Best Systems and Components for Win HD/TDM

[crna59]

Are there ANY new boards out that have 3 (or 4) PCI slots side by side?
I just bought an Intel DP35DP board and the TDM cards won't fit because there is to much crap on the board. Besided, 2 slots are together and the other is off to the side so you bon't be able to connect the cards together.
All I see on here are people running LE... or Pentium 4 boards. I'm looking for any P35/X38 or X48

Thanks,
Bruce

[markus44uk]

Are there ANY new boards out that have 3 (or 4) PCI slots side by side?
I just bought an Intel DP35DP board and the TDM cards won't fit because there is to much crap on the board. Besided, 2 slots are together and the other is off to the side so you bon't be able to connect the cards together.
All I see on here are people running LE... or Pentium 4 boards. I'm looking for any P35/X38 or X48

Thanks,
Bruce

THIS ONE! Four adjacent slots

http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1...89&modelmenu=1

[Jamesdbarr]

Hi guys,
great forum, very valuable info for those looking at changing over to PC from Mac.

Our system HD3 original PCI (not Accel) has been running on Mac PPC 1.8Ghz 4gig Ram.
Prob - added new Duende FW and had nothing but grief. Only has 3 avail slots so cant use different FW card.
Cost to upgrade MAC and HD to PCI-e is huge and leopard is not fully supported as far as plugs go.
PC adds a cheaper alternative by adding additional power with RTAS with additional solutions for F/w options (Duende)
the option with 4 slot MB would be great to pick up a second hand HD Accel process card PCI. (HD4 system)

I am living in Australia, and the 2 motherboards (ASUS P5WDG2 WS Professional and GIGABYTE GA-P35-S3G LGA 775 Intel P35 ATX Intel Motherboard) listed are not available any longer here.
I have seen Asus MB on ebay in HK and Gigabyte MB in Canada - but that could be problematic if there are any probs.
I have seen Sunburst79 using P5LD2, P5K Deluxe WiFi and my P5B Deluxe WiFi. At this stage I would be happy with just the HD3 with only 3 PCI slots.
If Sunburst79 is listening, are you running either of these boards with HD3 if so which one and what configuration?
The P5K deluxe wifi has a pcie slot in between the pci slots, so I believe this makes it unusable as far as consecutive slots go.
Asus P5K WS has 3 consecutive PCI slots (maybe available in Australia)- any comments?
Gigabyte seem to carry a lot of consecutive 3 PCI slots - anyone had any success with these boards, if so which model?
Regards
James

[RyanC]

Hey James-

I don't know what you do have available to you, but last Friday my old machine finally bit the dust (Asus ncch-DL) and one thing I'll say is that I wont be going with those fan-less heatpipe coolers anymore (duh). . . well and it was about 3 years old so. . .

Anyway I managed to put together a system all off of craigslist (all new parts) on monday using the Gigabyte P35-DS3R, and so far not one crash; even with wrapped vsti plugs that would regularly cause crashes before.

It does not have a FW port, but I got a PCIe FW controller for my MOTU 828mk3 and it's working perfectly (which actually had probs with the NCCH-DL)

What I find interesting is that the old board had 64-bit slots, but the new one actually shows lower PCI usage using only 32-bit. Probably have ICH9 to thank for that.

I'll probably swap this board out with the one that has 5 pci slots soon, it still has a PCIe slot for the FW card, and 2 more slots for accel cards (I have Hd3 also).

The nice thing is that the machine cost about $400, mobo, 4gb ram, and a q6600 and the FW card. . . not bad at all. Thanks Craig.

I'mn curious, has anyone actually tried mixing PCIe cards and PCIx cards? I know it sounds dangerours, but nobody here even thought about trying PCIe/XP until raga2000 started telling us about his system.

[GeneOuse]

Are there ANY new boards out that have 3 (or 4) PCI slots side by side?
I just bought an Intel DP35DP board and the TDM cards won't fit because there is to much crap on the board. Besided, 2 slots are together and the other is off to the side so you bon't be able to connect the cards together.
All I see on here are people running LE... or Pentium 4 boards. I'm looking for any P35/X38 or X48

Thanks,
Bruce

Check out THESE BOARDS, ASRock P45 P45R2000-WiFi & P43 board P43R1600Twins-WiFi. I dont think they're out yet though, it was just an announcement. They look really sweet with 3 PCI slots and support for 2000 MHz FSB and DDR2/DDR3!!! It's on Intel P45 Express chipset, I dont really know if this chipset works well with HD cards, anyone knows anything about it?

[Jamesdbarr]

Hi Ryan,
well I went with a trip along side you as I was able to get the gigabyte board, except I got the GA EP35-DS3R.
I have been trying to find the computer from Craigs list. I cant locate the thread.
Can you post his thread link or components list.
Also are you able to post which ram and graphics card you went with, and possibly your BIOS settings and version.
How is the board going after this amount of time now.
I am still putting the system together and now downloading all software updates XP and plugs.
Will post results as I go.
At this stage:
E8400 Core2 Duo 3Ghz, 1333Mhz Sidebus, 45nm. Same price as quad Q6600 and I read on magazine article out performs it. Any comments?
RAM -Kingston KVR800D2N5/2G (DDR2) - 2 by 2gig sets. It also reads on ram 2GB PC2 - 6400 CL5. Not 100% sure if this is the best choice. It was the best buy for the money. Any comments here. XP sees 3.5Gig.
I set Bios for sata drives as IDE - I read through here and other protools related forums with people having troubles when setting bios up with sata at AHCI Mode.
Gigabyte has an additional Raid chip with 2 SATA ports. I was thinking of adding a mirrored Raid for Archiving my jobs to, not using in Pro Tools. Anyone doing something similar - any feedback.
I have already. 1 SATA 160GB Seagate sytem drive. 1 SATA 500GB Seagate Audio drive.
Keep you up to date.
Cheers
James

[beef]

Yea James, I'd love to see how that treats you. I'm going to setup a Asus Rampage X48 chipset with an E8500. It has 3 PCI-E slots and 2 PCI. I'm going to RAID 2 Raptor Harddrives with Raid 0 and will boot off those drives. Have another Raptor for storage. Got 4 gigs (2 X 2gig) of DDR2 1066 Ram and a Nvidia 9600GT 512MB video card (Asus Silent). Planning on putting an HD Core Card and HD Accel with this machine. I have no idea what I'm going to run into, never built a machine for Pro Tools before. Oh and I'm giving it VERY clean power. 850w PC Power & Cooling

If your machine runs well, I'm hopin I can pull this off... We will find out next week.

[RyanC]

Hey James-

Everything, is still running good. . .I'm actually still waiting for some more serious ram to get shipped to me (4gb) so in the meantime I just have 1 gig of cheapo ram from bestbuy.

Still runs great, I had one crash when I was running PT and formating a USB drive for a 3rd backup drive at the same time, when the drive came online it crashed. These has always been rather normal for me, it seems as if the digi database does not like drives coming or going while PT is running.

Also one BSOD from the stupid akai mpc pad thing, I need to get another wall wart for it so I don't have to connect it via USB. Horiible drivers for that little thing.

Otherwise no fancy BIOS tweaks, some standard ATI card (x1600). . .I have to keep my pagefile set large until the other ram gets here, so other than it gettin a lil slow with lots of RTAS sampler plugs it runs really well.

I did do all the tweaks recomended by digi on the forum except the menu speed up one because that one can get extreemly annoying.

Thanks

[Fran d'Valle]

Hi,

I'm user of pt-le during 6 years with 002r and two years with my amd x2 configuration. Now, I have the opportunity to update toa new hd-2 accell or hd-3 non accell system and, of course, my actual system is not compatible, it is:

- asus a8n-e
- amd fx-60
- 2 gb ram
- scsi host adapter, adaptec u160 (pci-x) with 2xseagate barracuda hd
- sata hd for backup
- centos firewire adapter for 002rack
- ati x-1600pro dual dvi vga card

For HD I know it's very different. I have an old mobo where I was running a HD-1 non accell core system, is the asus p4t-533c with intel 850e chiset. I would like to get a new generation pc with dual or quad core cpu....I was reading all post and your experince select two models:

- gigabyte ga-p35-s3g
- asys p5wgd2-ws pro

Any new suggestion?????????


Thanks a lots and sorry for my terrible's english....

[BIG D]

Hi Fran,

yes I am still using the system as you can see from my tag, but I am using an older PROTOOLS CHASSIS to allow me to run HD4. I was able to run HD3 on the motherboard but the fourth card made the system unstable.

The chassis allowed me to run the 4 cards no problem. All I wish for now is the ability to access more RAm (hopefully VISTA COMPATABILITY will be the answer. Bring on Version 8) so I can run more RTAS plug ins. I run a lot of BFD, KONTAKT PLAYER 2, SAMPLETANK, VELVET, IVORY and XPAND and others so I tend to push the envelope when it comes to RAM and CPU. I am sure a DUAL QUAD will be lovely, but I will wait till the VISTA COMPAT arrives. Rumours here in OZ suggest vertsion 8 will be around Septemberish with a pre release to Retail in AUGUST (but you know all about rumours!!! In the meantime the system continues to deliver with the occasion glitch when I have too many RAM intensive RTAS instruments happening.

All the best,

Big D (Duncan)