• Registered: 2011-05-11
  • Posts: 1

Topic: System build thoughts

Looking into the possibility of building a system with 2 HDSPEe Raydat cards and 2 HDSPe AES cards. Obviousely latency is going to be a concern with that many pcie cards, but I am currious if any one has put this type of system together and what issues they ran into. We are reviewing various chipsets, mobos, and processors, but have not found the right combintation for this type of  setup. Your feedback and suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you

  • From: Germany
  • Registered: 2007-04-10
  • Posts: 9,558

Re: System build thoughts

The presence of several PCIe cards does not cause "latency" per se. There is little feedback on such setups, though.


Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

RME Support's Website

3 Reply by vinark (edited by vinark 2011-05-11 07:54:10)

  • vinark
  • DAW Mastermind
  • Offline
  • Registered: 2009-06-05
  • Posts: 2,660

Re: System build thoughts

Have a look at the forum @ www.cubendo.com hardware section for example. Very experienced people there (me LOL).

Vincent, Amsterdam
https://soundcloud.com/thesecretworld
BFpro fs, 2X HDSP9652 ADI-8AE, 2X HDSP9632
  • From: Frankfurt, Germany
  • Registered: 2011-03-23
  • Posts: 56

Re: System build thoughts

Hi Beards,

I was using 3 HDSPe cards successfully in a Dell Precision 3500 with Xeon cpu (4 cores) and X58 chipset. When planning the system, I made sure I get the fastest memory and highest QPI system. I have good experienced with Dell Precision systems, they are much more expensive than your normal line of pcs but they are rock solid and my experience with them as DAW are simply very good.

Initially I had an issue with this setup where I would get crackles and noises as soon as the third card would be busy, no matter how many channels were in use in total, even if cpu usage was way down. After upgrading to the new beta driver, this phenomenon went away completely. The beta readme states "Optimized callbacks for multiple cards usage on multi-processor machines", I guess this is what solved the issue.

I am using over 20 input and over 20 output channels simultaneously for live recording & live mixing, this includes channel strip inserts on all audio channels, the system runs at lowest buffer settings because latency is an issue with live performance and the system is totally reliable and stable.

I am just converting to a Dell Precision T5500 with Dual Xeon cpu (3,34 GHz, 12 cores, 1333 MHz RAM, 6,4 GT/s QPI) to have more power available, but I can't report about this setup yet.

Regards, Mikael

2 DAWs, each C 7/64, W7/64, Dell Prec. T5500 (2 x X5690), 2 x rme HDSPe / Multiface II / Octamic II