Dell 8100 & giga....

[elle]

Dell Australia (!) is announcing its Inspiron 8100 notebook, which uses the mobile 815 chipset (true Speed Step). http://www.ap.dell.com/ap/au/en/dhs/products/spec_inspn_8100_notebooks.htm (\"http://www.ap.dell.com/ap/au/en/dhs/products/spec_inspn_8100_notebooks.htm\")

The speed tests done by some magazines already showed that the 8100 finally delivers the same performance as we get from our desktop machines!

The famous Fan interrupt problem of the 8000 00 is also cured (new bios);

Now... if only we could wring two 7200 drives in there.

[carlgt1]

After that grief the Inspiron 8000 gave me with that stupid fan interrupt (and the money I lost getting rid of it) I\'m never going to buy Dell again!

[blabla]

Hi Elle,

I was looking at Dell\'s download site at the new A13 BIOS which is the latest version available for the Inspiron 8100. I could not find any reference to fixing the \"fan interrupt\" problem in the release notes.

I\'ve spoken to two tech support reps and no one is even aware that there was a fan related problem in the first place--no less that it has been fixed in the latest BIOS.

I\'m excited that this problem has finally been addressed but I\'d really appreciate if you could share the source of the information regarding the fan interrupt fix.

Thanks for your reply.

[elle]

Stefan Karlsson at Dell Technical support in Sweden confirmed that the official release day for the fan bug fixed BIOS for the i8000 is September 3.

The newer i8100 is available for distribution within the Dell organization a week earlier, so this almost matches the fan bug fix release date.

Keep an eye on this topic on the rme-audio.com newsgroup.

elle

[blabla]

I read the posts. Thanks for the link.

It sounds plausible, although I\'m not sure if the z65 Beta BIOS version named in Anders Hannus\' post on Wed, 25 Jul 2001 is the same as BIOS version A13 dated 8.1.2001 that I downloaded and loaded this morning (http://support.dell.com/us/en/filelib/results.asp?sid=INS_PNT_P3CG_8000&os=ALL&lib=1&lang=EN&st=3XNQN01&searchtype=filter)

--or, as you suggest, a future version that will become available on September 3rd. I hope you\'re correct!

I have not begun using the 8000 for GSt---I\'m waiting for the release of the PC card interface option for my Layla24.

I was wondering, would you mind sharing any other experiences you might have had with this machine running GSt that I should know about or tweak to optimize its performance?

Thanks in advance for you input.

[SteveHanlon]

I was looking into the Inspiran and saw that there is a IEEE port.

Is IEEE fast enough for hooking a HD exclusively for audio?

Is IEEE fast enough for a Gigasampler drive?

If so, then buying to extra IEEE drives would a possible way to have a portable Giga solution.

But then again, where will the GSIF drivers come from? Are there PCMCIA audio cards with these drivers yet?

[carlgt1]

IEEE1394 is fast enough for many digital audio apps and even if you have a MOTU 828 firewire audio device (total bus is 50MB/sec or 400Mbits/sec). The MOTU828 is GSIF compatible (for GigaStudio 2.2; not GigaSampler 1.5/6). I found the data transfer rates faster on my Firewire drive than on the internal Dell8000 hard drive. But as you know that\'s not everything, and I doubt that Firewire could offer that 8-9ms seek time that Giga loves. It may be sufficient for live use, say 32 voices. I would probably go with using VSampler which is more of a memory-resident PC sampler (although it does offer disk-streaming now).

Unfortunately I got rid of my Dell Inspiron 8000 because of the notorious fan/audio glitch bug. I\'m not sure I would ever buy Dell again after finding out that terrible design after I plunked $3K down on their high-end laptop!

[carlgt1]

well for one thing, I never saw a way to disable ACPI so that these Dell 8000\'s end up sharing about 10 devices on one IRQ! And of course it always seems to assign audio with the video or something equally horrible.

[blabla]

On the subject of Firewire drives; does anybody know of any sites that review the performance specs of high-end 1394 drives?

I\'d love to learn which drives had the fastest seek times and largest capacity.

Any recommendations?

[SteveHanlon]

Here is a response I got from a trusted computer builder regarding firewire/laptops/giga.


Hi,
>>
>>I talked to you on the phone recently about the DELL Inspiran as a Laptop
>>solution for audio. You mentioned connecting a IEEE hard drive to the
>>laptop for the storage of the audio. Does IEEE stream fast enough to get
>>10 tracks going smoothly?

Shouldn\'t be a problem, The Glyph models are tested with 24-tracks.

>>
>>If so, then is putting Gigasamples on another IEEE drive a possibility as
>>well? This would mean two HD connected via IEEE to the laptop...one for
>>audio...one for Giga (with the 1.3 GigaHertz and probably 512MB RAM in
>>the laptop).

That\'s what I would do, always best to have a separate drive for Samples.
However, they will be sharing a fixed amount of Firewire Bandwith, so there
may still be a degree of bottleneck\"


Maybe a solution is to find a laptop with two IEEE ports....does one exist?

[blabla]

Thanks for the info. After seaching the site it seems the only firewire-based Audio Product is the X Project. Don\'t know the price yet...if you know of a good place to buy please let me know.

thanks again

[SteveHanlon]

I thought so too but there seems to be a hotswappable Tabletop HD offered by Glyph. It\'s on their site. I wrote them to make sure it was firewire and to see what sizes they offer in terms of gigs.

Also, Pete Leoni at prorec. wrote that he knew of people who were getting above 24 tracks of audio on just one maxtor ata-100 drive.

If this is the case, then perhaps the laptop, if it comes with an ata-66 or ata 100 drive might be enough to get 12-24 tracks. Then just add the firewire drive for the gigs.

I also found that
Waves Digital has a portable solution http://www.wavedigital.com/portables/microwave_portable_pc.htm (\"http://www.wavedigital.com/portables/microwave_portable_pc.htm\")

It doesn\'t look like anything like a laptop but it\'s another thought.

Anybody else got opinions as to which laptop to buy if Dell Inspiran is not the one?

[carlgt1]

Well the only laptop Giga recommends on their site is the Toshiba Tecra 8200 850MHz/P3. They claim once you get rid of the WDM drivers it was getting full 160 voice polyphony. And I assume that\'s on the regular internal drive.

I don\'t think the firewire drive speed really matter once you go firewire. The limiting factor is the firewire bus, not the actual IDE drive. For example, I believe an older ATA33/5400RPM in my experience (which was still quicker than the internal Dell 8000 IDE/4200RPM hard drive). I don\'t think you\'ll see any difference in using an ATA100 7200RPM drive if it\'s in a Firewire case.

I had a Maxtor \"pre-built\" firewire drive (which you can see at Best Buy or CompUSA) and I took it apart and it was their last generation 5400RPM drive in it.

[SteveHanlon]

Thanks for the help, Carl.

I was just checking out the Tecra 8200.

I want a laptop that can do video and audio/giga and I think I\'m asking for trouble. Of course the video Application (Video Factory 2) will never need to be run while I run Giga/Cakewalk...but I have a feeling there could be conflicts.

Is it standard that IEEE ports are OHCI compliant?

Are you doing this as well..video/audio in a laptop?

[elle]

From RME-audio newsgroup
It seems we\'re not quite there yet...
-------------------------------------

Ok guys, take your seats please and fasten seat belts.

My 8100 arrived today. I bought a 866 MHz machine, because I thought if
this one now finally gives full desktop performance it will be more than
enough - and it needs less power and is much cheaper than a 1.13 GHz. I
was right.

I don\'t want to bore you with all the benchmarks I did, but eat this:

Logic Platinum Verb test

800 MHz desktop PC, PC133 2-2-2 memory, CUSL2 board (i815) = 13.

800 MHz Inspiron 8000, PC100 2-2-2 memory, i815 = 8 (so far the
disappointing part).

866 MHz Inspiron 8100, PC133 2-2-2 memory, i815 = 20.

YES! 20! At 3 ms!

The new Tualatins seem to be really fast, and together with the 133 MHz
FSB this notebook easily outperfoms my desktop machine!

Ok, now the bad news: the shipped bios A02 has all the known bugs
(Fan/clicks). So still no recommendation from RME for the world\'s
fastest notebook...

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME

[blabla]

hey elle,

September 3rd has come and gone and the only BIOS upgrade on Dell\'s site is from version A13 (which I have already loaded) to version A16, which the release notes indicate only addresses battery recharging.

Seen any new info on fan interrupt BIOS upgrades?

[elle]

There is talk of a A14 which is (partly?) working. Sorry no more news. Stay tuned.

[elle]

The Dell fan problem solved with Micha Henze\'s fan control utility!!
http://www.geocities.com/micha_henze/i8kfangui.html (\"http://www.geocities.com/micha_henze/i8kfangui.html\")


A report form Mattias from RME.
Thx Mattias!
--------------------------------------------
Today I did latency tests on my 8100 (Bios A03) using Micha Henze\'s fan control utility. I added Windows 2000 SP2 (to the existing Win ME installation) and installed all W2k drivers from the Dell driver CD.

WinME:

Without this tool the Inspiron behaved as known. Random clicks and crackles when the Hammerfall DSP is set below 23 ms latency, and when the fans switch on/off one must choose 46 ms to gain reliable click free
performance. When I used the program to set one of the fans to slow this seemed to be sufficient to never let the BIOS control the fan any further. So the latency could be set to 23 ms. At 12 ms still random clicks, which are obviously not related to the fans but to other ACPI calls, occured.

Windows 2000:

Without this tool the Inspiron already behaved like a desktop. No clicks and crackles even at 1.5 ms latency (eat this!). But when the fans switch on/off one must choose 46 ms to gain reliable click free
performance. Now here the fan control tool totally cleaned up the system from any clicks! Seeing how the Inspiron did a 24 track project playback at 1.5 ms, while I used the LM4 and some other plugs plus doing ASIO software monitoring...I checked this for 20 minutes because I couldn\'t believe it - it was exactly what we all want to have! Fabulous!

Conclusion :

Under Win2000 and using Micha Henze\'s small tool the Inspiron is already the dream machine (remember my previous post about its calculation power and overall Plug-In performance?) news://news.x-networks.de/3B86EDD6.1733FFD%40t-online.de

Under WinME Dell needs not only to remove the fan problem, but to generally improve the ACPI/BIOS/mobo communication, to catch up with other manufacturers (6 ms click free...).

Regards
Matthias Carstens
RME