Supermicro Mobos
 

Hi Folks

Suddenly in the market for a mobo following the surprise death of my old ATX AMD64 3000 driven board - and have been looking at SuperMicro. There's one called a X7DWE (visible at http://www.supermicro.com/products/m...5400/X7DWE.cfm ).

The combination of 5x PCI-E slots with single PCI-X slot is interesting, as is support for Xeon Quad core processors. It's Intel5400 (seaburg) chipset.

We currently have a Core card and are thinking about crossgrading the PCI-E version, or just adding PCI-E Accel cards.

The main reason for the investment is orchestral realizations and other virtual intruments.

Any opinions? These serverboards are not exactly cheap!

David
UK

Re: Supermicro Mobos
 

Digidesign does not support PCI-E on Windows yet.
Visit the sticky Best Systems and Components for Win HD/TDM for more info on hardware that's been tested and guaranteed to work.

Re: Supermicro Mobos
 

Hi

Yeah, read that with interest before posting. I did look at the X7SBA board others have used but that's not ideal for us.

Re: Supermicro Mobos
 

What I would say is that is unlikely that PT HD will remain non-PCI-E for that much longer under Windows. I just can't see why you'd stick with PCI-X given a choice.

Secondly, the 2Gb limit imposed by XP32 is not likely to be much of a barrier to Vista as it matures. Much of the complaint about Vista is that it is greedy on RAM as a baseline OS - but if you can go higher than 2Gb, that's not a consideration.

However, I for one would prefer to see PT HD run on at least one 64bit Windows OS, not just to get round the 2Gb limitation and to make best use of processor cycles on 64bit processors.

Re: Supermicro Mobos
 

I have already see this board for make a new PC , the intel chipset 5xxx
is supported from Digi , but unfortunately this board has the onboard
video card and there is no the PCI-E 16X for video card :(
ciao

Re: Supermicro Mobos
 

I thought at this point digi had qualified 5xxx chipsets (with pcie) as Paul states.

As for the video I have the x7sba, which I believe is the same as that board as far as the chipset and it works pretty well at 1920x1200 16 bit (using powerstripe). If you are doing video work this would not be adequate, but for audio only it's fine for me.

Onboard video was a problem when the controller shared the PCI bus with your audio cards, however what supermicro does here (I'm told by a SM tech) is to use the one PCIe bus that would connect directly to the MCH for the onboard video. So in this case it's not using the same bandwidth as your HD cards would be, this is the same way that any video card would be connected.

If you want to double check, look for the block diagram in the manual, as long as the onboard video is on the bus that connects directly to the Memory Controller Hub ( MCH) you wont have any sort of bandwidth issue.

It's really too bad that they dont make this so that you could just access the slot directly though. . .