What's a good motherboard/chipset for recording these days?

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Whoopysnorp

Whoopysnorp

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My Athlon XP 1500 system has been serving me well, but is starting to get a bit old. I'm kind of out of touch with the Athlon chipset situation these days. When I built my system two years ago I remember the big issue was avoiding VIA chipsets, which is why I went with the Abit KG7 and its AMD761 chipset. Hypothetically, if I were to build myself a faster DAW, is there anything I'd want to avoid like the plague in the motherboard department? I'm a fan of AMD's products, so I doubt I'd be going Intel with this one.

For that matter, I have another question: is there any point in spending the extra money for a 64-bit platform to be ready for the 64-bit version of Windows XP? What advantage does 64-bit have for audio applications?
 
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My AMD XP2000 works very well with my ABIT NF7 MOBO with NVIDIA chipset.
 
Recording Computer Motherboards

I recently ended up buying a new Compaq last week, but for awhile, I looked into building one. It became apparent that buuilding would have a higher specification, but a much higher cost! But I did learn a bit about the hardware..

In looking around and talking to people and reading PC world, I decided that most software devlopers use Pentium processors and Intel chipsets to develop their products- Autodesk, maker of AutoCad, may still almost insist on their users to have this combination. Almost everyone steers you away form VIA chipsets. I have to say, I don't understand the architecture of the logic circuits to know why the Intel chips perform better than others.

Accordingly, I looked around and- again with advice- settled on ASUS as good makers of motherboards for this use. The last computer I assembled- a Pentium 200- used an ASUS board and friends who are real computer, uh, fellows" like them.

Things to look for:

1. Pentium processor support
2. Intel chipset
3. the MB uses the latest kind of RAM
4. the capacity for RAM is large- some ASUS boards I saw hold 4GB
5. onboard fast HD controllers- I've forgotten the new standard, but it's DMA 133 or so. Ihere's are also the ultra-fast HDs with 4ms access times instead of 9, but I really didn't look into SCSI-3 or whatever it is. If you're doing 130 tracks maybe these are useful- I do only 2!
6. separate HD channels- put the OS HD on one channel and the music files HD on the other
7. sufficient slots! I add this as I saw expensive MBs with only two PCI slots and an GP for video. I would have 4 PCI miminum. Many boards have onboard Ethernet which frees a slot.
8. high speed video on the AGP bus -8X. By not having the video on the PCI bus- there is a "cleaner" pipeline for recording. Get a very hardware oriented video card that does not use the CPU or share RAM.
9. they almost MBs all have lots of USB ports- 4-6 and wonderful things they are, but many now also have IE1394- "firewire" port and l would have firewire as so many new pro components use it.

I think you find a really good MB in the $140-200 range.

Hope this helps!

Cheers,

Bambi B
 
whoopy. if you got the bucks demo your multitrack software on a amd 64 with two fast hard drives. oodles of tracks.
or for less bucks the top of the athlon range.
 
Just for your information Whoopysnorp you can put a 2400+ in your KG7. They're not designed for it but it definitely works because thats what I've done on my KG7-lite.

I should warn you however that I get a lock up about once a week which I suspect is due to the CPU being too fast for the board but at the end of the day I figured that I had nothing to lose as I was going to get rid of it anyway.
 
wombar said:
Just for your information Whoopysnorp you can put a 2400+ in your KG7. They're not designed for it but it definitely works because thats what I've done on my KG7-lite.

I should warn you however that I get a lock up about once a week which I suspect is due to the CPU being too fast for the board but at the end of the day I figured that I had nothing to lose as I was going to get rid of it anyway.
Click to expand...

Hmm, interesting. I may try that. On the other hand, I'm already getting some lockups, which I think may be due to heat. If I take the case cover off it eliminates most of them (not all). I don't know if I want to drop a potentially hotter chip in there.
 
I also heard the rumor of problems with VIA chipsets, and even had it confirmed in my Q10's manual (throughput latency) but i have actually had the exact oposite experience. My nforce board would not let me run my Delta 44 and cakewalk home studio it just crashed, so i moved to a VIA chipset and have had not one problem.


So now I have a AMD XP(dont remember exact name) 1GB DDR, and 120GB of SATA RADI 0 storage.
 
hey all

First post here in many months...

I'm glad I saw this thread, because I'm actually just starting to piece together my first PC system, with digital recording in mind. (I've always been a staunch Mac fan, but my beige G3 300mhz/OS8.6 is getting long in the tooth and I can't afford a newer nice Mac...*sniff*)

My first piece is an AOpen AK77-600n mobo with a VIA KT600 chipset for Athlon XP; picked that one primarily because it was cheap and has 6 PCI slots. I'll probably end up shooting for one of the XP processors in the 1.8-2.0 ghz range, which I hope--HOPE--will be sufficient for something like Cakewalk Home Studio. Anyway, I couldn't really tell whether the VIA chipset will make it for audio recording, since most of the DIY/mobo sites are firmly fixated on gaming *bleah* so I figured what the heck.

cheers

Billy S.
 
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