XPS M1730's are completely unusable for music production software [Please try test]

Hello,

I'm really sad about this and not sure what my next move is going to have to be now.
I guess the Dell XPS series just aren't cut out as real workstations.

The XPS M1730's have terrible dpc latency, causing them to be unusable for music production. In general some laptops can have slightly higher DPC latencies than desktops, but the XPS M1730's latency is at a totally unacceptable level making it literally unusable.

Here's what it looks like:



..and this is how it runs with a fresh install, no software installed or running, nothing in the system tray, idle computer.

Each of those Yellow "spikes" means that the music software (Cubase, Ableton Live, Reaper) is interrupted and cannot continue a smooth mixing, and will be accompanied by some kind of pop or stutter.

The problem can be felt in regular software too, as a general latency, but it's easy to overlook it.

If you want to test, the tool can be downloaded at
http://www.thesycon.de/deu/latency_check.shtml

After spending thousands of dollars on what I perceived as a workstation class laptop-- the best I could find, it turns out that my new computer is as useful as a brick for the work I do. The XPS M1730's ACPI Power Management system is the cause. There's pops and jitters every 10 seconds.

Sure it's possible to play a song in Winamp or something, but that's because something like Winamp doesn't use any low latency, it plays back with a gigantic buffer. But for music production, you can't play a note on your midi keyboard and expect it to be acceptable to hear the sounds a half second later. Dell hasn't fixed this issue, because they likely think most "consumers" who just want to play an MP3, won't notice the deep flaws in the XPS motherboard going on behind the scenes.

I've tried everything I can to fix this problem: disabling speed switching, disabling Powermizer on nvidia with the powermizer tweak tool, upgrading drivers for nvidia, disabling WIFI in the bios, disabling *all the components* in the bios, etc. I'm pulling my hair out now. Still DPC latency problems.

After disabling almost every disable-able component in the Device Manager, the DPC latencies actually DO improve -- it gets smoothed out to a more steady green. Except now I can work on music for 2 minutes instead of 10 seconds, because there's still a nasty spike with 16000 or 5000 dpc latency every 2 minutes or every 1 minute instead of just every 10 seconds. And sometimes it just starts going crazy with heavy latency for no reason, even more than once per minute.

I'm sorry if I'm complaining too much, I'm just really stressed out about this cause I literally cannot do my work at all. I bought this XPS as my new music workstation.

Please help me and take some DPC latency screenshots on your XPS M1730 and and post them. Even if you don't do music production, it might be helpful to see if your computer is responding quickly AND running fast, not just running fast.

Thank you,
- Bubzle

 

Unfortunately most of the forum won't understand most of above. I only understand alittle as I have seen enough threads asking for audio notebook recommendation. With most notebooks you won't know how well they will work with audio production softwares until you've got it in your hands.

That said it will be nice for people to run the test to identify notebooks that have high/low latency.


EDIT: Here is mine. HP8510p (Same generation Santa Rosa chipset)



EDIT2: I have moved this to the hardware section for more replies. Everyone please run the test, for future reference. It will help people later on.

 

I've never had to do that, but I got that program you linked to and tried it out. I was getting about half yellow bars, so I turned off Bluetooth, wireless, unplugged my USB mouse and keyboard, and finally turned off my intergrated webcam even though it wasn't in use, and it got mostly green bars with a couple yellow here and there.
This is on a Gateway P-6831FX laptop.

I've never done music work like that though.

This is mine with everything turned on and plugged in again... mostly yellow but not high. I'm pretty sure I need to format, I've been on the same Vista install for almost 2 years now! :O

 

I have the same problem on my dell lappy, I've tried sending it back multiple times but Dell just returns it to me saying "No problems found" the audio is very choppy. It's Dell's crappy onboard audio driver or some kind of IRQ issue. There is no solution. I've tried everything including different OS's, drivers, programs, disabling various hardware components and many minor tweaks. Dells systems are simply incapable of producing good sound.

My DPC Latency graph looks just like your s does except the "not-spikes" are lower.

 

A single yellow bar means your music software is dead with stutters in the music. You can't even get 1 yellow bar.

To do music stuff, you must sustain ~200ms max, without interruptions.

Yellow is 1000 == 1 second latency on DPC

 

Also, Citizen86, please allow your test to run for a few more minutes till you see a red one.

btw.. Yellow is *very high* ... Yellow is 1000...
even 400 is high

music software needs 200

A computer working properly should look like this:

 

My desktop (I guess I beat you all so far ):

 

No offense, but why do I need to see a red one?

Also, I'm just wondering, because I am no music recorder and have never really done anything like that, but aren't there sound cards you can buy for that type of work? Maybe they only exist on desktop computers, but if that's all there is, then you should probably get a desktop if you're serious about it....

I just ran it for a couple minutes while typing this and doing some other work, peaks at 1890, so it's very close to red, but not quite....

Now I got one red bar at 2152. *shrug*

 

If your doing audio work shouldn't you be using an external sound card anyways?

 

My T500's DPC latency:

 

Using an external card doesn't help the problem, because the external card is reliant on the latency of the computer. So you need to have No-yellows for the external card to even be useful.

 

You're probably better off with a desktop integrated into a rack system with pro equipment like MOTU (even on software. Or...you could go (gasp) the Mac route as they seem very capable and don't use the crap Sigmatel or Realtek STAC 92xx cards which weren't made for pro audio.

I haven't done pro audio in a while but I tried to use ASIO capable cards always, and I used to love Turtle Beach cards...although now they've gone the way Jewel has inthe music world. Stop making good esoteric stuff, and just start making crap mainstream stuff. I partly blame this on the failure of Aureal A3d and the heavy investment they made with them to go more mainstream. Good luck1!!!!

 

I have a desktop with RME Hammerfall and run at 1.5ms latency -- It's great when I'm in my studio, that's not the issue here. The issue is a laptop that I can do even basic music stuff on.

I expected the M1730 to be even usable. Honestly I can't even run 2 plugins without getting tons of clicks and pops, and with this kind of CPU power it should be able to run 100 plugins.

 

shutdown any av software, indexing, and shadow copy. try again. Shutting down unused/null function devices won't buy you much, you've not given us any idea of what else might be running on the machine.

 

As said in the original post, newsposter, I am not running any software. 0% cpu usage. Tested on Dell Vista restore disk, also tested on a 120MB nLite xp disk, 13 processes and 42MB of ram usage in total. And this issue effects all the Dell's XPS's M1730's. I've even tried with 10 services running. It's a hardware problem, not "antivirus" (i don't / never have used any software like that. you don't use that stuff on music rigs)

As I said, I've tried everything, even removing all programs from the dell Vista disk install in Add/remove until nothing's left, not even drivers.

 

Besides this audio work, does the system feel snappy otherwise? Before you give up, you could try doing a clean install of the OS.

(What are your system specs btw?)

Then again, what others have said is probably true, I can't see the onboard audio on ANY laptop being any good for serious audio work.

Might these help? (Sorry, I don't know too much about audio issues.)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829999005

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16829121001

 

usapatriot, Yes, I have tested on a clean-install 120MB nLite XP disk with 10 services, 13 processes running, and 42 MB of ram usage.
Same problem.

The products you linked can't do anything, because the Computer's latency is the weakest link. They cannot improve the computer's latency. Instead, the DPC latency will just interrupt the 3rd party soundcard's driver, instead of interrupting the builtin audio.

 

When you talk about the computers latency, what do you mean?

I can't see your CPU or RAM bottlenecking you, maybe your HDD?

 

I have the same problem on my dell lappy, I've tried sending it back multiple times but Dell just returns it to me saying "No problems found" the audio is very choppy. It's Dell's crappy onboard audio driver or some kind of IRQ issue. There is no solution. I've tried everything including different OS's, drivers, programs, disabling various hardware components and many minor tweaks. Dells systems are simply incapable of producing good sound.

 

Well, not to be a jerk or anything, but unfortunately you didn't really buy a workstation with that XPS 1730, you bought a gaming laptop... It's hard to say which laptop would be better for your circumstances though... that's really something you'd have to scour the internet for or raid a Best Buy and see which laptop is decent for latency....

 

Have you tried locking the CPU to full speed? It might be throttling down incorrectly.

I dont have my notebook here at work but heres what i got for my desktop with a M-Audio Pro Delta 66:

 

I guess tomorrow morning I will test it with my dell precision M6400.

 

Yes, tried. No dice. Also tried turning off the Intel Dynamic Speed boost.

I've tried almost everything

 

nlite could be the problem, did you make that disk or was it 'given' to you? nlite is good for a few things, but it's way to easy to build an OS that just doesn't work right.

 

Had similar problems with my XPS 1640. Installed new bios and a few updated drivers from Dell that were just released and now my red spikes have turned to this:

<object width='425' height='344'><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/YOI5U2uGBQs&hl=en&fs=1"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/YOI5U2uGBQs&hl=en&fs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" width='425' height='344'></embed></object>

 

syphic, you are still getting 500 spikes

that makes only high latencies usable but at least the software is workable at all

 

Not to rain on anyones "workstation-class" laptop parade...

My $550- HP G70 (Pavillion, consumer class) notebook is running with ALL of the default services/tasks running from Vista SP1, Office 2007 Enterprise, Adobe CS3, and others. Using the test program the OP pointed to, my machine does a constant 50us with very occasional spikes to 950 and no red spikes at all. I'll get a screenshot up tomorrow along with one from TaskManager.

Have you actually gone into Control Panel and locked the whole machine into a high-performance power scheme?

And yes, an external sound processer could very well help with your machines 'latency'. By taking the audio/MIDI processing off the mobo/chipset and doing it outboard, you free up internal resources by using the Laptop strictly as a control head, not as a processor.

You don't know how 'good' Dells BIOS or audio drivers might or might not be. Have you looked anywhere besides Dell for updated device drivers? I'd also suspect the Nv drivers for that video card. Nv has been earning itself a reputation lately for less than competent work in this area.

It would also be helpful if you were to post the exact/complete hardware and OS specs for your machine.

 

A 950 is the same thing as a red spike. 900, 950, 1000, 1050-- whatever, it's all the same (Horrible.) 950 is fail and means the computer is not fit for music. The "graph" line divider the original author of dpclat chose to split 1000 at red was designed around simple streaming/movie playback/audioplayback smoothness, NOT recording. Desktop boards have dpclat's of 15 - 30 with no spikes. For music production, 500 is red, 300 is yellow, 200 is green. Consistency is key. If you get a single 950 spike then music apps stops playback and you get a glitch / unrecoverable error till you stop playback and restart. That's not gonna fly in a session. It can't even happen once. Imagine getting playback glitches where you start hearing a bunch of popping only "once every few minutes, a 950 spike!" ...

Getting a 500 spike ruins the day, meaning you have to run at very high latency and can't do realtime recording. 950 is disaster. Your HP has problems, too.

 

Not operating as *you* say it should <=> 'problems'. Laptops are not desktop workstations no matter how much they cost or how much we wish they might be.

Also, without knowing the exact methodology and logic the test program author is using, it's impossible to come to precise conclusions from the pretty colored lines.

Sounds to me like you've made up your mind on the subject and aren't in the mood to help us help you with troubleshooting. You've got yourself into a situation that no one here can yet duplicate. You say that you get occasional transients to 16000 (1.6 seconds?) and steady-state spikes of 2-4000 while those of us who've posted here are hard pressed to show any spikes >1000 and none to the levels you see.

Without knowing a lot more about how your system is setup, it's difficult to offer you help of any kind other than a forum for venting.

 

No, that is incorrect.

The external soundcard does nothing to lower the latency. Zero, zilch, nada. It increases latency. The basic dpc latency is the same with or without an external soundcard. You cannot change the facts and magically solve Dell hardware issues by hooking up yet another device. The dpclat is what it is, and it works in a "weakest link" manner. Adding the external firewire soundcard increases dpc latency by about 30.

So add 30+average of 300+ massive spikes of 16,000. Means Cubase dies once per minute. What you don't realize is that the computer cannot even reliably play back 4 tracks, let alone drive another Firewire device.

These high (16,000 dpclat spikes) happen with sound *disabled* in device manager. We're talking idle computer. The benchmark DPCLAT picture I showed in my first shot was a picture with sound, wireless, and various USB devices disabled. ...And you can't get any "better" than disabled. 'Disabled' is the best-case scenario.

If you read the guidelines for RME external soundcard, a dpclat of ~100 to 200 is required to utilize the external card.

And I have that card -- it's the best one money can buy, an RME Fireface, which builds the asio drivers into a custom programmed FPGA chip to offload the cpu, and it's unusable with the XPS M1730 due to the XPS's massive red spikes.

 

And what are the hardware recommendations for Cubase, et al, and have you been in communication with both RME and Steinberg regarding this problem?

 

Have you tried enabling/disabling RAID?
Have you tried diabling Bluetooth option?
And maybe update driver, eg, wifi driver, and GPU driver to 185.85?

Also I take it you done this on AC power?

Maybe switching off the monitor, and link to an external monitor?

 

Yes, I have tried that.

Test 1)

* disabled Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
* verified power profiles on maximum performance
* disabled speed switch and dynamic cpu speed settings in bios
* disabled LAN power management and other power management settings
* used the NVidia "PowerMizer Switch" 3rd party reg tweaker to disable speed throttling on powermizer which can cause a hiccup
* updated to latest nvidia drivers
* used the MINIMAL vista services registry file (here)

RESULT:

Significantly lower overall dpc latencies, but it didn't tame the spikes. Random choo-choo trains of nasty latency appearing out of nowhere and going nuts and killing the recording session.


Test 2)

uninstalled nvidia drivers
uninstalled Intel raid drivers
used MINIMAL services reg
disabled dynamic switching in bios
disabled Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery
disabled NVIDIA GeForce 8700M GT
disabled MATA BD-RE UJ-220 ATA Device
disabled Ricoh Memory Stick Controller
disabled Ricoh SD/MMC Host Controller
disabled Ricoh xD-Picture Card Controller
disabled RICOH OHCI Compliant IEEE 1394 Host Controller
disabled Broadcom NetXtreme 57xx Gigabit Controller
disabled Intel(R) Wireless WiFi Link 4965AGN
disabled SDA Standard Compliant SD Host Controller
disabled SigmaTel High Definition Audio Codec
disabled Microsoft iSCSI Initiator
disabled USB Root Hub
disabled ALL Intel(R) ICH8 Family USB devices
<rebooted>
next, disabled all possible devices in the BIOS

RESULT:

Even lower dpc latency, with random bursts of a bunch of yellow spikes appearing out of nowhere.

16,000us Red spikes gone when disabling the NVIDIA card. Of course graphics was so slow it was unusable.


Test 3)

* Installed Windows XP
* Disabled WiFi and every device I could bare to live without (Ricoh, etc)
* Opened Process Explorer, and edited "system threads", suspended ACPI.SYS kernel thread.

Like this:



RESULT:

DPC latency of 80 with no fluctuations or spikes, ever. Maximum latency 100.
Of course, suspending ACPI.sys causes all sorts of issues, and you can't shut down or do basically anything with it suspended. So you have to:

a) suspend acpi.sys
b) start music session
c) don't do any weird stuff now and hope laptop doesn't overheat
d) end music session
e) unsuspend acpi.sys

 

Not sure if it's a mistake with the labeling but "μs" is a microsecond (millionth of a second) not a millisecond (ms - thousandth of a second). So 1000μs is 1ms not 1 second.

I don't get any red bars on my 1700 (with Wifi and BT off) but do get mainly yellow up to near the maximum but it doesn't seem to affect my latency using Cubase Studio 4 and an Echo Audiofire 2 (think I'm running my buffers at 128).

 

Here's a shot of the Gigabyte EX58-UD4P Desktop Motherboard:



This value does not change.

 

There's mines (XPS M1730)

I have the latest BIOS version (A10, as you can see in the CPU-Z window). I run the test with some devices/functions disabled in Windows 7. No processes from Task Manager (or anything else) was stopped.
I am not using any drivers from Dell's website.
If I enable all devices (even that I never use), I have latencies between 70 and 400.

BUT! I have huge DPC latency skipes ONLY when video cards are downclocking (NOT! upclocking), this is happening because of PowerMixer, if I disable it or keep my cards at a constant frequency, then everything is back to normal.

 

Bublze - On your ASIO controller for your audio software, what does it say the total turn around latency is? (in+out latency)?

 

I ran your test out of interest


Heres without the WIFI adaptor enabled:




And then I enabled it - uh oh....



And thats running a "heavy" server OS as well.

You should have a read about Deferred Procedure Calls, and the DPC Queue, to try and understand this better because for the most part, this problem is caused by the drivers either not talking to other drivers properly, or being written in such a fashion that they're constantly filling the DPC Queue - unless a board or BIOS is really badly engineered - this is a software (driver) issue.

There are ways in the kernel that you can take snapshots of the DPC queue to see what drivers have "code waiting" in it at any one time, maybe the DPC Latency guy should consider adding this to his util - I don't think its that hard to do once you set a global flag to list the DPC queue objects...

But then after all this - if session time is that important and can't be ruined by hardware that doesn't match your needs, I would simply return the M1730 and do a little R&D on what portable machines serve the music industry best - i'm sure it's not a wheel that needs reinventing for you.

TimeWriter - did you have wifi disabled when you took that screen? - and also can you link us to the driver you have installed for it - if indeed it was enabled - i'd be interested to try it.

 

The tool to do that is called RATT V3 by Microsoft

 

Wireless and bluetooth were enabled when I took that shoot.
Like I said, I am NOT using any drivers from Dell's website.
I will make soon a new thread where I will explain how you should install drivers if you got a Broadcom WiFi card.

 

try that tool then Bublze - so you can properly troubleshoot which driver has most code waiting in the queue.

Which wifi card do you have timewriter - and where did you get the driver for it? just tell me that and can I figure out the rest thanks.

 

I have the same card as you, the Dell 1505.

 

errr.....link us all to the driver then so we can fix the dpc latency?

 

Well, I don't remember from where I downloaded the drivers, so I've just uploaded it on rapidshare, you can find it here.
You will need to uninstall your drivers what you're using at the moment and install the new one, but pay big attention! You need to install it with Have-Disk method, otherwise it won't work! This driver is for other wireless Broadcom cars, but it will work with all Broadcom wireless cards.

I am sorry for my poor english.

 

thanks i'll try it later and see how it goes.

edit2 - i was doing it wrong - have engaged brain and done it right now it works perfectly - my dpc latency sits at about 60 now with everything enabled.

nice one TimeWriter - I reckon my pc will be cooler throughout the day now - not to mention perform better.

edit3 - have just uninstalled everything and reinstalled the dell driver so I can have the DELL wireless tray utility - then I installed your driver over the top of the dell one TimeWriter - and it works fine with the tray utility, and the dpc latency is still low and stable.

The OP should try this driver for sure.

 

Personally I think you (Bublze) are expecting quite a lot to be running at 1.5ms latency. That's pretty ambitious for any system but I'd like to think you could run between 4-6ms. If you can hear the difference between 1.5ms and 6ms I'd be surprised. Few people can hear 10ms of latency and many can't hear way above that.

 

Glad to hear it.
But, how did you have so low lacencies? Mine's sits at about 180 and goes up to 400 sometimes... with all devices enabled (under Windows 7 X64 RC build 7100).

 

This thread has me really worried

I run cubase studio 4 through a lexicon interface. I expect at least 15ms totaly lag max, preferably better...

My current desktop (4 years old) can do 10ms fine. I am worried people are struggling to get it low.

Should I not buy the SXPS 13?

 

The OP seems to be the only one to still be having major problems after setting it up properly, I wouldn't extrapolate to the whole of the XPS line. One thing I would say, though, is that the SXPS 13 is not an audio workstation nor an incredibly high-end laptop. It probably wouldn't be suitable for professional audio work.

@Bublze: To be honest with you, the XPS series really aren't workstation laptops. The XPS 1730 is a consumer gaming laptop which was intended to "pwn" people in crysis rather than to record music. You should go for a Precision if you want a workstation.

 

Just to clarify... u = microsecond, 1000 microseconds = 1ms...

At least for my experience with cubase (not much) the problem is spikes not having 200-300u