[PlanetCCRMA] Thinkpad T61P questions

[plutek-infinity]

greetings!

i've been struggling a bit here to get low-latency audio functional on a T61P -- i've tried various distros, and am now wondering whether the Planet might work better. i noticed in another thread that Fernando has a T61....

my issues, in a nutshell, are these:

1. i need to use an external monitor, keyboard and mouse
AND
2. i need no-xruns, solid low-latency

so far, it seems like these may be mutually exclusive because this laptop has an NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M -- in order to get an external display active, the proprietary nvidia driver is needed, but that seems to rule out an rt kernel, since nvidia has not built an rt binary module. 

on SUSE 11.0, with the jacklab packages, there's an rt/nvidia pair in the jengelh repository -- it's fully functional, but causes much higher cpu load in audio apps than with a default kernel and the proprietary nvidia binary. with the latter pair, performance is very good at 5.8ms latency, but i'd like to get it down to 2.9. 

the Sidux distro also does quite well with its default kernel and the nvidia binary, but still not as well as i'd like.

is there a solution already existing in the Planet, or any other clues?

thanks very much!

-- 
.pltk.