Neximage 5 OS requirements

[slim80]

Hi

Im about to purchase a neximage solar system imager and have come across a story of the camera not working with AMD processors.Just wondering if anyone one has run one on a AMD.Celestron say the min is a Pentium 4.I have Acer 5250 laptop AMD dual core processorE450 AMD Radeon HD 6320 graphics.

Cheers

[xtreemchaos]

ive got a neximage5 it runs on my amd fx6100 chip+r7 gpu desktop ive got w8.1 on it,my laptop is a intel so thats not a lot of help to you,but if it works on a amd pc it should work on you laptop,i hope this has been some help.clear sky for all.charl.

[damnut]

I have just looked at the specs on the manual. Your laptop should cope fine, connection is via a usb 2.0 . The spec is P4 2.0GHz and your chip is dual 1.65GHz and min is 1Gb of ram.  It is compatible with xp onwards , I cannot imagine that it would be incompatible with an AMD processor running standard Windows environment. If you have only got 1Gb on board it would benefit from another SO DIMM .

[slim80]

Thanks for the help and info guys @Damnut so i should be ok with the camera and my laptop?..Martin at FLO says they have come across a few issues with AMD but weather thats down to the processor os an OS issue no one knows.They know of people running the camera on old and new AMD's and have no problems.

[JamesF]

It might be something along the lines of not working well with certain USB chipsets that tend to be used more with AMD motherboards than Intel ones.  That sort of thing can happen sometimes.  No idea in this case though.

James

[damnut]

I would have thought so, I would not think it would be directly be the processor, there are different ways in which the CPU interacts with the sub components. I have had responsibility for large estates (7000+ pcs laptops) and have not directly come across an incompatibility with AMD / Intel platforms.

I have an AMD Phenom quad desktop, Intel netbook & laptop with no issues. I would have thought that if you had let FLO know your current setup then if it does not work they would refund. However as the neximage is credited in functioning with Win XP then I really do not see problems. James is correct above regarding the Prolific chipset for USB, W7 in particular is a bit choosy, but that is usually only usb to serial converters where the chipsets have been copied and compromised.

[slim80]

Appreciate the tech help guy's.Going to bite the bullet and give it a go.FLO have already said if i have any problem's then just return the camera

[damnut]

Thats the advantage in dealing with a specialist supplier. Hope it works ok, no reason why it should not. Drop me a pm if you need assistance.

[slim80]

Cheers Damian

[mallorcasaint]

I had one and it would not work on any AMD laptop I tried. Worked fine on an Intel machine.

[slim80]

Just had a reply from Celestron regarding this.

Hello Rob,

Thank you for contacting Celestron Technical Support Services.

I would be able to tell you with certainty. but most AMD processors do not work with the NexImage 5. We do not have the means to test every processor model. To be safe side, I would speculate that it will not work.

If there is anything else that I can support you with please let me know.  

Jonathan Cheek

Technical Support Representative

2835 Columbia Street | Torrance, CA 90503

[damnut]

Wowser, thats a bit cheeky!  . I'd love to get that s\w on a test rig.

[slim80]

@Damnut.I know .I understand now why the have never really taken off.You'd think the would test for both Pentium and AMD.Talk about norrowing down your customer base.Im guessing alot of people dont know if this issue.Celestron certainly dont avertise this anywhere.

[damnut]

I am astonished, in effect they have a very close instruction set. I would be interested to know why. For my personla use I have always used AMD on my pc's, mainly because of the cost comparison, I have then opted for the best processor at that time. As such my pc is 6 years old and is still not that challenged!. I have never had a windows program that would not work in the AMD environ.

[JamesF]

I'm really surprised by this.  You'd think it would be quite difficult in the general case to create a situation where a camera works with Intel processors and doesn't work with AMD processors.  The two possibilities that occur to me are the hardware issue I suggested in my previous post, or that the driver uses code that doesn't run correctly on AMD processors.  The latter seems perhaps more likely if they're not sure it runs on any AMD system at all, but I guess we can't be sure it doesn't.

The camera is actually a rebadged TIS camera.  I think it might be a DFK72, but I'm not certain of the actual TIS model number. By default these cameras run firmware that implements a bespoke interface created by TIS, but TIS also release firmware that can be uploaded to the Neximage as well as their own models that presents a standard UVC interface.  Given a standard UVC interface one would expect that any host system should be able to work with the camera, not just Intel ones.  (In fact, the Neximage can also be flashed with the latest TIS bespoke firmware too, which apparently gives more functionality than available with the Celestron version.)

James

[damnut]

James, would more suspect that it is the way AMD handles graphics requests, it is closer or on the CPU in some cases, INTEL started the MMX extensions. But am deeply mistfied

.

[JamesF]

Well, as it turns out, having done thrown various search terms at google it appears that there is a problem with the AMD SB600 and SB700 south bridge implementation (those are the two I can find details for, at least) that may be the cause of at least some of the problems with the Neximage 5 (amongst other things) on AMD machines.  It looks like Linux has a fix/workaround in the kernel for this, but some vendors may have issued BIOS updates to resolve it too.  Allegedly an AMD machine with a USB3 interface shouldn't have the same problem (even when using a USB2 device).

James

[damnut]

Nice bit of digging James. The southbridge controls all the slower aspects of the motherboard. ie. ALL the I/O and legacy.  I am astonished really, as you have found that common new development (USB3) will be ok. I think this is because the later configurations Southbridge has been reconfigured and renamed to match the 'fusion' range of processors.