awfulgrace Posted February 19, 2006 Share Posted February 19, 2006 I'm looking into buying a MOTU Traveler soon, and have a question regarding a comment made in Keyboard magazine regarding this product. In the Audition review of the MOTU Traveler in the Feb. '06 issue, it says that bus power comes at the cost of reduced computer horsepower. I wasn't aware that firewire bus powering used CPU resources and am not able to find anything on the web regarding this. I did a quick test on my system using my friends PreSonus Inspire (my FW410 is out of commision) and I didn't notice a difference in my activity meter between bus & wall power - but I wasn't really pushing the interface that hard and I would assume that the Traveler uses more power than the Inspire. So my test was far from conclusive of anything. So - my question is whether it's the case that bus powering will drain CPU headroom, or is the horsepower mentioned in the review regarding something other than processor demand (battery life, etc..)? I'm just curious before I make the plunge and get one, and I couldn't find an answer to this elsewhere. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Byrdman Posted February 19, 2006 Share Posted February 19, 2006 It will run down the battery faster. I don't believe any computers throttle cpu speed because of auxillary power needs. Many will reduce performance to save power when the computer is not working hard but when you are pumping audio I doubt that would kick in. So I think they meant to say battery life rather than compute performance. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bob Rinker Posted February 19, 2006 Share Posted February 19, 2006 Originally posted by awfulgrace: I'm looking into buying a MOTU Traveler soon, and have a question regarding a comment made in Keyboard magazine regarding this product. In the Audition review of the MOTU Traveler in the Feb. '06 issue, it says that bus power comes at the cost of reduced computer horsepower. I wasn't aware that firewire bus powering used CPU resources and am not able to find anything on the web regarding this. I did a quick test on my system using my friends PreSonus Inspire (my FW410 is out of commision) and I didn't notice a difference in my activity meter between bus & wall power - but I wasn't really pushing the interface that hard and I would assume that the Traveler uses more power than the Inspire. So my test was far from conclusive of anything. So - my question is whether it's the case that bus powering will drain CPU headroom, or is the horsepower mentioned in the review regarding something other than processor demand (battery life, etc..)? I'm just curious before I make the plunge and get one, and I couldn't find an answer to this elsewhere. There will be a slight amount of processor time used by the "driver" for the firewire interface, so it is probably true that a small amount of CPU time will be used. However, this should be negligible - the interface and driver designers are going to use a design that is matched to the type of device. Since firewire is fast, they will use a fast type of interface, such as DMA. It would make no sense to have a fast device attached that hogs the CPU to the point where it can't utilize the speed of the device. I also think they might be talking about battery power, which doesn't directly effect CPU processing "power." - Bob Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
awfulgrace Posted February 20, 2006 Author Share Posted February 20, 2006 Yeah - I figured they were referring to battery life instead of CPU load. Thanks for the responses! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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