• Registered: 2011-07-04
  • Posts: 9

Topic: FF 400 / totalmix w/ win10x64 becoming less reliable.

For many years I have had zero problems with my trusty FF400. I've been constantly impressed by its performance, and always recommend RME to my friends. While I have upgraded my pc over time, as well as the Firewire card and cable, none of those have really affected the performance in my audio apps and in Reaper.

But In the last iteration or so of Win 10 feature updates (1809, 1903), now I get periodic random blue screen of death in Reaper (which I realize could be from many different things), as well as non bsod crashes on reboot.

The BSOD crashdumps point to the firewire card, which as far as I can tell from my troubleshooting, depends on a pretty ancient legacy driver and there's no way out of that. Swapping out cards makes no difference.

When the non-bsod errors occur on machine reboots, they point directly to a Totalmix problem (can't remember if it mentions a .dll). It's not every time but it is pretty frequent.

I've got the newest firmware & sw updates for my FF400 that I am aware of. While I think there's probably nothing physically wrong with my FF400, I'm considering selling it and getting an FF UC instead.

(Yes, I realize I could have a totally separate DAW pc retaining a non-networked win 7 box or something, but that is not in the cards for me at this time).

thoughts?

Thx RMErs. : )

2 Reply by ramses (edited by ramses 2019-09-01 17:22:41)

  • ramses
  • DAW Mastermind
  • Offline
  • From: UTC+1
  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 12,885

Re: FF 400 / totalmix w/ win10x64 becoming less reliable.

Did you check your DRAM proactively?
Do you overclock your PC ?
Possibly faulty FW card?

You don't need a 2nd PC for Win7.
Simply take a 2nd SSD for dual boot.

You can even leave it networked, simply use an internet security solution like KIS and take care which URLS you are accessing.

Having a Win7 parallel installation would also have the benefit for you to check whether you have a Win10 specific problem or nother.

With a little older HW you still have this great option. With newer CPU'S and mainboards you will have no Win7 support anymore. At least for some newer components on the board you will miss drivers.

Use the advantages of a Win7 parallel installation as long as you can do.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Registered: 2011-07-04
  • Posts: 9

Re: FF 400 / totalmix w/ win10x64 becoming less reliable.

thanks for the tips. : )

No sign of ram faults that I can detect. I never overclock. The i7-7700 almost never gets noticeably taxed (I only hear the fan speed ramp up if I do simultaneous mp3 thread ripping, for example, or run a benchmarker).

My multiple firewire cards could be bad? But that seems unlikely; as I said, I swapped out the card once to test, and it eventually had the error again. Bad mb is possible I suppose; no failures on complete system hw diags.

I have really had no problems on this machine until the last few months. Guess I can build another to try and determine if win 10 1903 is the culprit, but it will have completely different mb/processor, so not a great comparison unless it also fails similarly.

Still curious whether anyone has noticed increasing problems with Firewire in win 10 in general (though I am not sure whether the TotalMix error is related to it or not).

  • ramses
  • DAW Mastermind
  • Offline
  • From: UTC+1
  • Registered: 2012-10-14
  • Posts: 12,885

Re: FF 400 / totalmix w/ win10x64 becoming less reliable.

There was another report having issues with 1903, but 1809 was stable.
I recommended some HW sanity checks as you said having issues since the last three releases of Win 10 ...
If there was a misunderstanding from my side and 1809 was more stable for you then go back to 1809.
I made already some comments / proposals about the necessity to have proven backup / recovery mechanisms.
Also good to haverify a 2nd SSD to pretest any new Windows version. Macrium Reflect Home also supports cloning of disks.
It's very easy to implement a dual boot system together with internal and external backup disks.

BR Ramses - UFX III, 12Mic, XTC, ADI-2 Pro FS R BE, RayDAT, X10SRi-F, E5-1680v4, Win10Pro22H2, Cub13
  • Registered: 2011-07-04
  • Posts: 9

Re: FF 400 / totalmix w/ win10x64 becoming less reliable.

So I did some more digging before doing anything more extreme, and came upon a number of people discussing poor firewire performance in various iterations of Win 10. That led me to several links regarding a legacy Firewire driver for Win 8 / 10, including the one below:

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/hel … s-8-1-or-w

I installed this driver instead of whatever the current TI chipset driver win 10 uses by default, and so far, no sign of BSOD!  I've been trying to tax the card by having it do multiple audio jobs at once, loading high cpu vst's, video + audio, leaving it on for a couple hours. So far, no crashes. I will continue to monitor the behavior to see what happens. I doubt this is going to fix the Totalmix-error-on-reboot, but I can just ignore that for now since it doesn't seem to impact anywhere else that I can detect.

6 Reply by Thermaltake (edited by Thermaltake 2019-09-04 06:07:02)

  • From: Croatia
  • Registered: 2010-08-27
  • Posts: 234

Re: FF 400 / totalmix w/ win10x64 becoming less reliable.

I have few PCs with same and almost same configuration as yours, with Texas instrument firewire card, and didn't have any problem on any version of Win 10, currently running on 1903 with all latest updates.