View Single Post
Old 08-01-2012, 11:41 AM   #56
chucky5p
Human being with feelings
 
Join Date: Apr 2011
Location: Canada
Posts: 454
Default

Quote:
Originally Posted by brainwreck View Post
Really? We had good latency with some of the lower cost interfaces running under XP, but for Vista/7, latency has gone to shit again. And I'm sitting here with an onboard soundcard/asio4all, getting half of the latency of my usb interface, the same interface that got half the latency on XP, but doubled when moving to 7.
Are you referring to the Fast Track Ultra 8R? If so, I know a trick allowing the 8R to get 5.2ms RTL latency under W7/Vista (64 samples @ 48 kHz). You need a motherboard that can disable HPET in its BIOS (High Precision Event Timer). With HPET disable, you’ll be able to use the old 8R XP drivers in W7 and select “High Performance Mode” which allows for 64 samples, et voila, it works really well! My main setup still uses XP but I used this BIOS trick on my Acer Netbook (pre-loaded with W7). Originally, the Netbook didn’t have the HPET option in its BIOS but I was lucky enough to find a hacked BIOS that did.

AFAIK, HPET is THE reason the 8R crashes under W7 when using High Performance mode. (High Performance mode and HPET are incompatible) And since M-Audio/Avid didn’t want to redesign their driver to work under W7 with HPET enabled, they simply removed the High Performance Mode option! The reason why the 8R works great in XP with HP mode on is simply because XP doesn't use HPET, so it doesn't matter whether your motherboard BIOS has the HPET option or not when using XP.

Even though I found this hack, it still makes me angry that Avid didn’t release an updated 8R driver for W7 with a working HPmode. And don’t count on it because if they did, the 8R would then become in direct competition with their new MBox Pro 3 (which allows 64 sample under W7) but at a lower price. Basically, as far as latency is concerned, you could say:

FastTrackUltra 8R (XP) = MBox Pro 3 (W7)

BTW, in most cases Asus motherboards don’t have the HPET option but AFAIK all Gigabytes MB do.

Chuck
chucky5p is offline   Reply With Quote