Motherboard

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Kinsley

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What soundcards do you suggest? I don´t need more than 4 inputs.
The ones I´ve heard about are Aardvark 24/90, Gadgetlabs Wave 424 and the ones from Echo.
Do you have any other suggestions/comments?
 
How much important is the motherboard for the efficience of the machine?
I mean, I have two options: to buy a motherboard with sound, video, fax onboard which is cheaper or to buy a motherboard with nothing added so I can plug more cards on it.
Is it really necessary to choose the second option?
 
It depends on what your planning on doing with your computer but as you ask in a home recording forum, I presume you plan on doing some recording with it. If that is the case, get a motherboard _without_ built-in audio, video, coffee maker etc. Besides being of poor quality, onboard sound chips can cause conflicts with "real" soundcards and will cause you headaches in the future.

Get a good motherboard like the Asus P3BF or Abit BE6-2 ATX Slot1 that will do what they're there for in a very good manner but nothing else. Then get an AGP video card rather than a PCI as AGP ones tend to cause less problems with soundcards (I'm told anyway). Many suggest getting an external modem rather than a PCI one. I presume internal modems can be a source to conflicts. When it comes to soundcard, it could be discussed for weeks and I will leave you to your homework for a while. There are simply so many and with varied setups so you need to figure out what you need first.

Good luck

/Ola
 
Thanx for help...
That´s what I thought.
Maybe you could tell me if the configuration I´m looking for is enough to do home recording.
AMD K6-2 500MHz, 128M RAM, 15G HD.
About soundcards I need to see what is available here in Brazil.
 
If you want to use an Athlon processor, you need a motherboard that works with them. Any particular reason why you want to use Athlon? I've read something that adviced against K6-2. It missed something that the K7 have. I can't remeber what so don't count them out, just do your homework and you'll be fine. I think it was some soundcards that were not supposed to work with K6-2 (or was it Athlons in general, can't remember) but I can't recall anyone i this forum that has had problems that was strictly Athlon-related.

128Mb RAM will be sufficient but you may want to look into getting 256 from the start. You can't have too much of that stuff.

HD - Buy 15Gb and you'll be sorry tomorrow. You can never have too much HD space. You could of course buy a second HD when you need it. Just make sure that you have a spare IDE port.

One thing that is usually overlooked is the monitor. Get a big one, like 19". You will have enough tracks, effects, VU meters etc. to fill the entire wall so the bigger the better. I think 21" are still too expensive though.

As for soundcards available in Brazil, on-line shopping is the answer.

/Ola
 
About online shopping I like it. But here in Brazil the importation taxes are very high, so if I can find them at music stores I´ll save money.
So you think it´d better to buy a larger HD. Thanks for the advice.
Regarding K6-2, the reason why I´m looking to it is about price. The difference between this one and Intel is quite big, so if there was no problem I´d prefer that. But I´ll study more carefully this situation.
 
The difference between an AMD K6-2 and an Intel Celeron is very small price-wise, and VERY large when it comes to realtime DSP. Go with an Intel Celeron over the AMD, unless you consider the K7.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Slack - could you elaborate a bit on the K6-2 vs. K7 vs. Celeron issue or maybe point me to some article that covers it.

The import taxes in Sweden are about 30-40% (or +200% if it's alcohol or tobacco) depending on the type of goods. I bought my soundcard from Korea and still got it 20% cheaper than in the local store. I think that whatever card you decide on, you can buy it cheaper on-line including shipping and taxes. The only reasons for me to buy locally is if 1.It's cheaper 2.I like the store and get good support 3.I'm over my credit on the VISA.

/Ola
 
Yeah, I´d like to read about this comparison too...
Regarding the taxes, here in Brazil it´s 60%. The shipping will not be cheap too.
But I´ll make the calculation, maybe it could still be cheaper.
 
Them are some whoppin' taxes! I still think it's cheaper on-line though. The local dealers have to pay taxes too.

Good luck in your search
 
Ola,

I'm not going to search for articles on this topic anymore. I've posted on this topic at least 20-30 times in this group alone, and in the first 10 or so I posted links to various benchmarks. Go back a few months and you'll find a bunch of stuff. (This topic will be in the FAQ if we ever get around to doing it I'm sure)

Basically what you want to look for here is FPU performance. Search for Celeron, K6, FPU and the like and you'll find dozens of interesting articles.

Off the top of my head I also recommend reading "Roll Your Own" over at prorec.com and there is also some decent information in the n-Track FAQ over at fasoft.com which is written for n-Track users, but contains a lot of information that is pretty generic to DAW construction.

Also search for DAW builders on the web and check their specs. There's a lot of shit out there if you're willing to look.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Also, in regards to the difference between the K6-2 and the K7...

The K6-2 lacks a good FPU which in practical terms means that it's a poor performer when you get into DX plugins like reverb, etc. Intel, on the other hand, has strong FPU support on all of its processors.

The K6-2 also lacks the large full-speed cache of the K6-3 and K7. Intel Celeron, PII, and PIII (non-coppermine) processors also run a smaller low-speed cache. In practical terms, a nice cache system is great for business applications but doesn't do as much for realtime multimedia applications where instruction reuse isn't as frequent. Therefore you'll see the K6-3 processor beating the crap out of Intel processors in business application benchmarks, which we're not so concerned with.

The K7 has a great FPU and basically, in all the benchmarks I've seen to date, beats the tits out of the PIII. However, they're not cheap and you're stuck with a chipset by VIA. I hate VIA. But then the latest Intel chipsets blow hard so you just can't win :)

I would avoid the K6-2 and K6-3 processors at all costs. In the US, a Celeron 500 is only 30-40 bucks more than an AMD K6-2 500. It's ok to get cheap memory and cheap CDROM drives and such...but don't go cheap on the brains of your machine...especially when "cheap" is only saving you some pocket cash.

Also, you can upgrade a Celeron to a PIII if you buy a Slot 1 motherboard. You cannot upgrade a K6-2 or K6-3 to an Athlon.

Slackmaster 2000
 
I should also point out that I started recording on an AMD K6-2 400Mhz. Very shortly thereafter, I upgraded to a Celeron 400Mhz and my DSP performance increased dramatically.

Slackmaster 2000
 
As a long-time PC builder and trouble shooter, I'll just say this: DON'T buy a board with built-in ANYTHING - no sound, video, modem, whatever. I can almost guarentee you will regret it. The big problem I have found is that when you want to upgrade and put in a nicer video/sound/modem/whatever card you will have problems. Although these boards often have jumpers to "disable" the on-board items, in many cases the system resources these items take up are not freed when "disabled". Packard Bell and Compaq systems are infamous for that. Although the price may be attractive, you will save yourself headaches if you buy a good motherboard without any bells and whistles. I just bought a ASUS P3V4X board and am very happy with it. ASUS is a good brand, I have also had good luck with Gigabyte. I am not too crazy about Intel brand boards although I favor their chips over AMD. If you want AMD though go for the K7 - I have owned both K6 and K6-3D systems and they were quite flaky and not very fast. On the other hard I have heard good word of mouth from techy friends with K-7s. Good Luck....
 
Slack, I know you have posted on this topic a bunch of times but with the search function disabled and with the information usually hidden in threads with other topics than expected, I wondered if knew any good articles off the top of your head. I wasn't asking you to search for articles for me. I'm willing to look. Trust me. I just quit my job and am stuck in the office with a high speed connection and nothing to do for another three weeks :)

Anyway, thanks for the explanation of the processors.

/Ola
 
I´d like to thank you all for help me in my search, you help me a lot.
Just one final question: if 15Gb is not enough to start, what should be a good starting point?
 
15GB is enough for starters but you will need more in the future. You could simply buy another HD when you need it to get more for your money. However, having two disks is really handy in any case so maybe two 15GB or even one 15GB and one 9B is a good start. I have one 9GB and one 25GB and it's plenty, for the moment. Keep the OS(es) and apps on one (the smaller) and record to the other. This way you ensure that any read the apps need or funky virtual memory stuff doesn't interfere with your recording. Also, having two disks means that you can easily move all things you want to save to one disk while formatting the other. Finally, keeping a ghost image of your OS/apps disk on your recording disk (it usually doesn't fit on a CD) makes it a lot easier to restore the last good setup if you add new apps or change settings that screws up your system.

Just make sure you get 7200rpm disks with low average seek time and you should be fine. When it comes to brand I can only say that Slackmaster2k just bought a Maxtor. Is nothing sacred anymore?
 
Yeah, I bought a Maxtor just because I found one in town...I was prepared for the hell that some of you have gone through with them...but at least on Win2k, the Maxtor is a sharp performer. Very speedy, no problems.

I still must say that Quantum is my favorite hard drive. You also can't go too wrong with IBM. Just avoid Western Digital like the PLAGUE! A lot of WD drives work fine for long periods of time, but I've just seen way too many fail and it cannot be coincidence. Plus they're not automatic when it comes to 66/33.

Don't pay over $150 for a 20GB 7200RPM 2MB cache ATA/66 drive.

Slackmaster 2000
 
Actually I have had a bunch of Western Digital hard drives, both at home and work, and have never had a problem with any of them. I'm not sure there are any "bad" drive brands, any major brand is OK but you are going to find an occasional defective now and then. Right now I am using a Western Digtal 8 gig as master (with the OS) and a Maxtor 40 gig as the slave. Keeping the OS, programs, and all non-music data files on the boot drive is the way to go.
 
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