D830 Owner's Lounge

Just a quick question for you D830 owners :

I'm thinking of buying a D830, but..

I do a lot of work using pro audio cards which generally require a Texus instruments PCMCIA card controller for stable operation. Can someone confirm the type of PCMCIA card controller in the D830 ?

In XP/Vista go to Device Manager (view 'device by type') There should be an entry that says something like 'PCMCIA adapter'. The type of adapter should be listed.

Thanks

 

double post

 

Triple post !

Whoops

 

Mine has O2Micro OZ711EZ1 MemoryCardBus Controller

-j

 

Thanks for that - not exactly ideal for audio

 

But you also get a ExpressCard slot, and since express card is a REAL PCI express 1x interface, you might have a lot better response times with that one?


A possible dumb question: in the back, above the powered USB plug, there's a connector like I have never seen one. It has the case of a USB connector but inside on the right side it has a black bar of 4 small holes that probably take some sort of pins?

 

This is the powererd usb port. It's of 2 parts - one the USB and one the power plug.

 

Mhh weird, never seen a USB peripheral use that kind of connector, usually they just use the 500mA from powered USB

 

It's used for some of their D-Bay devices that need more than 500mA of power. Such as external HDD's (particularly, 3.5"'s) and so on. There's an interesting article over on ZDNet about similar devices from Buffalo. In the eventuality that the USB port their drives are plugged into are incapable of providing the needed power (somewhere around 800mA, I think), the additional power cable plugs into the drive and into another USB port in order to provide only the additional power (and not stream any data).

 

Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The O2 Micro chipset controls firewire, cardbus and PCI expresscard. Some are better than others at handling real-time audio buffers at low latencies. Can't really blame Dell as their laptops aren't exactly aimed at the pro audio market...

There's a huge 40 page thread about it here :
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=73829&highlight=firewire+audio+problems