Yes, but never  yellow warning symbol. Card is not detected. I can install drivers, windows don't see the card.

Yes, I've insert a normal express card (firewire), and it recognized.

Maybe is energy safe ? Power menagement ? I can try.

Im in allarm because I've buy a DELL Vostro 3750 (will arriving 24th September).:( Im worring, troubling, I hope that with Dell it working.

Start, start. :-)

Dont work, Dell ?:-O

MC has very bad experience with his dell notebook(s). You can search the forum for the postings.

best regards
Knut

return it?

DELL dont return and refound professional user, but only domestic user. Tomorrow im waiting a Dell technical assistent at my house for "repair" laptop.

Maybe he change notherboard or express card slot.

HeadScratch

Bad story. Very bad story.

What about other Expresscards?

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Yesterday you said you had a FW Expresscard....

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

HI Giacomo,
From one of your earlier emails you mentioned trying the MADIface on your HP and Samsung. It is unclear from your statement if the MADIface worked fine on those systems. If it did then the issue is purely with your Dell.
You need to confirm that your Dell's express slot works perfectly with other express card devices to rule out there being something wrong with the MADIface express card.
Perhaps the Dell technician will have some device to check this with. There could very well be a compatibility issue with MADIface and possibly other Pro Audio devices. You are the only person I know using that particular Model.

If it turns out that the issue is just with the DELL then you will be able return even if they say you can't. Kick and scream loud enough and they will. In the US you can simply contact your credit card company and have them do it as long as it is within 30 to 45 days of the purchase. Dell should at least be able to exchange the model of another that may work.

Thanks Chris

Mixer working, I've see micstasy channel mic, but Samplitude (and Sonar) not comunicate with it. I've try ASIO and MME, but software don't received micstasy --> madiface signal.

And my DELL ?

I've try DELL 3750 under WIN XP 32 Bit. Same problem. Freeze after 3 second.

Never Intel chipset. Maybe Dell change my laptop, and maybe the 3555 with AMD working.

DELL 3555

Stay tuned!

I think it was me reporting on HP and Samsung. HP elitebooks worked fine (intel vpro software/drivers had to be removed), but fan noise was really a problem to me. Samsung 600b5b didn't work (computer didn't react anymore until the madiface was removed), though fan noise was good here... I haven't seen a BIOS update on the web for the samsung so far, so I guess they still have these problems.
I am still in search for a notebook compatible with the madiface (and it should have a high resolution, non glare screen). It would be really helpfull if RME could share their experiences here. Maybe I will try lenovo, but some of them seem to have fan issues, too. There is also a new Fujitsu, however, without dedicated graphics card. Is this still considered to be a problem with Intel HD 3000 graphics?

Ulrich

Thanks for reporting, George.

What about the fan noise? Of course this is highly subjective, but maybe you can comment on this a little bit? Thanks a lot!

Regards,
Ulrich

Hi again guys,

Ulrich, I haven't found the fan noise to be an issue at all. I did read about some fan noise complaints on the Lenovo forums, however this was apparently rectified with later bios revisions on the T520. As my laptop arrived with the latest bios, I am not sure what the noise was like before this. All I can say is that the Lenovo is much quieter than my old Asus laptop and the fan noise has no impact on my recordings (especially given that with a Madi setup, the laptop is generally a fair distance from the mics). Up close, I can barely hear the fan running. It may ramp up with a larger CPU load, however these newer models with faster processors may not require increased fan speeds until a much higher threshold is reached, as they are not taxed to the same extent as older models. Not sure about this though.

Thanks for your report Georg. The T420 is basically the newer revision of your laptop and as I mentioned seems like a good modern candidate for a Madiface setup. As I feared, the discrete graphics card drivers do still sometimes cause DPC spiking and possible audio glitches. The angled 90 degree firewire cable sounds like a great idea, as does the simple velcro fastening. It is a shame that the ExpressCard standard is so mechanically hopeless, however that is an issue with the standard itself, and RME simply have to work within the standard. Time to find a right angled firewire cable!!

Kind regards,
George

Now I tried a Fujitsu E782, i7 (ivy), Win7 64 pro.

Madiface is not recognized at all. RME's LED is on, but that's all. Nothing is showing up in the device manager. Instead, I can see that the system load immediately increases significantly after the MADIface has been put into the slot (EDIT: resource manager showing that system interrupts take away more than 10% CPU power), and this doesn't stop after removal of the MADIface.

Fujitsu support recommended to get latest card firmware: I have latest firmware (11).

I also tried to change BIOS options, but there are only very few related to this, and no effect. EDIT: I also tried deactivating all kinds of power management.

My old Dell XP laptop works fine with the MADIface. I quickly tried a further, very cheap HP (AMD, Win7 64 pro) which was just lying around here: Same behaviour as the Fujitsu. Last year I also had problems with Samsung. HP (intel) worked but was too noisy, Lenovo probably works as well, as others stated here.

For me it just looks like that there are HUGE problems with quite a lot of today's laptops in conjunction with the MADIface. (EDIT: I tried all the same also with Expresscard/Digiface: same results). What does RME know about this? Can you please share your experiences here?

Ulrich

PS: In the meantime I persuaded the device manager to recognize the MADIface. Basically it works now, but there is still this strange behaviour that while the MADIface is inserted system interrupts are taking away more than 10% of CPU power of this really powerful quadcore. This is not a normal behaviour.

Right click in the device manager, search for new devices. Only then the madiface became visible.

Have you tried running in "High Performance" mode and set the min/max CPU to 100%?  This might get the DPC's down further by disabling Speedstep,etc.

Also, for an Audio PC - especially one that's expected to handle MADI I/O - I'd ALWAYS do a fresh OS Installation - Bar none.

Glad to hear you got it working!

"High Performance" and CPU 100/100 doesn't disable CPU clock changes anyway, because it still utilizes processor C-states. You can turn that off completely by turning ON "Processor Idle Disable" or uninstalling the processor drivers. But that would leave your CPU running a full speed permanently with no power-saving whatsoever, which results in maximum temperature and fans running at full speed all the time.

The better option is to use a combination of customized power profile and third party software Throttlestop (to disable C1E state which does not seem controllable from power profiles alone and some BIOS don't offer to switch it off either).

Hi Ulrich,

Glad to hear that your T530 is operating so well. I just completed a recording yesterday using my T520 in combination with a Madiface/Micstacy setup, and all went fine as usual. As long as you turn off/disable your WiFi adapter whilst recording and have disabled the PCI ExpressCard power settings in the BIOS you shouldn't have a problem. A lot of people spend a lot of time trying to lower their DPC latency values to the lowest possible numbers, however mildly fluctuating low numbers that reside comfortably within the bottom (green portion) of the DPC range (and that never spike into the yellow) are generally absolutely fine for recording purposes.

If you really want to test your system out, do some test recordings at your preferred latency settings and channel counts, and use that as your reference point for when things start to fall apart. The DawBench website also has useful benchmark sessions so that you can really test out how your system operates under a heavy load.

As Randyman suggested, I would probably do a fresh OS install. I used a spare OEM W7 Pro disk, and plugged in the Lenovo W7 authorisation code (that usually resides within the battery compartment) and went from there. The Lenovo website has all the drivers you need, categorized within the T530 support pages. I would simply install the essential drivers and leave out any of the Lenovo bloatware that you don't need. If your laptop came pre-installed with Microsoft Office, etc... you can download the installer directly from Microsoft if you have got your Product Key Card. A fresh install using a legit installer DVD also means that you do not have to use the Lenovo Backup and Recovery utility, as this sets up a separate recovery partition by default on your hard-drive, which is really a waste of valuable HD space.

For any others reading along, I can also highly recommend the Lenovo T520/530 laptops for DAW use. They may not look as sexy as a Mac, but they perform admirably, at a decent price-point, with low fan noise and no DPC or ExpressCard power issues.

Kind regards,
George

Hi Matthias,
thanks for still contributing new drivers to this technology - it proved to be able to run very smoothly, I hope I can work with he madiface still for a long time.
At the moment I am too short of time, I hope others will test the new firmware. It would have been interesting to test the samsung notebook with the new firmware, but now I am on lenovo...
It is always possible to install an old firmware over a new one, right?
Christmas greetings,
Ulrich

Hello Giacomo,

Nice to see you here too, nice setup you purchased ;-)

Madi face does not work???

What is your current setup?