Quick question about an old product

My main edit suite took a massive power surge and every single component inside is fried. I'm trying to cobble together a temporary system to limp me through until replacement hardware arrives and I have a quick question.

I have an older Decklink SP card laying around... will it work on windows 7 with Adobe Master Collection CS4? And if so, where could I snag drivers...or does this card use the same driver set as all the newer decklink cards?

[Sarah Jones]

Hi Matt,

The DeckLink SP has been out of production for quite a few years now and was never tested on Windows 7. It does use the same driver core as our current cards, but we've not tested or certified it to work with the current version of the driver. Also, CS4 hasn't been tested in quite a while either. The last version of the driver that states support for CS4 is DeckLink 7.9.6. According to the readme file associated with that driver, it should work on Windows 7. This would be a good jumping off point to start trying to get that card working on your system.

You can locate the archived drivers for our cards via our Support page. When you input your information and reach a page with the current Desktop Video driver, there will be a link for archived drivers directly to the right of that. DeckLink 7.9.6 can be found on page 3. This link should get you to the right place: http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/support ... rue&os=win

[Chris Pearse]

Hi Matt,

I saw you had posted the same question elsewhere. As Sarah says, in theory the card may well work, but hasn't been tested. But as discussed in the other forum, there is a limitation with the PCI version of the older DeckLink cards, where they will not work with more than 4GB of RAM installed.

Because they were designed before addressing more than 4GB was common, they will not work when more than a total of 4GB RAM is available in the system. But this also includes other types of memory such as VRAM. If you were to have 4GB of RAM in Win7 64bit, you would see 4GB available, but anything like VRAM pushes it over 4GB, and the DeckLink SP would stop working.

PCIe versions of the older DeckLink cards should not have this same problem however, it only affects PCI as far as I am aware.

I saw your post in the other area, thanks for responding!

So it all boils down to luck? Considering the week I'm having I'm not hopeful...

If I have an older card with PCIe the edge connector is going to be smaller to fit in a PCIe 1x slot, right?

[Chris Pearse]

The PCIe connector of the older cards are both electrically and mechanically a PCIe x1 connector, so it will fit into a x1 slot.

It doesn't really look like a PCIe card but I've gotten pulled into another project and can't really try anything out until Sunday.

I was hoping I could post the info on the card in here and someone could look it up if that's possible? If it isn't possible then no big deal, I'll just try it myself on Sunday.

Blackmagic Design ©2003
DecklinkSP
Serial #34882
BMD-PCB3 rev.E

Thanks