USB 3.0 warning!

    Hi


    After having a few problems getting the virus plugin to work with Sonar X1(d) (mainly due to my Creative X-Fi Titanium card not supporting the ASIO buffer size) I tried the ASIO4all driver with success.


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    Note: for everyone with an X-Fi Titanium


    It turned out that having the X-Fi in the 'Entertainment' or 'Game' modes meant the Virus ASIO driver would be greyed out.
    I then found out the way to enable the Virus ASIO Driver in Sonar was to set the card to 'Audio Creation' mode then all was fine.
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    Now I was in Sonar using the Virus ASIO driver and everything was fine (USB MIDI, Audio and Latency).
    Reading all the USB problems (Macs and PC's) I struggled to find why so many people are having problems although I can't speak for the Mac fraternity.


    Then today the nightmare began when I fired up Sonar.


    First the plugin failed to load in Sonar saying 'communication error' and it would drop out of Windows USB recognition and become an 'unknown device' with a big yellow exclamation on it.
    Then I would have to power cycle & reset the Virus, reboot the PC (whilst removing all USB/power leads etc) and it would do it all over again as soon as I started Sonar - aaaahhhh !! 'a 2 week old virus is going back to the shop' thoughts were occurring.


    The clue lay in when I tried to update the Virus using the 'Control Center' application - it would get some way then freeze and the Virus would be left in an unfinished state.


    You know what I am going to say from the title of the thread - now with my PC it was tricky to find a USB 2.0 port, I only have two of them on the front (all the rear ones are USB 3.0).
    My PC is a reasonble spec (by my standards!) i7/8Gb/ASUS ROG Maximus board, Win 7 (x64) etc etc so I knew it could not be a performance issue and besides it worked when I first got it.


    The problems disappeared when I unplugged the USB 3.0 connector from the back and then plugged it in at the front (USB 2.0) which is what I probably (randomly) used when I first connected it but had forgotten.


    The moral is, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise, is that USB 3.0 may be stated to be completely compatible with USB 2.0 (which it normally is as I have everything else I use such as mouse, keyboard printer etc in USB 3.0) but just NOT with the Virus driver (version 4.53.00 with Win 7 x64 at least).The USB 3.0 chipset on my board is mad by Renesas (NEC).


    To confirm this theory I tried the Virus with another PC with a motherboard that used the USB 3.0 Renesas chipset and Win 7 (x64) and got the the same results.



    I am no expert but I would tentatively advise the Access firmware guys to look at USB 3.0 compatibility in Win 7 (x64) before releasing V5 as there is definitely something amiss there.


    Cheers

    My motherboard with the same NEC based USB 3 chipset does not work well with the Virus either. It either never connects, or even worse, will lock up my computer if I turn on the Virus while it is in the USB 3 port. This is with the latest bios and drivers installed for my system. Unplugging it from the USB 3 ports and into a 2 port solves this.

    Zitat von Marc

    we have generally good results with USB 3 compatible motherboards. please contact support.
    best, marc


    It was an old issue which new mainboard chipset like p55-h55-h57 with usb 3.0 doesn't provide full bandwidth for usb1.1/2.0 for TI !!!!
    my old usb m-audio sound card doesn't work even with usb3.0 correctly.

    Zitat von Fringe

    My motherboard with the same NEC based USB 3 chipset does not work well with the Virus either. It either never connects, or even worse, will lock up my computer if I turn on the Virus while it is in the USB 3 port. This is with the latest bios and drivers installed for my system. Unplugging it from the USB 3 ports and into a 2 port solves this.




    I'm going to chip in and say that I totally agree.


    The main problem though is that the chipsets require software to run USB 3 spec, and it's that software that is a problem rather than the chipset itself.




    After building an absolute monster of a pc daw, adding sonar x1 and a virus ti2, I was totally shocked to my boots at how s**t the whole thing ran. It took two weeks of vacation time from work and then a further month or 2 of weekends to get the whole thing working, or at least workable.




    The one single thing I did that improved things the most, was to take the NEC (aka Renesas) USB 3 driver software and throw it into the bin and then put my foot in that bin and stamp down hard. It is an absolute disgrace of a piece of software and really dented my MB vendors chance of another sale from me in the future.




    The problem is that the software has latency built in on purpose - ie - it recieves a communication at the port then reverts to a coded pause before moving on. That's no problem for most users, they wont even notice, but for music, forget it.
    Everytime the Virus tried to communicate with TI it would invoke a pause in the Renesas software.




    So, obviously I'm running USB 2 now, from the chipsets, no software middleman, and it works.