Does anyone with a Mac Pro/HDX have a stable system at low buffer settings?

[Will Russell]

Nice thread hijack fellas!

[fsavell]

Originally Posted by Craig F

mixed sticks is not a good thing
you should be running ether 6 8s or 6 2s but not both

Can you point me to some legitimate literature that would back up what you're saying? My research indicated that it would be fine.

[Cheesehead]

+1 on this. The CPU usage/overall stability completely chills out when switching the playback engine off of HD hardware. Just tested it and achieved the same results after 10 tests. Crazy.

I noticed this on a film I took home to prep at Xmas.

Mac Pro/HDX1 system was having fairly regular 9171 errors.

Mac laptop/ internal sound, no problems at all. I was even able to add extra plugins!

A bit galling when you've spent all that money on hardware.

[fsavell]

Originally Posted by Ienjoyaudio

+1 on this. The CPU usage/overall stability completely chills out when switching the playback engine off of HD hardware. Just tested it and achieved the same results after 10 tests. Crazy.

Holy ****balls batman! I have a massive mix session that was overloading the CPU on 512 buffer size. Switched to my Built-In Output and now I can run the thing on a buffer size of 32. WTF!? Literally gone from peaking out at 100% CPU (on 512 HW Buffer Size), to peaking at a maximum of 44% (32 HW Buffer Size). Epic difference.

Did some more testing and not every session has the same dramatic change, but still noteworthy. It's also worth pointing out that in all these tests, all the DSP plug-ins are converted to their Native equivalents, putting even more load on the CPU, yet it still behaves as good or better than running the session using the HDX card.

I would be very interested to see how the system behaves on a 3rd party interface connected via Thunderbolt or even USB. I can't believe that HDX/HD native is choking the computer that much.

Remind me why I bought HDX again?

Forrester

[JFreak]

Originally Posted by fsavell

Remind me why I bought HDX again?

Because it has most voices and i/o perhaps?

[loud neighbor]

Originally Posted by Cheesehead

A bit galling when you've spent all that money on hardware.

+1 on the galling / confusing nature of these issues.

As to the OP's question - I've got a very similar setup… 2009 MP 4,1 with 32GB of ram, SSD's, running PTHD 11.1.3 on OS 10.8.5. HDX1 with Avid I/O. Can't use anything lower than 256 buffer-wise either. Ever. Tracking or mixing...

[WernerF]

Originally Posted by JFreak

Because it has most voices and i/o perhaps?

And how is one to take advantage all of that great stuff on an unstable system?

[fsavell]

This is really interesting.

http://duc.avid.com/showpost.php?p=2165649&postcount=9

With my experiments, there's definitely inconsistency with sessions working efficiently. Perhaps its all just plugin related.

[GuyPicks]

Sounds like a Symphony PCIe card w/Symphony I/O would work just as good if not better?