It's time for a new motherboard, any suggestions?

B

bbundy96

New member
Hello,
if any of you read my previous post on my motherboard mayhem, you might have known that i would be getting a new motherboard for my DAW. For those of you who didn't, i have a PIII 667 MHz (133 Mhz, Socket 370) and 512 meg of RAM (133 Mhz), using the MOTU PCI-324 w/ the 24i for recording audio. Any suggestions on what brand and model i should get for my next motherboard? i am looking to stay in the PIII series and would like to keep my 667 chip, but i would consider a faster chip if it would make a drastic difference in recording and real-time effects.

thanks for all the help.

jim
 
have you checked out the cusl2 series from asus? 815 chipset, ata100 , max 512 ram. you can get it with or without onboard video.
 
my 1 cent..

I think its the d815eaa ($100), made BY Intel themselves that I would go for with a pentium board. If you're really looking to upgrade, get a faster processor too, or maybe a dual processor board and another 667mhz pentium.
Make sure the 667 you have supports the 133mhz front side bus, too. Not all of them do, and many are sucker to this fact.
Also, I think that board has built in graphics too, if you dont have an agp card.
Peace,
Paul
 
Here's an article on that Asus CUSL2 motherboard mentioned by j. That board has received rave reviews everywhere I've looked - it's what I would definitely buy if I were buying a new PIII board.

Since we're kind of on the subject, has anyone had any experience with a P4 specifically for audio recording? I know in many cases the 1.7 GHz P4 is sometimes outperformed by the Athlon 1.3 GHz, but the memory bandwidth is so impressive I figured it might work well for audio. More on the subject here.
 
Diragor,

thanks for the links...i had read the cusl2 article but not the other....
 
I'm trying to build a DAW and hardware selection is getting to be so frustrating that I'm beginning to be sorry I ever took on the project. It's a bitch to get this discouraged before you even start. I've been struggling with this for three months now and am hardly better off than when I started. The only upside to this is that stuff gets cheaper each week I delay. 8-)

I am getting nothing but contradictory (mis)information about what I need and don't need, what's good and what's junk and what's irrelevant. You start to wonder if anyone really knows what he's talking about or if everyone's just making it up as they go along to screw with you and have a good laugh as soon as you leave.

Of course, there's always the age-old problem of most people not knowing what they're talking about in any discussion on any subject, and trying to sort out who's informed and who's a bigoted ignoramus. 8-) Hey, it's not always obvious!

I want to do multitrack 24/96, so I know that this is going to be relatively "resource-intensive," but looking around the various DAW discussion venues I can't get anything solid about what that means in real system-requirement terms or even what CPU to use. I was going to go with an Athlon 1.2G, as it's relatively inexpensive around here at present, but I read that 1G and over CPUs are unsuitable for audio due to floating-point instability, and before the truth of this assertion even gets established or dismissed someone starts in with the Athlon v. Pentium bashing and the discussion collapses into noise and I'm no wiser than when I started.

I figured that I would want a motherboard that would support RAID and possibly DDR, though I am not sure if DDR is required or worth the additional expense, or how much memory I really need and how much would be excessive and unused. I don't know what other features I need, or what chipset will or won't work. There seems to still be a lot of anti-VIA sentiment, though others say that this is an obsolete issue, that VIA is fine now.

You see what I mean? It's hard to get started when you can't even get this low a level of basic orientation.

Seriously, what do I really need for this sort of a system, and what's wasteful overkill? If I haven't explained enough, ask and I'll tell you what I've left out.

I'm really trying to do the right thing here and move on to real recording.

Thanks for any help.
 
Wow, the interface on the forum changed

bongolation

Yes, it can be frustraing trying to figure out what's good for your computer needs, The big AMD vs. Pentium War is more for the gamers and overclockers, overclockers love AMD because you can unlock the multiplier and get a higher clock speed. Pentium is still the more popular for DAWs, due to some lingering compatabillity issues with high end sound cards and AMD, I also recomend Pentium, though I could go either way.

OK the building decisions.

Start with the case, you'll want at least a mid tower, with good ventilation, add a fan or two. you'll want a 300 watt power supply. Other options are full tower or rack mount, again keep ventilation in mind. you might want to buy that locally, to avoid shipping cost.

The Mobo: the above mentioned Asus CUSL2 is a great board, probably the best available for pentium socket 370, I have one, it's extremely stable. If you want to add your own video card, save $15 - 20 and get (check into, I get a little sloppy with the word "get") the CUSL2 - C. that is of course if you want to go the intel route. If you want to go the AMD route, you'll have to get the information from some AMD DAW users.

The Processor: I'll suggest the PIII 800 EB, cost to performance, it's the best Pentium out right now. any more is really overkill for a DAW, and just a year ago, people were doing just fine with 500 Mhz or less on a pc100 platform. P4 is overkill

The memory: just get high quality pc133, 256Mb's should be plenty 512 even better. if possible (money wise) get a single stick of 256Mb's. www.crucial.com or just look for micron brand, that's what crucial sells. cas 2, unbuffered or buffered, no ECC, non parity... will work great with the Asus Cusl2. DDR is overkill + you have to build your system around it, not your soundcard + most people using it right now don't realize that there mobo isn't capable of DDR transfers, and it's working in SDRAM mode anyway.

Hard Drive: I suggest Western Digital, 40 Gig, UDMA 100, 7,200 rpm . It's based on a 20 gig per platter platform, making it an ultra silent and fast drive, you can't even hear it defrag. if you can, get a second hard drive somewhere in the 5-10 gig range to keep your programs on.

well, thats the vitals less soundcard, CDRW, CDROM, Video, Monitor, Speakers, Etc. Etc...

It's also just my 2.34 cents worth.
TX

PS, on the Asus Cusl2 , only use 2 of the memory slots, so if you want 512 megs get two sticks of 256, not 128 128 256, there are reported performance issues using all 3 slots.
 
Bongolation, I've been using my AMD 1.2GHz/Asus A7M266 for about 5 days now. Although I can't really comment on long-term reliability yet, I can definitely say that I haven't come across any problems at all, including "floating point instability", whatever that's supposed to mean.

Also, overclockers may love the AMD, but, geez! I sure as hell don't need to overclock with this setup!! People almost make it sound like that's the only time AMD's are any good. It ain't so! An Athlon at 1.2 gigahertz is freakin' fast!!!!

I've also seen people mention whether or not DDR is worth it(price vs. performance). Let me say this: at about $90 for 256MB PC2100, who gives a crap if it costs more than PC133 sdram??? Plenty of tests have shown a 15% increase in performance under most circumstances over PC133 sdram. if you don't believe me, check out tomshardware.com

Another thing, when torpid-x says DDR is overkill, i can only assume he's talking about Intel based systems. It sure as heck don't apply to AMD with the right motherboard(AMD761 chipset).
I havent read anything about the Asus A7M266 not being capable of ddr transfers; I'll see if I can find any more about that.

If you're going to be doing 24/96 recording, I can't imagine anything being overkill. My old trusty AMD T-bird 900 didnt quite cut it for me. :-) I highly recommend doing more research on AMD + an AMD761 based mobo.

Romeo
 
Bongolation, you are right that there is a lot of conflicting sentiment about what boards / chipset / cpus to buy. The bottom line is that while everyone has an opinion, most boards work fine for most people. Among people like myself who have built a lot of PCs we have usually had one bad experiance and we tend to remember it and slam that particular product. For example, VIA chips from a few years ago were not the best. I think their chipsets are great now but those who were burned before are not likely to want to try them again - a shame.

In terms of compatability issues, like this "floating point instability" (which sounds like nonsense to me) I would do research with reliable sources. There are sites on the the net (like Tomshardware.com) that do extensive testing & benchmarking on products. As for compatability with music hardware, check with the hardware manufacturer. They should be the ultimate authority. The only warning I have ever seen from such a manuafacturer involved early AMD K7 motherboards using AMD chipsets. Beyond that I have just heard rummors.

Mr. Boogie - I almost bought your motherboard and chip over this last weekend. Because I had not done any research on it (or its ALI chipset) I chickened out and just upgraded my PIII from 533 to 933. I would be interested to hear back from you after you have given your new setup a good test drive! That board/chip/RAM combination seems like a sweat value in terms of power-to-dollar.
 
if you should consider a cusl2 series board, i was warned in writing about using an orb fan with a pentium III 1ghz processor. tech support recommended : cooler master ep5-6i11

i wouldn't have taken this too seriously, but the guy i talked to was fairly articulate about explaining the design flaw in heat dissipation of the golden orb.....he said the orb looks cool, like the air filter on a mustang...he said he hopes they can get it to work....
 
I'm just back from the update wars - Win2000 installation, Delta66 sound card and Sonar. The computer place told me that my mobo was fried and replaced it with a DFI CA63(something) - It had a VIA chipset. I wasn't aware of it until I brought it home and booted it up.

At any rate, everything seemed to work pretty well -after a long learning process - except that I could not lose a static/popping sound engendered each time I attempted audio recording. I tried every parameter in the book and then some, including: pulling my SBLive card, setting video acceleration wa-a-ay down, going Standard PC instead of ACPI, VIA driver patches, on and on, to no avail.

Yesterday, I got the DFI replaced by the Asus CUSL2. The static, I am happy to say, has left the building. Gone.

I don't want to rekindle the VIA wars. Makes no difference to me - got nothing against 'em. Just be advised that there are -still- some apparent compatibility issues out there. Perhaps it was the Delta card. I'm delighted to have made the switch.
 
bongolation

I'd turn to some of the sites that review hardware. Two I like are www.tomshardware.com and www.anandtech.com. They won't have DAW specific comments, but overall they do a decent job of providing the straight facts. Toms has an article describing components he'd use for an optimal sytem. You could use that as a starting point. That might make it easier to make decisions. Aside from hardware sites, any additional issues with DAWs are usualy tied to compatibility with peripherals and apps and those questions can be answered here.

I love the comment about floating point instability, whoever said that must be on crack. Overclocking is far more likely to cause floating point instability and nobody seems very concerned about that. Remember the Intel floating point fiasco? It was headline news. When a major manufacturer makes a mainstream part that failes under it's normal operating conditions it makes headlines. Don't believe it.

As for what you need, thats a tough question. Whatever you buy will have limitations, its a fact of life, no matter how fast a system you put together. Most people manage to live within those limitations, you probably will too. Is there such as thing as to many tracks? If not then I'd suggest that higher performance will be better. I'd aim for some optimal point on the price performance curve. Whatever you buy *will* be outdated within a year. Because of that, I'd rather spend less and leave the option open to do some upgrading in a year than buy the best of everything and be stuck with it indefinitely.

As for details like how much DRAM, do some searches on posts here that mention DRAM and you'll find people discussing how much RAM they have. Article searches are an excellent way to find out what other people have and what they think of their system.
 
Well, I've been away playing with new set-up for about 2 weeks. Here's what it is:

AMD Athlon 1.2GHz
ASUS A7M266 motherboard
256MB DDR Ram(Crucial has it for $79 right now!!!!)
ATI Radeon VE dual-head video card running 2 Compaq monitors (not flat panel lcd's)
M-Audio Delta 66
5400 RPM UDMA/100 20 gig hard drive primary drive
7200 RPM UDMA/66 13.6 gig secondary(audio)
Win98SE - i did the smallest install possible except i DO have IE5 installed. No special tweaking has been done to the OS other than setting the role of the computer to "network server" and of course, I installed the VIA 4-in1 drivers.
Cubase VST/32 5.0

Running audio at 24bit, 96KHz. Not using 32bit truetape.
I have the ASIO driver for the Delta set at 12ms latency, which is fine for me, but I could get even lower...haven't even tried yet.

I started by recording a bunch(10) of tracks of me just noodling on the guitar for about 3 minutes. Then I just started adding effects, eq, and dynamics on every channel. So now, I've got 10 tracks of 24/96 audio, 10 various eq plugins going, 10 dynamics processors, 10 different fx going on in the inserts, and 5 effects in the Send effects. Right now, cpu usage is a little over 50% and disk usage at 70%. I haven't seen any signs of my system choking...I mean, I can switch fx in and out while playing without dropouts. I know this is all kind of vague, but it's more info than I've seen anyone give on this bbs about specific usage. If you want to know more, let me know.

This system has been rock solid over the 2 weeks I've had it.

I will see how much more I can squeeze out of this system, but for now, I am bored with testing and am working on real music :-).

Romeo
 
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Almost forgot something. :-)

RWhite, the ASUS A7M266 has a combination of AMD761 and VIA VT82C686B. No ALI.

I've never seen anyone go out of their way to get an ALI based motherboard. I've never used one either. Anyone here using one? I'm curious if they're any good.

Romeo
 
I must have been looking at the A7A266 MB. Apparently there is a A7A266 (ALI chip) a A7V266 (VIA chipset) and an A7M266. Enough to make you dizzy....
 
Jim,
Since you are using a Motu 24i, drop an email to Motu tech support for advice. At one time they had compatibility issues with AMD. I have the first ASUS K7M (with the 751 chip)mobo and I stayed away from Motu because of their recommendations. I use Pulsar 1, and at the Pulsar site, almost everyone uses ASUS csul.
Chuck
 
MrBoogie said:
Well, I've been away playing with new set-up for about 2 weeks. Here's what it is:

AMD Athlon 1.2GHz
ASUS A7M266 motherboard
256MB DDR Ram(Crucial has it for $79 right now!!!!)
5400 RPM UDMA/100 20 gig hard drive primary drive
7200 RPM UDMA/66 13.6 gig secondary(audio)

I will see how much more I can squeeze out of this system, but for now, I am bored with testing and am working on real music :-).
Click to expand...

OK, this is starting to sound like the sort of thing I'm trying to do, with the exception of the drives.

I was told that if I get two identical drives and run them RAID I can get a lot better performance in a DAW. Does this MB support RAID? I never seem to see a board with EVERYTHING I'm looking for. 8-)

Also, would another stick of memory speed any of this stuff up?

Thanks...
 
Unfortunately, the Asus A7m266 doesn't have onboard RAID. You'd have to get one of those PCI RAID controllers......which brings up a question:

If I used a PCI-based RAID controller, wouldn't it hog the PCI bus from my PCI-based audio card? I would think so, at least when I'm doing lots-o-tracks. But then, I really don't know.

My current set-up's disk activity is at around %70 with 10 tracks of 24/96 audio. So, at this point, I'm assuming I could get another 5 tracks or so...?? I'm looking into getting an IBM 75GXP 20 or 30 gig drive and hoping that will boost my performance. The next step would be a RAID controller.

This isn't a big concern for me right now because I rarely do more than 10 tracks. Probably because I don't do any vocal recording, yet.....just instrumentals.

About the memory. Kind of interesting....the Asus Probe program tells me that about 80 megs out of my 256 are being used after bootup. When I have the previously described song loaded in Cubase, it's about 120 megs being used. I wonder how accurate this program is? Also, I still think I would benefit from 256 more megs of ram, even if it just gives me a little more memory headroom.

Romeo
 
bongolation said:
Of course, there's always the age-old problem of most people not knowing what they're talking about in any discussion on any subject, and trying to sort out who's informed and who's a bigoted ignoramus. 8-) Hey, it's not always obvious!
Click to expand...

Very true. People with the narrowest minds seem to have the broadest tongues.
 
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