New Motherboards

[JFogarty]

I did a search for motherboards, and everything was really old. What motherboards do you guys use or recommend for a new system for the digi on the PC?

[Mark_Knecht]

Hi,
You probably need to choose your processor first. Once you know which processor you want to run (P3, P4, Athlon, Athon XP, etc...) then make this choice.

Cheers,
Mark

[Allen Hallada]

Asus A7V266E with Athlon XP1.8 or 1.9

[JFogarty]

yeah, I was prohbably going to go AMD. On digi designs website, they say get stuff with the VIA kt133a chipset. Is this still what will run the best?

[JFogarty]

Digi doesn't support it? What does that mean? And it will take 2 years till they do? Thats seems a very long time.

[Maxz]

Hi Allen does the A7v266e motherboard comes with everything you would need to use the raid controller for two hard drives or do you have to buy an extra part?
Also where did you go to pay $135 for your
Everywhere I look it's $160 and up ?

[Allen Hallada]

Actually the new go to chipset is the KT266a with the DDR ram. I like Asus products so I recommend the A7V266E. Make sure it has the E on the end as there is also an A7V266 that is an older version.
Ok, Digi doesn't support it yet, but you can wait another two years or be two years ahead of the curve and get about 60-80% better performance for an extra $30.00. I just bought one for 135.00. Good luck.
Allen
[img]images/icons/grin.gif[/img]

[Allen Hallada]

Hey Maxz,
I just bought one from 1stweb.net where I bought my last A7M266. I don't have their phone number with me as I'm not at home this week. I'm thinking that they made a mistake and gave it to me at their cost as I haven't seen one advertised on the web yet near that price. They didn't have any in stock and had to special order it for me. So that 160.00 price sounds about right. Keep checking www.pricewatch.com for the latest prices.
No digi will probably not support anymore AMD motherboards for awhile as they are a very Mac focused company. Especially with the new Mac OSX out which is basically a Linux operating system now. It is hard to change old habits.
The A7V266E does have onboard Raid controller, however after doing alot of research on using RAID for audio, the conclusion I've come up with is that it is overkill and doesn't increase performance significantly. You might see an increase of one - five extra plugins. Better to just use the ATA100 onboard Promise controller by hooking your hard drives up in parallel to each other, each to their own Promise Controller port. Make sure you use ATA100 ribbon cable for each one. Last board I got with the onboard Promise controller only had one ATA100 ribbon cable included.

Good luck.
Allen [img]images/icons/cool.gif[/img]

[Maxz]

Thanks Allen, once again great information and well said.

[gerax]

Hey Allen, speaking of the Promise controller, is it so fast to give you that "extra mile" with the 001 system? I was thinking about a separate controller for my actual setup (although it works great),because I'd really like to push it to the limit; I was also thinking about a SCSI controller so as to be able to link more than 2 devices (disks) in a single chain an get : 1) a boatload of disk space, 2)a minor stress per disk factor, thus taking full advantage of the track allocation feature of PT. What do you think?

L.G.