Driver problem since 5.1.1

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Felix,

Our engineers have been working over Christmas and the New Year and I think the next release you will see later this month will address the issues you have raised. Please also note that Dell Workstations are not certified for use with DeckLink cards and are currently unsupported by Blackmagic Design.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Felix Dames]

Hi Luke,

nice to know you are working on stable drivers! Thanks!

I am a bit confused about the certification with DELL products like the precision workstation 670 which I own.
https://www.adobeopenhd.com/certified_solutions/
https://www.adobeopenhd.com/certified_solutions/dellohdcertsummary.pdf

I am working with the dell 670 since April 2005! It works fine for me and my clients in SD mode in conjunction with a Sony digital BetaCAM Deck / Sony DV Recorder all over SDI connections with house clock sync generator. Firewire video connections like hdv work too.
My opinion: why shouldn’t it work? The dell presision 670 have the right mainboard chipset Intel 7525 the disk drives (SCSI Raid0) are fast enough and the PCIX bus have two diffrent busses for real 100Mhz per PCIX Slot!

Maby I am wrong and there are limitation or I forgot something importend?!
But then question of the day:
DELL is one of the biggest and largest computer manufactor and the cheapest one, so wouldn’t it be importend for Black Magic Design to support a company like DELL or at least the workstation 670?
And when you are right and that workstation is unsupported why are so many video companies out there who sell the Black Magic Design cards in combination with DELL Workstation 670?

I don’t know?!?

I only started this post to tell people who have problems with BMD products that it could be importened to keep certifications in mind espacially for drivers.

Regards,

Felix Dames

http://www.felixdames.de
http://www.redsun-berlin.de

[Bill Buchanan]

Felix:

Very well said. When it comes to the alternative systems (non-AVID), I’m not sure which rule should apply: “You get what you pay for.” or “You don’t get what you pay for.”

Bill Buchanan
Buchanan Film Co.

[Sameer Shrivastava]

Hi,
Very rightly said about dell systems.
I am also using a del sc1420 server since dec 2005
Dual xeon 2.8, 800 fsb
3 gb ram
3 sata 1 disks raid giving 165mbps/145mbs
6600 graphic card
without any problem
(except one driver realted problem of audio sync on master, which lot of other people have, having even more robust systems and even g5)

other wise system works rock solid. initally i used the ati 16mb pci card which came with the system without any problms. But now i have installed a 16x pci express n vidia 6600 on the 8x slot. though i have to file the slot to make it accept it. The card work fine.

I guess blackmagic does not certify dell systems because most of them does not have a 16x pci express slot used for graphic cards, except 670.

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Felix,

OpenHD have certified PC’s from both HP and Dell whereas we have only certified DeckLink cards for use with HP PC’s. The reason for not certifying the Dells is that we received many customer reports regarding the Dell Precision Workstations 650 & 670. Some customers had no problems and found they worked brilliantly. Others could not start up their PC’s after installing a DeckLink card along with other PCI cards, especially some models of SATA cards and also non-NVIDIA graphics cards. Some of these PC’s shipped with NVIDIA cards (and worked fine) and others shipped with other cards and did not always work well. The exact driver version for the graphics cards also seemed to be very important.

The problem for us was that even though there were just two models of these PC’s, the components inside seemed to vary and so we were unable to say that DeckLink cards would work with a particular model of Dell PC as one Dell Precision Workstation 670 could have different components to another Dell Precision Workstation 670.

In short, some of these PC’s work very well but others did not. We had no easy way to determine whether a customer’s Dell Precision Workstation would work well with DeckLink cards and hence the decision not to support them even though they are great machines for many purposes.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design