Topic: Help with Win7 IRQ sharing, causing ASIO glitches with FF800

Hi everybody (and Jeff the undisputed RME Guru),

Now that I've reformatted with Windows 7, I'm running into a strange problem with my FF800.  I apologize if this is off-topic, as it's not in direct relation to the Fireface, but instead other devices which are impeding upon my baby's performance.

Whenever I move or resize a window, or minimize/maximize, I get an ASIO glitch of epic proportions...  Now I know that it's not a good idea to be resizing windows or changing stuff during ASIO operation, but I do expect some degree of heartiness in this regard.  In fact, I am using DPC Latency Checker, which also jumps into the yellow or red whenever this happens.

Lo and behold, I've gone into Device Manager and checked the Resources by Connection, and found that my NVidia card is on the same IRQ as my SATA controller...  Of course ask Microsoft this question, and they say "it's OK for devices to share IRQs," as if it's no problem.  But clearly I have two of the most high bandwidth devices on IRQ 16, and that would appear to be causing me some serious grief.  After 2 reinstalls, a BIOS update, and every other tip and trick explored, I still have this issue (which I may add that I didn't encounter on Win XP).

The other option here is that the NVidia Graphics controller is hogging the PCI bus...  I'd tell it to stop being such a hog, but there are no options in the driver options or NVidia control panel that make much of a difference.  I can always just run a generic driver, which has the added benefit of assigning a different IRQ to the card (reinstalling the NVidia driver then just switches it back to IRQ 16), but the generic driver has zero acceleration support, so just by virtue of the video performance being slow as molasses it doesn't function well.

Any ideas/suggestions/wisdom?


My setup is:
Thinkpad T61p, 4GB ram
7200 RPM SATA drive
NVidia Quatro 570 discrete graphics w/ 256mb RAM
Intel Core2 T9300
Fireface 800 (running on Ricoh 1394 controller, I also have a PCMCIA card with TI chipset, but that defaults to IRQ 16 when I plug it in, so no go once again)

Re: Help with Win7 IRQ sharing, causing ASIO glitches with FF800

Hi,

since this is indeed off-topic (and I've just had to ask another user to post general questions elswhere), would you be so kind as to post the question here?

Have you tried reducing colour depth?

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Re: Help with Win7 IRQ sharing, causing ASIO glitches with FF800

Yes, running at 16 bit color.

Re: Help with Win7 IRQ sharing, causing ASIO glitches with FF800

What if you were to post the question at GS, and we'd leave a link here for another day or so?


Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME

Re: Help with Win7 IRQ sharing, causing ASIO glitches with FF800

Yep, I'll do so right now - I've actually found another person with the exact same issue, albeit with a different setup and an FF400

Re: Help with Win7 IRQ sharing, causing ASIO glitches with FF800

GS thread here.

Regards
Daniel Fuchs
RME