One of the most popular mobos for the AMD platform is the Asus A7N8X 2.0, deluxe version. A fully loaded board with Firewire, SATA, lots of USB 2 ports, Soundstorm with on-the-fly DD 5.1 encoding, etc.
Unfortunately, the board has a major issue with SATA in RAID 0. It introduces severe glitches in audio playback and recording. m-Audio technical support has said "there is limited success by upgrading the board's BIOS". Limited to 0, in my case.
When playing back audio, there is glitching when there is is concurrent disk activity. So even when just using winamp, it pops from time to time when the controller is sednign routine status check. Pushing the entire file to memory (buffer of 20 MB) does not aleviate the problem as it is still going off the PCI bus.
Strangely recording seems to be mostly stable, except for the occasional time when the sample rate gets completely wierd. But usable, not like the way the PC seems to redefine what 'pop' music is all about.
In any case, the only way out seems to be to move to either Intel, and those results I do not know, or to an IDE-based setup. Which is what I did, I no am dual booting on the same board to an install running off the IDE drives - which is blind to SATA - for the audio, and a different setup for my games. So I have a total of 600 GB of disk space (2x120 SATA, 2x120 IDE, and 120 GB of backups on two external drives). That I will not need to upgrade for the next few years, hopefully, provided the drives don't melt.
So if you want fast SATAs and a Delta 66, don't go AMD or Asus.
Unfortunately, the board has a major issue with SATA in RAID 0. It introduces severe glitches in audio playback and recording. m-Audio technical support has said "there is limited success by upgrading the board's BIOS". Limited to 0, in my case.
When playing back audio, there is glitching when there is is concurrent disk activity. So even when just using winamp, it pops from time to time when the controller is sednign routine status check. Pushing the entire file to memory (buffer of 20 MB) does not aleviate the problem as it is still going off the PCI bus.
Strangely recording seems to be mostly stable, except for the occasional time when the sample rate gets completely wierd. But usable, not like the way the PC seems to redefine what 'pop' music is all about.
In any case, the only way out seems to be to move to either Intel, and those results I do not know, or to an IDE-based setup. Which is what I did, I no am dual booting on the same board to an install running off the IDE drives - which is blind to SATA - for the audio, and a different setup for my games. So I have a total of 600 GB of disk space (2x120 SATA, 2x120 IDE, and 120 GB of backups on two external drives). That I will not need to upgrade for the next few years, hopefully, provided the drives don't melt.
So if you want fast SATAs and a Delta 66, don't go AMD or Asus.