Old RME Hamerfall Digi9652 (non DSP) cards?

[kdiamond]

I have a chance to get two old RME Hamerfall Digi9652 (non DSP) cards?
There's no Win7 driver or support and the last driver for XP is dated 06/14/2004.

Since SAC is 32bit I see no real need to go for Windows 7. AFAIK there's no 64 bit or multi-core CPU plans for SAC, so I guess XP will be good OS choice for SAC for a while.

I had two of those cards few years ago, but never used it on lo-latency operation. Does anyone have any experiences with it.

Thank you!

Br,
Dali

[DominicPerry]

SAC uses two cores, but yes, you are right, providing the MoBo/CPU you buy supports XP, then XP is still be easiest and you could argue the best way to go, for SAC.

The Digi9636/52 cards are good, and still very usable. Their only disadvantage compared with the later PCIe cards is that the smallest buffer size they support is 64 samples, rather than 32 for things like the RayDAT. My Digi9636/52 happily runs at 1x64 and there's no reason to think that the performance you will get with a powerful machine will be much different from a later card.
The other two things are,
1) no Vista/Win7 support, as you mentioned.
2) No TotalMix. You may find this a blessing, as SAC will be your mixer, not TotalMix. It does prevent you from doing a special 'one-off' zero-latency TotalMix headphone mix, but frankly, you have to be pretty hot with TotalMix to fiddle with it and not make a mistake. I would discount the absence of TotalMix as a problem.

Plenty of others here also using the same card - it makes a very cost effective purchase.
I can't remember what the maximum number of Digi9636/52 cards you can have at one time is, I think it's two.
The only other thing to consider is that if you have a Digi9636/52 card, you can't ALSO run an HDSP card at the same time. So if you were to suddenly need extra channels, you would have to wait for a second card to come up for sale or you'd have to buy two HDSP cards. Not really a reason for going straight out now and buying an HDSP card, I don't think.

Dominic

[kdiamond]

Their only disadvantage compared with the later PCIe cards is that the smallest buffer size they support is 64 samples, rather than 32 for things like the RayDAT.

and no midi, as I can remember. But buffer size 32 increases CPU load very much. Is anyone here dare to run 32 channles + 8 monitoring mixers on 32 samples latency?

Br,
Dali

[905shmick]

If you're getting them on the cheap and they'll fit the bill for the next little while, then go ahead and get them, but realize that there isn't any active development or support for them anymore. Eventually we'll be forced to use a newer OS and the likelyhood of those cards working then is pretty slim. So if the ROI on those older cards is worth it, then go for it.

[mloretitsch]

I can confirm the DIGI9636 works fine under Win7 32-bit. I have one, and it works fine into SAC and the Saw Demo (no funds for saw just yet).

Supporting documention:
http://www.rme-audio.de/forum/viewtopic.php?id=6890

[kdiamond]

The thing is I might get two cards for free. My friend upgraded to Win7 and was forced to buy Raydat. Now he has absolutely no use for digi's.

I might give it a try.

Thank you
Br,
Dali

[905shmick]

Free has a very attractive ROI

[DominicPerry]

Excellent. Maybe I'll upgrade to Win7 on the i3 with my Digi9636/52 and see what happens!

Dominic

[905shmick]

Excellent. Maybe I'll upgrade to Win7 on the i3 with my Digi9636/52 and see what happens!

Dominic

Just make sure you use Win 7 32bit as there isn't support for those cards under Win 7 64bit.

[Bob L]

Win 7 would not yet be my choice... there are many issues in the background and many processes to remove to clean it up.

If you do use it... the first thing to do is be sure to turn OFF Border Padding in the Windows advanced Window properties area... or simply set the theme to Windows Classic, which turns it OFF automatically.

The new border padding option inside the windows and dialogs will cause pixel mapping errors in the entire graphics design of the app.

Bob L