HDX installed - good and bad (fan is LOUD!!)

[albee1952]

The iso box is great if you have the cash. If not, you might get some relief with some basic building skills. I had a noisy tower in my one-room setup, so I built a nice box out of oak plywood and oak edging. The box was oversize by 2" all around and was a foot deeper than the tower. I lined the box with Auralex Sheetblock, then 2" wedge foam, then slide the tower into the foam tunnel(the foam tunnel extended beyond the back by the extra foot. The whole thing dropped the noise enough to track vocals in the same room, so it may be worth a shot

[khoop2112]

ISOBOX is a great product. I owned one of the first ever built - I'm just miles away from Sound Construction and Supply. Todd is a gem of a person, and has built every piece of furniture in my studio.

I sold my ISOBOX last year because the ISOBOX fan was louder than the fan in the MacPro. I don't think I'll rebuy one - I'm having a contractor help install some pass throughs to help me move the computer to another room.

Day 2 of HDX - some strange errors today. I had a new session with a single stereo track. While recording on this track, I got an error (might have been 9092 or 9094) and the recording stopped. Bizarre. Had that happen once more, but not on my high track count mix sessions. Those are working great - and I'm not having the PT10 output muting issue that I had with my HD3 rig. And the 64 bit mixer / 32 bit internal signal path does seem to make a subtle improvement over the same mixes with the 24/48 architechture.

Plenty of power, and it's nice and zippy instantiating plug ins...they do need to fix those strange DAE errors that I get randomly. I also wish they were able to spend some more time on the engineering of the fan to quiet it down a bit.

But - I'm really glad I upgraded. I feel like I've got a very powerful toolset - more so than I've ever had.

- kent

[Craig F]

I'm assuming were are looking at the same fans used on top end video cards

I seem to remember those being noisy also

[FilterDecay]

yeah if they are the same then they are loud.

I thought that they were able to keep them clocked low enough to not need fans?

Maybe there will be a 3rd party water cooling device like with videocards. Probably not the kind of item you want to void the warranty on though.

[Tweakhead]

Originally Posted by khoop2112

SNIP... Bad news: the HDX Fan is AWFUL.

That is a deal-killer for me. I will not tolerate noisy fans in equipment anymore.

[khoop2112]

Craig,

Ya know - I have a ATI Radeon HD4870 in my other MacPro Nehalem, and the fan looks very similar to the one in the HDX card. The ATI is super loud when you first power on, but then it goes nearly silent.

HDX, not so much.

kent

[FilterDecay]

well your 4870 has a temperature sensor that throttles the fan speed. If avid just tossed a tiny fan on at full speed without any throttle then LOL.

Thank god I went native.

[digidesigner]

Originally Posted by Bo Walker

From the PDF Read Me

Some Plug-ins Require Exclusive Use a DSP Chip on HDX Hardware Accelerated Systems (PTSW-154614)
Certain plug-ins, such as ReVibe and Reverb One, use direct memory access (DMA) on Avid HDX cards. DMA plug-ins cannot share HDX DSP chips with other plug-ins. Additionally, even though DMA plug-ins of the same type can share a single HDX DSP chip (for example, multiple ReVibe plug-ins can use the same HDX DSP chip), they must be of the same channel width (DMA plug-ins of the same type cannot share the same HDX DSP chip if they have different channel widths).

but still, promoting it as "up to 5 times DSP" and then actually being able to run 50% less ReVibes per chip seems like a nonsense, doesn't it!?

OP please confirm that you were running 2 ReVibes on both systems.

[SD2]

Originally Posted by khoop2112

HDX system usage: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1453227/fearfully%20HDX.png
HD system usage: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/1453227/fearfully%20HD.png

Thanks for the info, but the two sessions seem pretty different...?...
You have more voices and a higher usage of time slot in the HD one.
Also, are you sure you were using DSP cache in this HD session (and, if not, did you purge the cache?)? It looks like there's a lot more "delays" slot than there should be?....
And finally, I wonder if the fact that you had one Accel and one process (and not two Accels) didn't slow the whole thing down (I remember having trouble opening session begun on my HD3 Accel on studios' HD3/4 Accel+Process).

Anyway, this fan thing is indeed a deal-killer (along with the $$$$, specially when you crossgraded from HD3 PPC to Intel last year, as I did.... )

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by albee1952

The iso box is great if you have the cash. If not, you might get some relief with some basic building skills. I had a noisy tower in my one-room setup, so I built a nice box out of oak plywood and oak edging. The box was oversize by 2" all around and was a foot deeper than the tower. I lined the box with Auralex Sheetblock, then 2" wedge foam, then slide the tower into the foam tunnel(the foam tunnel extended beyond the back by the extra foot. The whole thing dropped the noise enough to track vocals in the same room, so it may be worth a shot

Couple of questions: how was the heat level in the box after you closed it up? Did the computer get too hot? The Isoboxes have fans in them already.