two 2496 cards, is it any better?

[mozaicman]

I have a pentium 2.8ghz 4gb ram windows xp system that I just peiced together from used parts, I want to run two 2496 audiophiles together, in sync, and wanted to know how this is done and if it unburdens the cpu from excessive vst demands from plugins etc.... I am going to do this in Sony Acid pro 5.0. if this works and the cpu is further unburdened my inserting multiple cars, I was going to forego a purchase of another competitors pci effects card (I wanted to get the lowest latency with highest performance) any thoughts??

[JA]

Installing a second Audiophile 24/96 card isn't going to do anything to improve your CPU performance; the advantage of installing a second Delta card is the additional Inputs/Outputs. The Delta cards have native low latency high performance ASIO drivers. You can free up some of the burden on the CPU by increasing the buffer size.

[estambre]

Hello.

What happens when you install a second identic card? Are they treated as one?

And a different M-Audio card? Will the two be simultaneously useable from my DAW? I've ordered a Profire 610 after returning an Alesis Multimix8 Firewire because it only received a stereo bus from the PC. Will it be useable from the DAW at the same time as my 2496?
What about a card from a different manufacturer?

Thanks

System:

Win XP SP3
Intel Core 2 - 2.13 GHz
2 GB RAM

[JA]

You can install up to 4 Delta cards (excluding Delta 44 because it lacks S/PDIF I/O for sync'ing) in one system, however, you cannot use different interfaces (like a Delta card and a FireWire interface).

With multiple Delta cards installed, they all use the same driver, and you can select among the installed cards in the Delta control panel to adjust the settings. If you install multiple identical cards they should be identified as 1, 2, etc; and by name if using different cards. Pro Tools does support multiple interfaces, however, applications such as Cubase and Ableton Live do.

[estambre]

Hello and thanks for your reply.

JA, you probably mean :

"Cubase and Ableton Live do not (support different cards)"

Thanks again