NVIDIA question

[Tony Marone]

I have a machine that I have been testing SAC on.
It is an ASUS P5N73-AM motherboard with an E8500 cpu and 4 gig of kingston ram. This thing not only has nvidia graphics onboard but the chipset is nvidia! SAC runs fine for anywhere from 2 to 20 minutes then the whole machine freezes - GAME OVER - until it is rebooted! The card is an older RME 9636 I got off EBAY for this purpose. I have one Behringer 8 channel ADA8000 connected. There is no discernible load on the cpu even with all 8 channels loaded with compressor, gate, and equalizer. Are there some known issues that I have missed?

Thanks,
Tony

[DominicPerry]

Tony,

IIRC, I think that the NVidia problems were graphics card problems from some considerable time back - certainly nothing as dramatic as you have described. And I don't recall any problem with the NVidia chipsets.
Personally, I suspect something else, quite possibly a faulty HDSP card.
Is there an on-board sound card you can run the same test with?
Is the rest of the machine new or at least well tested? Could be a heat problem or a memory fault. Do you get a BSD or just a complete screen freeze? Do you get a freeze if you run CPU/memory intensive benchmarks instead?

Dominic

[Tony Marone]

Hi,

I ran Microsoft's Memory tester for 2 hours with no errors. Also, I ran CPU stress test for 2 hours with no problems. Haven't tried a different sound card yet:) Any other Ideas?

Thanks,
Tony

[Bob L]

As SAC is running... before the machine freezes... can you check to see if its dropping buffers by left-clicking in the load display readout.

Bob L

[Tony Marone]

Bob

No dropped input or output buffers:confused: Will try onboard sound in a while.

Thanks,
Tony

[Tony Marone]

UPDATE!

Moved RME9636 card to a Dell Optiplex 330 with 2gig ram, E7200 processor, and nvidia GeForce 9500GT and NO PROBLEMS so far - running for 2 hours with no dropped buffers and 0 to 1 % load. There has to be something strange going on in the other machine. By the way, I could get the onboard sound card to work in multimedia mode, but I loaded ASIO4ALL driver and was unable to get it to work - yes i uninstalled the RME software and rebooted:)! I think I will run with the multimedia driver for awhile with SAC and see if it locks up.

Thanks for the input,
Tony