Motherboard model: Springdale PE
Chipset: Intel i865P/PE/G/i848P rev.A2
Southbridge: Intel 82801EB (ICH5)
Sensor: Winbond W83627THF
Graphic interface: AGP version 3.0
Transfer rate: 8x
Max supported: 8x
Side band: enabled
NVidia GeForce4 MX 4000 (Location: PCI bus 1, device 0, function 0)
Memory: dual DDR 2gig (Performance mode: disabled
Intel 82801 Ultra ATA Storage Controllers (location: PCI bus 0, device 31, function 1)
Boot drive: 7200rpm Seagate IDE (Location: 0 (0))
VSL drive: 7200 Seagate IDE (Location: 1 (1))
LAN card: Realtek Gigabit Ethernet NIC (PCI bus 2, device 0, function 0)
Soundcard: MAudio Delta 2496 (PCI bus 2, device 1, function 2)
Midi-Over-Lan3

I have changed the PCI latency settings to the following:
Bus1 (GeForce4 MX4000) from 248 to 32
Bus2 (Gigabit Ethernet adaptor) to 32
Bus3 (ICE1712Envy24 PCI Multi-channel I/O Controller) from 32 to 248 (I assume this Bus is the one carrying the audio streaming, hence the highest setting).

With 6 instances of VI playing moderate tempo perf-leg instruments, I get glitches at buffer setting 512. Fewer glitches at 1024, but still there.
If I add one more instrument, it goes really crazy.
RAM loaded is only 600 gigs (after optimizing).

Am I asking too much from this system?
If so, what do I need to upgrade?

Thanks,
Mike.

i think i've found your motherboard, it is possibly a GA-8ISXT in a fujitsu computer.
http://vsl.co.at/upload/users/449/SpringdalePE.png">
if we talk about this board (or a similar one) we have to play the *find the right PCI-slot* game, because the respective manual does not provide an IRQ-table (meaning: which slot is using which IRQ and which of them are shared, possibly actually with onboard devices)

common IRQ routings on such boards are: AGP is shared with PCI1 and PCI2 with PCI5 - this means no bandwidth sensible devices should sit in the respective slots if the correlating one also holds a sensible device.
tell us in which slot which card is sitting for further suggestions.

in any case an AGP card will improve the overall performance on your system (this board supports 4x 1,3 V as well as 8x 0,8 V ... try to get a simple ATI card, they have the most reliable drivers.

in a second step you need to place your delta into an unshared PCI slot (we have to find out which would be the best) - make sure in your BIOS IRQ assignement is set to *auto*, everything else makes things worse usually. possibly the problem disappears already with replacing the PCI VGA with an AGP version.
christian

ps: please keep also the PCI latency settings at their default value - this kind of tweaking is a science by its own ....

Thanks very much Christian [:)]

I will look for an ATI AGP card today.

I will post the PCI slot allocations later today

I will not change the PCI latency settings (they reset to default at boot up anyway).

Appreciated,
Mike.

I can find an ASUS N6200 128MB (8x).

is this OK?

Mike.

Here is how my PCI slots are allocated:

AGP slot (brown) - graphics card (soon to be ASUS N6200 if you approve)

PCI Slot 1 - Gigabit network card
PCI slot 2 - Delta audio card
PCI slot 3 - empty
PCI slot 4 - empty
PCI slot 5 - empty (this slot is furthest away from the AGP slot)

BIOS IRQ assignments set to "AUTO".

Thanks,
Mike.

[*-)] Just got back from the PC retailer. He says I must already have an AGP card - because a PCI card will not fit into an AGP slot.

To be fair, I did not have the PC with me for him to look at when he said this.

My current GeForce card is plugged into the brown AGP slot.

Can you please clarify whether the GeForce4 MX 4000 is an AGP card?

Thanks.
Mike.

That's just a graphics chip...not the model of a card. But, I would assume they're correct. Literally--it's HARD to find a PCI video card. If you bought it new in the last few years, it's AGP.

So, that's not the issue. However...your PCI config may be.

On my mobo, the first PCI slot shares resources with the AGP. In general, I wouldn't put anything in there unless you absolutely had to. See if you pull the network card all together if it doesn't resolve the issue.

Thanks Popmann

1.Can't pull the network card because this P4 serves as a slave, and all midi data is via Midi-Over-Lan.
With that in mind, which slot would you recommend for the NIC?

2.Is there some way to see which slots share resources?

Sorry for the misleading info re the graphics card - I'm on the learning-curve from Hell.

Mike.

i should have seen this, of course an MX4000 is AGP ... it actually says PCI bus 1, whereas the other devices are on bus 0 and 2 ... although the N6200 should be slightly better, there is no reason to change it ...

also the motherboard must be different from the one i've found, because i don't see an onboard ethernet now (model is often printed beneath the RAM slots or between the PCI slots, sometimes near the edges of the board) - as long as we don't know the model we have to somehow grope in the dark ... (hopefully it is not an MSI board, i found them to be very poorly designed)

in any case you should move your gigabit card to another slot - my feeling says the network card should sit in slot 2 or 3 and your soundcard in slot 4 or 5

christian

CAUTION: always remove main power cable before changing cards in slots - a screw might accidently fall on the board and destroy parts leading standby voltage.

OK here are some test results.

I installed Cubase on this P4 so that I could test without using the network card, and used the offending midi sequence from the Host PC (ie. using the P4 as a host, rather than a slave).

a) With a buffer setting of 512, the Delta card played flawlessly on PCI slots 2, 4 and 5. Slots 1 and 3 broke up.

b) With the Gigabit card connected to PCI slot 3 (but no network activity), playback was still flawless.

c) When I play the sequence from the Host PC to the slave P4 viaMidiOverLan, bad audio breakup occurs.

So the problem seems to be caused by the Network (Realtek RTL8169/8110 Family Gigabit Ethernet).

I'm only using 6 midi channels with modwheel data, slow note tempo, nothing frantic - should be a piece of cake for the network to handle.

Any suggestions?

Thanks,
Mike.