Please help me out of Firewire hell

ekwipt · Post by **ekwipt** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 5:24 am

Dalibor Loncar wrote:
Laura_Live wrote:
I have the 8895 WFJ Thinkpad T61 with a T9300 CPU and 2 GB Ram
i had a look at the specs of your tp t61. it has both a PC Card Typ II/III and an Express Card/34/54 slot. the pc card slot is definitely controlled by a ricoh chip. as i can see in a product description there is no internal firewire port on that t61, right? that´s the reason why you are connecting you inteface via an expresscard interface, eh?

http://www.ricoh.com/LSI/product_pcif/p ... index.html

nevertheless i can´t imagine that the expresscard slot is also controlled by that ricoh chip, so it should be no problem at all to have your digidesign audiohardware controlled by your fw expresscard with better latencies than 256samples.

Laura, which latency was possible with your old notebook and the same audio interface?

i have tested vista also. i must say that vistas performance for audio isn´t acceptable for me at the moment (i have installations of vista and xp on the same machine!). so stay with xp if you wanna have better results related to latency.

nevertheless you don´t need to disable services under windows xp (you dont´need that slipstreamed xp disc), the xp tweaks you´ll find on the net are outdated. my laptop has a T8100 CPU and i can run my interface via a firewire 800 expresscard controller with 88 samples under XP with no problems if i don´t overload the cpu (i can´t test it with 64 samples simply because my asio driver doesn´t allow that setting). and i tweaked my system only a bit. the only tweaks i did are:

i switched off the power schemes and disabled the system sounds.

for a dual core / core2duo processor you don´t need to change the processor scheduling to "background services" anymore.

furthermore i disabled some critical devices in the device manager after checking it with the latency checker tool.

LAURA: could you please post a screenshot while the latency checker mentioned before is running? did you maybe try the recommended RATTV3 tool under XP?

Do you have the newest bios for your thinkpad?

what's controlling the expresscard then, i'm pretty sure it's the ricoh chip, that's the reason for the problems

Dalibor Loncar · Post by **Dalibor Loncar** » Mon Sep 22, 2008 9:49 am

ekwipt wrote:
what's controlling the expresscard then, i'm pretty sure it's the ricoh chip, that's the reason for the problems

i would say there´s another than the ricoh chip responsible for the connection to the ich8m southbridge through a pci-express-lane (=direct serial connection to the southbridge). unfortunately the hardware maintanance manual of the thinkpad states nothing.

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mo ... 545_03.pdf

that´s typical for manufacturers. so i am only assuming, but ekwipt, you could be right.

Laura, you´re on XP SP3, right?

here´s a hotfix regarding the bandwith limitation of firewire under xp

http://support.microsoft.com/?scid=kb%3 ... &x=13&y=10
but this does not realy apply to laura´s setup just because her fireweire xpresscard has 1394a ports only. if you have a fw800 (=1394b) controller and you´re wondering why no connection to an audio interface could be made under win xp with service pack 3 installed, this fix will help.

good luck!

gjm · Post by **gjm** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 9:16 am

adventurepants_ wrote:
gjm wrote:
gjm wrote:My hunch is the SP1 thing might be bogus.
I recant! It is true. Microsoft did down grade the Firewire speed to 100mb/s in SP2. http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 Hmmmmm.
nice find. this gets curiouser and curiouser. yet you saw no speed differences between the sp3 driver and the rollback one?

Well, I was curious to, so I went back to the original driver, tested again, and then reinstalled the SP1 driver from the link provided earlier in the thread. Perhaps I am not using a valid method of testing.

As already mentioned I used HDtach to measure the average read speed on an ext HD attached by Fw400. My thoughts are if the drivers have been downgraded to only allow 100Mbs or 12.5MBs, then I am unsure why I got a rating of 40.3MBs. Maybe I am out to lunch.

Dalibor Loncar · Post by **Dalibor Loncar** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 11:25 am

gjm wrote:
Well, I was curious to, so I went back to the original driver, tested again, and then reinstalled the SP1 driver from the link provided earlier in the thread. Perhaps I am not using a valid method of testing.

As already mentioned I used HDtach to measure the average read speed on an ext HD attached by Fw400. My thoughts are if the drivers have been downgraded to only allow 100Mbs or 12.5MBs, then I am unsure why I got a rating of 40.3MBs. Maybe I am out to lunch.

your measurements are ok.

this does not apply for an 1394a (FW400) port. you have to connect to an 1394b (FW800) port, then the performance is decreased. my previous mentioned patch is the counterpart if you have SP3 installed + a FW800 controller. btw the patch from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/885222 is for SP2 only.

gjm · Post by **gjm** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 6:20 pm

djsynchro wrote:Firewire on Windows was crippled by Microsoft in SP2/3 have alook here:
You need to downgrade to the old SP1 firewire driver have a look here:

http://www.xpfree.org/windows_xp_speedup.htm

Hope that helps

I'm still confused. http://www.over-clock.com/marci/1394sp1.zip This is the driver backdate from the article posted in the above quote. There is no mention in either the article or the driver details, from what I can see that restricts the 100Mbs to only 1394b interfaces. I am very new to all of this PC tweaking. Are you and I talking about two different sets of driver information? Can you see something in the driver details that confirms that this particular SP1 driver only fixes fw800 issues?

I suppose the fact that my avg read rate for my ext FW400 HD is maxed out to the manufacturers spec is enough to prove that my FW400 1394a interface is working correctly 41.3MBs = 330Mbps, clearly more than 100Mbps.

Dalibor Loncar · Post by **Dalibor Loncar** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 6:46 pm

gjm wrote:
I'm still confused. http://www.over-clock.com/marci/1394sp1.zip This is the driver backdate from the article posted in the above quote. There is no mention in either the article or the driver details, from what I can see that restricts the 100Mbs to only 1394b interfaces. I am very new to all of this PC tweaking. Are you and I talking about two different sets of driver information? Can you see something in the driver details that confirms that this particular SP1 driver only fixes fw800 issues?

I suppose the fact that my avg read rate for my ext FW400 HD is maxed out to the manufacturers spec is enough to prove that my FW400 1394a interface is working correctly 41.3MBs = 330Mbps, clearly more than 100Mbps.

this problem occurs if you connect a 1394a or 1394b FireWire device to an 1394b port ONLY! e.g. if you have a fw400 audio interface connected to a firewire400/1394a controller the bandwidth speed is NOT decreased neither with old (SP1/SP2) nor with the new (SP3) 1394 XP drivers!

again: only 1394b ports are affected!!!!

gjm · Post by **gjm** » Tue Sep 23, 2008 6:58 pm

Dalibor Loncar wrote:again: only 1394b ports are affected!!!!

Thanks for that...loud and clear

ekwipt · Post by **ekwipt** » Wed Sep 24, 2008 5:44 am

Dalibor Loncar is spot on...

You can read more on the RME webpage about the speed problems

Is there any menus in bios, I recently sorted a problem on a laptop by disabling some things on the bios, LAN WLAN, DVD drive etc. Disable everything you don't need and test from there, enable things back one at a time if yo fix the problem.

bios is different from doing it in software device lists and such.