ASrock Z170 OC Formula and Thunderbolt integration

Just did another check on the thunderbolt card and ASRock must have updated the website as the OC Formula is now supported.

Audio Stew,
   I too was looking to setup my new ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+ and Thunderbolt 2 AIC to work with my newly purchased Resident Audio T4 Audio Interface  but have yet to get this working properly yet.  I have some clues about setup from the manual of course as well as some other ideas from the forums about the ideal PCIe slot to use, but still not getting it to work properly.  It seems to be detected properly by the BIOS (can change settings for it which appears to alter its behavior) and the driver that allows you to "enable" Thunderbolt devices from the OS that sits in the system tray also seems to be working properly BUT when I plug in a standard TB 1 external drive or the T4 audio interface, they do not seem to be detected, even when the correct drivers for these devices are installed.  Hopefully this isn't a driver incompatibility error for the T4 audio interface which is supposed to work with Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 without issues.  The T4 interface plugs right into my Macbook Air laptop via Thunderbolt and works great with no fuss.  Looks like Thunderbolt and this card will require more massaging to get it working.  Just be warned this card is likely not plug and play for the audio solution you are looking for but if/when it works the low latency through the TB interface is going to be great as I can vouch for that with this audio interface on my Macbook Air.  Will probably put up another post specifically about this, but my time to troubleshoot issues like this is limited so my progress on these issues suffers as well.

~Dubhead

Dubhead:

Did you have any luck with your installation?

I've been running the T4 via the ASRock AIC card with thunderbolt 2 capability.


General Question to Anyone Who can help:


While the sound that comes through is the best I've heard on a PC, I do find weird latency issues, but I'm suspecting these stem from the CPU getting jammed with microsoft and security software services that report and saturate the TCP IP, and lock up the i7 7700K CPU with crap.

Honestly, without this, this combination of T4 and AIC card seems to work really well.

I know the CPU is not overloaded as the individual cores don't even break 25% utilization, yet once I have a lot of tracks (say 50-100) all with compressors, EQ, and other processing (Reverb and Delay send tracks that cover buses esp) gets my DAW to the 100% mark, while the latency issues are mainly TCP IP and some other ridiculous and non essential Microsoft services (which I try to turn off and even went into the registry to kill some), and things like vsmon.exe for Zone Alarm security.

At the same time, if I have much loaded up, this also drives the recording latency up.  If I shut down everything that is unnecessarily in  task-manager, startup, etc, this helps, but still I have to streamline my recording projects with minimal processing to get the latency to an acceptable level.  This kind of defies the benefit of Thunderbolt 2, and makes me think there is a software or weird mix of factors effecting the audio latency.

Any ideas on this please?

Dubhead wrote: eComposer,    Glad to hear you had better luck with your T4....you must be running on Windows 8.1 as I understand the drivers are completely incompatible with Windows 10 and Resident Audio will not be doing further development to assist that issue.  Had thought about making a Windows 8.1 VM and seeing if that would work but it may introduce a host of other complications.  May also get a separate cheapo SSD and install Windows 8.1 directly there and boot to that drive and see if I can't get the RA T4 working with the AIC card after all.      On another note, still have not had any luck with the AIC card recognizing any storage drives using Thunderbolt that are connected to it either.  Really not sure why there are so many issues and it has been some time since I spent time with it troubleshooting and had moved onto other things.     You may be on to something regarding why the latency starts to get worse with other things running in the OS.  It shouldn't require that you shut everything down just to lower latency though...seems like bad driver software IMO.     On a positive note, I still am able to use the RA T4 box with my MacBook Air without any issues and very very low latency....just had hoped to be able to move between machines and OS's originally. Dubhead

Hi Dubhead,

Actually I'm running the latest version of Windows 10 64 Home, and recently took the plunge with the "Creator Edition".

The T4 works well, in fact very well, and never had an issue with the AIC card.  I note a lot of people have issues if the BIOS is not configured correctly.  If you want to have a crack at getting it to run on PC again, I'd be glad to help if I can.

Key thing is to update the BIOS to the latest version if possible (Helps if you go Kaby Lake i7 7700K for example).

You MUST enable Thunderbolt there.  You also must use the AIC card in the specified slot that is capable and connect to the specified header to make this work, AND run the Thunderbolt software to make this happen, AND install the T4 Windows driver.

Interesting to hear Resident aren't updating the driver.  It seems to work fine in Windows 10 for me interestingly.

Please note though, I'm running the ASRock Z170 Extreme 7+ board (thinking of upgrading to the Z370 class soon, apparently there are real advantages including better CPU performance).

For me, with Music mixing with multiple channels (50-100 or more sometimes), then you need the I/O grunt to try to run sequentially real time, vs background rendering, two very different things.  This actually means you need to avoid anything that can lock up a core. 

When this happens, it only needs to lock out and delay one key thing to screw the whole real time playback/recording which is a real pain, as often it is the most stupid Microsoft dumb monitoring/reporting BS driver/service that just happens to lock up one key core and destroy everything and cause pops, cracks and freezing. 

I HATE that, and get pretty annoyed when I see TCP IP flood with Microsoft and other irrelevant and annoying activities that saturate the I/O for NO good reason other than to screw up my DAW.  So ridiculous, and very hard to eradicate without causing other problems.  I don't like to have to mess with the registry if I can avoid it, and frankly I shouldn't have to do this.

I couldn't give a stuff about a stupid Microsoft monitoring service reporting a minor crash of an irrelevant Microsoft service I don't want or need, and why they make it so hard to remove such glaring redundancy and performance sucking badly written code is an affront to anyone wanting to mix/record/master music.  It's like they are deliberately sabotaging us!  LOL

I wish there was a "nuke" program you could run that would permanently remove all redundant and unnecessary crap so that I can just run my DAW optimally with no page or I/O issues caused by this layer of irrelevant and counterproductive drivers and services that lock up my CPU and network!  :)