PCIe to PCI Adapter

[poppy]

Anyone ever had any experience of these? Could they possibly be a way to keep our old PCI cards?

http://www.virtuavia.eu

[digidesigner]

http://duc.avid.com/archive/index.php/t-218596.html

http://duc.avid.com/archive/index.php/t-248735.html

http://duc.avid.com/archive/index.php/t-218778.html

http://www.google.com/search?q=pro+t...0cfd04ba3c5cf9

[poppy]

Apologies...point taken!

[digidesigner]

Originally Posted by poppy

Apologies...point taken!

Hey, no need for that, it's just been a hot topic for... ever

[tigeba]

Originally Posted by poppy

Anyone ever had any experience of these? Could they possibly be a way to keep our old PCI cards?

http://www.virtuavia.eu

I checked out a bunch of forums for this, and I was never able to get any sort of definitive answer. So I bit the bullet and ordered the kit version. The shipping took a LONG time but it finally arrived yesterday. I had 2 donor PC cases hanging around to serve as transplant candidates. One of them had a bit of an older ATX connector and it didn't work properly. The newer case had a proper power supply, but I had to perform a bit of surgery on the internal drive bays to make room for the huge PT cards. The donor case has a 500 watt power supply, which I'm sure is massive overkill, but I will just throw that out there. I believe some of the problems with the Virtuavia all-in-one (non kit) chassis were related to inadequate power.


My configuration:

Early 2009 8-Core Nehalem Mac Pro
OSX 10.6.5
HD3 (PCI-X) cards.
Tested with Protools 8.0.4 and 8.1
The Virtuavia PCI-E card is in the second slot in my Mac Pro, adjacent to the video card.
PC Case with 24 pin ATX connector, 500 watt PS.


The short answer is: It works for me . The cards all pass digitest and all my interfaces show up. I have only opened up a few trivial sessions and they worked fine. I think the largest session had 24 tracks and basically no plugins. If anyone has some suggestions on what might be a good stress test I will give it a shot and report the results.


I just got things going last night, so I haven't tried hooking up some of my other related items, like SyncIO and Eleven Rack. I have tested 8.0.4 and 8.1 but only completely stock configuration with no 3rd party plugins.

[digidesigner]

Thanks for testing this and letting us know your results!

Look to see what type of PCI bus usage action you see on your meter in PT. Does everything run in "normal typical" PCI bus load (I have mostly around 96 track sessions that run @ about 50% PCI usage with playback engine set to 256 Samples 96 Voices (2DSP) on my PT9HD PC). Also do a session with as many tracks as your HDD can handle to see if PCI bus will come clogged or not. Also check with live input if you can tell if there is added latency to the system.
So if all these things check out well then why not use it!

[tigeba]

Originally Posted by digidesigner

Thanks for testing this and letting us know your results!

Look to see what type of PCI bus usage action you see on your meter in PT. Does everything run in "normal typical" PCI bus load (I have mostly around 96 track sessions that run @ about 50% PCI usage with playback engine set to 256 Samples 96 Voices (2DSP) on my PT9HD PC). Also do a session with as many tracks as your HDD can handle to see if PCI bus will come clogged or not. Also check with live input if you can tell if there is added latency to the system.
So if all these things check out well then why not use it!

With 96 audio tracks using the 96 voice ( 2DSP ) and 256 samples I'm getting around 50% PCI bus load. Just for fun I also inserted a 1 Band EQ3 on each track. I did this by creating a single track and duplicating it X times. I think that is probably a sufficient test for PCI usage since mixing is probably mixing, but to push the HDD I probably need to go a step further and make 96 or more unique tracks for it to stream from disk. I tried going for 128 voices but that made Protools pretty angry and I had to restart and trash prefs to get it going again. I believe that there might be a 96 voice limitation when using any sort of expansion chassis. For my needs that is just fine, I have never used more than 48 voices anyway.

[Detlef Brockmann]

Hi tigeba,
just curious... is this the package you have purchased?
Cheers, Detlef.

http://www.virtuavia.eu/shop/index.p...id=29889&sl=EN

[tigeba]

Originally Posted by Detlef Brockmann

Hi tigeba,
just curious... is this the package you have purchased?
Cheers, Detlef.

http://www.virtuavia.eu/shop/index.p...id=29889&sl=EN

Yes, that is the one.

[Detlef Brockmann]

Hi tigeba,

is your VirtuaVia PCI Adapter still working fine for you?
Detlef.