Is the PCI bus still used for EVERY Device on the nF4

[Scratchin&#39 Ball]

I am thinking about trying to get rid of my nF3 LANParty, but I like it. I am just a sick bastard who read too many sicker-than-I nonsense. I am telling myself the only way I will spend the money on the nF4 is if it has seperate busses going to the Memory Controller or HTT bus for the PCI slots. I need more than shared 510 Mb/sec for multi-track recording. I know that $500 boards have this, but that is too much $$$ for me. Thank you in advance, PLEASE HELP! I am sick!

 

Anybody want to show off a screenshot of their device manager viewing "devices by connection"...

 

THANKS!:angel:

[Eric Adams]

The only things on the 133MB/s shared PCI bus are:

 

Marvell 88E8001 Gigabit PCI Ethernet (2nd ethernet port)

VIA VT6307 Firewire

Silicon Image Sil 3114 SATA RAID (only on LANPARTY nF4 SLI-DR)

 

and of course everything you'd care to stick in a PCI-slot

 

So this is basicly just like nF3.

 

For more than 510MB/s you'd need something like a 4-lane PCI-E or a PCI-X 100/133Mhz.

[housecat]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he said he needed 510megabit of bandwidth for his recordings.

 

Thats what he said.

/shrug

 

MB=megabyte

Mb=megabit

 

lets get it together guys

[Eric Adams]

:housecat

 

You're absolutely right. I read that too fast, and probably didn't think that 510Mb/s sounded like much.

 

 

 

Then the PCI lane should be sufficient, also on an nF3.

If there's problems, maybe you should tweak your PCI latency settings.

The AGP card can hog the 'timeslices' on the PCI bus, even though it's on a separate bus.

[Scratchin&#39 Ball]

Sorry guys, I thought PCI bus/lane has 510 Mb/sec. I am pretty sure they do. I am talking about the bus that all the peripherals ride on, not the IDE bus mastering (which is 133 Mb/sec.)

 

Never the less in this case THANK YOU guys for answering at 3am in the morning. Thank you guys a gang. Thanks! :angel:

[Scratchin&#39 Ball]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but he said he needed 510megabit of bandwidth for his recordings.

 

Thats what he said.

/shrug

 

MB=megabyte

Mb=megabit

 

lets get it together guys

 

I don't NEED it, but I don't want everything including all my raw data tracks and processing crammed into the PCI bus. This limits the number and latency of tracks I can record. And I like to use lots of effects.

 

What I would have typed if I knew what I was talking about is 510 MB/s

[Angry_Games]

if you want pro recording then you really need a board/sound card/SCSI drives that are designed for this sort of thing

 

you don't buy a small 1/2-Ton pickup to tow big loads that really require a 2-Ton pickup to tow do ya?

[NEOAethyr]

On the nf2 boards of dfi's there's 2 pci buses.

 

I'm not sure what slot is which bus, but the last slot gets you on bus 2 with the realtek lan.

 

You can use sandra to tell there's a 2nd bus btw.

I'm hoping there is 2 buses on the nf4 too.

 

For 512megs a sec, lol.

 

33mhz x 4bytes( 32bits / 8 = 4 bytes) = 133megs a sec.

50mhz x 4 = 200megs a sec.

 

50mhz is probably the best you're gonna get with the pci bus, maybe.

 

It seems that the nf2 boards here, that if you oc the agp bus it'll oc the pci bus as well.

Both of them probably.

 

Clockgen says this, also the fact that some pci cards lock above 81mhz agp, the onbaord sound and usb has trouble without south bridge cooling at that speed as well.

 

There's a clockgen ver for the nf4 too.

Though it does'nt seem that the pci bus is divided by the pci-e bus .

I'm not totally sure though.

 

Default pci-e bus is 100mhz I believe.

If it was a dividor then it would be 100mhz / 3(dividor) = 33mhz pci.

 

So if you had 2 pci buses at 50mhz then it would be close to that 512megs you're looking for.

 

Sound card last slot, 200megs a sec of bandwith to play with.

IDE or SATA raid 10 or 0+1 on the 1st slot or something would probably have it's own 200megs of bandwith to play with.

 

Now given that there's other things on the pci bus as well, usb and lan.

Usb can't be using much, firwire included then, you know.

Gigabyte lan on the otherhand is using quite a bit if maxxed out, probably max 100megs a sec for that lan on one of the buses.

 

You get the idea.

 

You could allways use the pci-e bus ionstead for the sound card if you can find such a thing.

 

I hope someone can clear this up.

Overclocking the pci bus is really a big thing to some people, needed that is.

Also if there's several pci buses or not.

[Scratchin&#39 Ball]

if you want pro recording then you really need a board/sound card/SCSI drives that are designed for this sort of thing

 

you don't buy a small 1/2-Ton pickup to tow big loads that really require a 2-Ton pickup to tow do ya?

 

Well, I had purchased a Dually AthlonXP board for $250 and a SCSI 64-bit RAID card, and if you look at my sig you'll notice my Card. I'm gonna buy another one next week to add more tracks and pre-amps. I jumped on this board a couple months ago, and as it turned out, the Dually was a total waste of $250. There is no need for SCSI, but PCI-X controller to help off-load some of the CPU load would be Kosher.

[Scratchin&#39 Ball]

NEOAethyr,

 

Thank you for that fine, fine information. nF2 Infinity or only NFII-B? I want something like that for my Athlon64 architecture.

 

I had my AGP/PCI set at 100 Mhz before I installed the 6800 GT. I don't know if it's good for a 6800 GT, but that thing definately doesn't need it. I want my sound card and HDs OFF the same bus. I guess I better get a better job.

 

Thanks for confirming the PCI bus bandwidth, bro.

 

:angel:I doubt anyone knows any better info than that...:angel: