Digidesign Expansion|HD Expansion Chassis work ok?

[Will Russell]

Hi,

I need to finally upgrade my dual 1.25 G4 to some sort of G5. This means getting an expansion chassis. Does anyone have one of the new Digidesign Expansion|HD Expansion Chassis? Is it ready for prime time? I seem to see a bunch of cs releases addressing bugs. Please advise.

[Will Russell]

bump

[subwoof]

I have 2 new HD PCI Expansion chassis, with PCI-e cards inserted in each of my 2 G5 Quads. Each chassis has an Accel 4 HD system in it. It all seems to work fine as far as I can tell.

Overall audio suite manipulation and previewing is slower than I am used to, as well as auditining sounds in the regin bin, but rendering files is very fast. I don't know if any of that is due to the exdpansion chassis or not.

I do have occational unexpected quits in Pro Tools, but I believe that started with OS 10 and Pro Tools 6. Pro Tools 5.1.3 and OS 9.2.2 would sometimes lockup and force me to reboot, but not unexpectidly quit. I guess it's always 2 steps forward, and one step back with computers and software!

[BDWillis]

Hey Will,

I'm in the exact same situation as you re: upgrading. One chassis option may be the new Magma PCIe > PCI 6-slot HERE .

I hope to dig up some more informed opinions in the next week or so... I'll try to keep you posted.

Warmest Regards,
Brian

[feakerboo]

we have 4 of these at our studio and they work just fine for us. SOmetimes on 192 track sessions I'll get processor too slow to keep up with chassis errors but it isn't all that common. I think that I need more RAM as I only have 2gig right now.

[BDWillis]

we have 4 of these at our studio and they work just fine for us. SOmetimes on 192 track sessions I'll get processor too slow to keep up with chassis errors but it isn't all that common. I think that I need more RAM as I only have 2gig right now.

I assume you mean Digi's Expansion|HD chassis (not the Magma), correct? What computers are the chassis' running off of?

Warmest Regards,
Brian

[feakerboo]

All systems are G5 2GHZ Duo Core with 2Gigs of RAM. The Chassis are Expansion HD Chassis with the PCIe Card inside the G5. I have HD3 Accells in all 4 systems. two of these systems have 2 HD Proccess Cards in them as well. In addition all of the G5s have a UL5Ds and Atto PCIe Fiber channel cards. One system has an Avid MOJO.

I have had very few porblems overall since upgrading. I have been banging the system pushing 192 tracks over the last few weeks as we have been testing a fiber network. I have had no protools related problems so far and am currently running 7.1cs5. I'm prolly not going to do anymore CS until 7.2 comes out.

Since cs5 I have not had any nagging problems. I sometimes get that Proccess to slow for chassis error but thats when I TRYING to throttle the systems and I think that if I upped the RAM that might fix it.

-feaks

[feakerboo]

I tried to replicate the Processor Error that I spoke of above yesterday. I haven't seen it again dispite trying my best to crash the systems. So Digi might have fixed this now. Nice work fellas.

-feaks

[BDWillis]

I have been banging the system pushing 192 tracks over the last few weeks as we have been testing a fiber network.

feakerboo — thanks much for all the information! A few more questions when you have time...

Excellent in terms of sheer horsepower... do the tracks contain any edits, if so what kind of density (yeah, I know, hard to quantify...)?

Also wondering of you've been loading up with plug-ins (TDM & RTAS simultaneously), which I'd think would tax the CPU/PCIe bus/Chassis functionality of the system even more than just massive throughput. If so, are any particular plugs more "fussy" than others?

Warmest Regards,
Brian