Which motherboard for recording and gaming?

  • Thread starter Thread starter bobbo
  • Start date Start date
B

bobbo

New member
I'm thinking of building a computer (1st time) for recording and for playing games (first person shooters), and have a couple of questions before purchasing anything.
I'm trying to figure out which motherboard would be best for me. I've looked at epox 8kha+ and it seems to be a pretty good gamimg one, fast. I'm also looking at a soyo sy-k7v (dragon plus), which also has "raid". I'm not too sure what that means, but would it be better for computer recording? (I read that it can make your hard drive faster, but I don't know what it does or how it works).
Both have onboard sound, but can be disabled in the bios I believe, leaving me room for the delta 1010 soundcard I have I hope. I'm using ntracks for multitracking.
So I guess I'm looking for some opinions on motherboards that would be good for both games and recording.
I'll probably start from scratch and get all new hardware and keep my old computer, which isn't too good for either games or recording, although it works ok. I'm just looking for more tracks for recording and the ability to play some of the newer games coming out.
Is raid a good thing or a bad thing for audio recording?
Are there any motherboards that you could suggest to me?
Thanks
bobbo
 
I have become a big fan of ASUS motherboards, they have been very dependable for both my company (where we have about 150) and my home DAWs (I have 2).
 
I've heard only good stuff about ASUS.

ABIT has a good reputation.

VIA does not. :)

Be very very careful about using RAID if you don't fully understand it. Do some reading up, be sure that it's really what you need. RAID 0 or RAID 0+1, which is all I believe onboard controllers support (along with RAID 1) will increase your speed in applications that demand sustained access, like recording.
 
Yeah, I've been doing some reading up on the raid features and I'm not really sure if it would be good for me to use it. Maybe if it was just for recording it might. I'm using a slow hard drive right now, so I guess any increase in performance would be nice, and with higher speed ide drives nowadays I'm sure I'd be fine without raid. I'll keep on doing some research though. Thanks for your input.
 
That hard drive is definitely one area where you REALLY don't want to cut corners. More than anything else - maybe even the CPU - that will determine the speed of your system.

I was really close to building a RAID 0 computer for myself, too. But through asking around here, I was able to find out what kind of performance people are able to get out of single 7200RPM drives - and that ought to suit me just fine.

Unless you're working with a lot of tracks in a greater depth than 16 bits, I bet you'll be just fine with a single audio drive.
 
Lets get wet..

Greetings,

I have been researching this like hell for the past few months (I am NOT a natural computer person)

The best motherboards right now run the 266a chipset. It is fastest, and one of (few) the most stable. These boards all take SD DDR Ram I believe (they are all new products) and are all compatable with the new Althon XP processors (Which are by far the best performing processors on the market per doller benchmarking as good or better then the pentirms of the same class)

The best three boards bases on the several reviews i have read are:

Asus A7V266-E
Soltek SL-75DRV2
Soyo SY-K7V
Epox EP-8KHA+

This basically because they have all been found to perform at the top of the heap, they are all stable with good drivers, and they seem to have been well built (features such as raid, PCI slots, onboard stuff which many of us will disable anyways)

The Epox has been burdened with supposed stability issues (depends on who you ask) and the asus has been regarded as a rather average product (expensive too) for such a good company (depends on who you ask as well)

some good sites with motherboard reviews

www.tomshardware.com
www.extremetech.com
www.anandtech.com


I have personally narrowed it down to the Asus, Soltek or Soyo.
Asus was my personal fav a while ago, but i have seen some rave reviews about the Soltek product, as far as drivers and stupport and stability and packaging and stuff goes.

PS- in a nutshell RAID allows you to use two hardrives as one big harddrives (giving you twice the transfer speeds!) and apparently its not exceedingly complex to setup, even thougha 7200rpm will do you more then good for most recording stuff. Still however, if there is onboard RAID at a reasonable price (which there is ) its no bother to get it for later.
SirRiff
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top