heyas guys, missed yins. think my muse has returned, got a new gig as a front man, can ya believe it?
anyways, I’m looking to build a new rig, nothing real fancy. Prolly 20 tracks max, got the HD already. What mobo/CPU are known to be happy combo these days?
I’ll be recording through an ensoniq or soundblaster or some other equally crappy 16 bit card 
thanks, and good to see yins again.
I like the Asus P4C800-E Deluxe but it’s alittle pricey; however I tend to like middle-to-high end machines. It’s the standard board I use on my DAWs. Did you get a SATA drive?
Mike
I tend to think that the MOBO is the last part where you should try to shave off on price. If you get a great MOBO and cheap out on all the other parts, well, you can always upgrade those parts later. And the MOBO is the part that’s most likely to give you grief if it isn’t up to snuff.
After all, we’re talking about a $50 or maybe even $75 differential between excellent and mediocre here, right?
btw, nice to see you around, Hux! Hope things are well on your side of the state. 
heh, good out this way my brudda
naw, no sata needed for 20 tracks…heh…plain “old” UDMA 7200 drive works out perfect fer me. I’ll check out that mobo, thanks.
i also got an asus P4C800-E Deluxe (made my purchase about 4-5 months ago)… it wasn’t the cheapest, but it supported everything i wanted to do… including native support for sata hd drives. i bought a p4 2.8 “prescott” cpu, which i’m not sure i can vouch for… no problems, but it runs quite warm… so the requirements for cooling may raise the noise levels of your case, if that’s an issue for you… however i was doing some heavy processeing on my pc last week and brought that sucker up to 87 degrees celcius (cpu temp) and my machine didn’t flinch. hows that for dangerous levels of stability??? 
The Asus mobo Mr.Soul mentioned is a nice board.If you get it with the 865PE chipset,it will run you $113.00 at Newegg.com.The i875 chipset will cost you $179.They take the Prescott P4,you would have more than enough nut with that board and some quality ram.Abit and Msi also make good boards and all three of those brands can overclock quite a bit and still remain rock solid.
That’s right DS but Hux only needs 20 tracks ( 
). This kind of reminds me about the guy who stopped in my friend gas station & asked him to fix his car so it would go another 500 miles or so. 
The problem is that you can’t buy older hardware after a while so mobo’s, memory, etc., progress & your old ATA100 drive is obsolete, not because it doesn’t work, but because you can’t find capatible hardware.
Anyways…
shrug. You know as well as I do the hardware of the moment isn’t necessary for most applications, even DAW. Nope, I don’t need to overclock. Yup, just 20 tracks. A hot processor to handle the heavy processing I like to do(no such thing as too much reverb, right?), me and my obsolete drive will be tracking happily away.
Looks like the same brands now as before, thanks fellers.
Well I’d argue that the old “UDMA 7200 drive” might not be acceptable if you’re recording 96/24 for example.
I have a 3.0 GHz PIV with an 800 FSB & very fast drives and this machine can barely keep up with my projects which have less than 20 tracks typically. It’s all a matter of what you want & what you are doing. You will expand your processing to fill existing machine limit everytime (from my experience).
But seriously, any old mobo that supports ATA100 (or 133) will work for you.
Hi All:
I’m in the camp of Asus/intel/865 chipset. I don’t have the resourses yet to go there… But after the New Year there should be hardware sales, and that should drop the prices. And I’ll order top grade ram. In the order of 1 gig, or so… mabey more… We’ll see…
All edits are done in ram till the edit/edits are (Saved As) or rendered… I have found that it’s easy to run out of resources while editing, especially if a lot of plugs are used on the tracks in the time-line…
That being the case… does that mean progressing to XP, as the Operating Sysyem?? Will '98SE support more than 512 meg of ram?
I presently use '98SE as the operating system… as one system, that I use. With an Asus CUSL2C and intel 1.2 intel prosessor and 512 meg of ram. This system has processed as many as 38 stereo tracks with plugs and all, on the timeline… But, not without it’s work-arounds… Well…
Bill…
I build computers and a 7200rpm hd is hardly obsolete…And it will affect nothing as far as recording 24/96.They’re still dropping 5400 rpm drive into laptops.Sata drive technology hasn’t taken off yet because of cooling issues.ATA100 drives are still the industry standard…Its what themajority of people are still using these days,Mr.Soul .
Memory is far more important than hard drive speed and the only drives faster than ata 100/133 drives are the 10,000 rpm Sata drives…Which are fairly expensive and run hot.I record on my 80 gig 7200 WD with an old Asus BP 533/FSB and pc2700 ram without incident.Quality ram and board are far more crucial to recording than hard drive speed
edit:Current boards still come with primary/secondary ide channels…That should tell you something right there…It will be quite some time before your ATA100 drive is obsolete.
LOL ya, I was kinda being facetious. It’s all good, I appreciate the advice
I'm in the camp of Asus/intel/865 chipset.
I used 3 or 4 of these boards for clients & they are nice but they had problems with them mis-reporting the Zalman CPU fan's status. A voice would actually come on & say that the CPU fan had failed. Of course, that wasn't true but it's a little disconcerting. The problem goes away if you bump up the RPM of the fan, which of course you don't want to do because of the noise.
I build computers and a 7200rpm hd is hardly obsolete...And it will affect nothing as far as recording 24/96.They're still dropping 5400 rpm drive into laptops.Sata drive technology hasn't taken off yet because of cooling issues.ATA100 drives are still the industry standard...Its what themajority of people are still using these days,Mr.Soul.
Don't mean to start a war here but I've been using SATA drives for +6 months now & they work great! All my client's computers have them now. I have 2 SATA in a RAID-0 configuration on my DAW & the one I building for a client in this forum, and it will beat any anyone's diskbench results.
Most of the fast IDE disks still run at 7200 RPM but 10,000 RPM disks are on the market. I've avoided them right now because I've heard they are noiser. Of course, SCSI disks have been running at these RPMs for years.
ATA100 is NOT the standard anymore - your info is a little dated I'm afraid. Sure if you buy a Dell computer, that's what they'll put in but they are way behind. They continue to sell outdated stuff for years because that's what they've got in stock.
Memory is far more important than hard drive speed and the only drives faster than ata 100/133 drives are the 10,000 rpm Sata drives...Which are fairly expensive and run hot.I record on my 80 gig 7200 WD with an old Asus BP 533/FSB and pc2700 ram without incident.Quality ram and board are far more crucial to recording than hard drive speed.
I disagree. Everything is important in a DAW - memory speed, FSB speed, CPU speed but particularly disk speed. If you do 44.1/16 work then I agree disk speed is not as important.
I used 3 or 4 of these boards for clients & they are nice but they had problems with them mis-reporting the Zalman CPU fan's status. A voice would actually come on & say that the CPU fan had failed. Of course, that wasn't true but it's a little disconcerting. The problem goes away if you bump up the RPM of the fan, which of course you don't want to do because of the noise.
I build computers and a 7200rpm hd is hardly obsolete...And it will affect nothing as far as recording 24/96.They're still dropping 5400 rpm drive into laptops.Sata drive technology hasn't taken off yet because of cooling issues.ATA100 drives are still the industry standard...Its what themajority of people are still using these days,Mr.Soul.
Don't mean to start a war here but I've been using SATA drives for +6 months now & they work great! All my client's computers have them now. I have 2 SATA in a RAID-0 configuration on my DAW & the one I building for a client in this forum, and it will beat any anyone's diskbench results.
Most of the fast IDE disks still run at 7200 RPM but 10,000 RPM disks are on the market. I've avoided them right now because I've heard they are noiser. Of course, SCSI disks have been running at these RPMs for years.
ATA100 is NOT the standard anymore - your info is a little dated I'm afraid. Sure if you buy a Dell computer, that's what they'll put in but they are way behind. They continue to sell outdated stuff for years because that's what they've got in stock.
Memory is far more important than hard drive speed and the only drives faster than ata 100/133 drives are the 10,000 rpm Sata drives...Which are fairly expensive and run hot.I record on my 80 gig 7200 WD with an old Asus BP 533/FSB and pc2700 ram without incident.Quality ram and board are far more crucial to recording than hard drive speed.
I disagree. Everything is important in a DAW - memory speed, FSB speed, CPU speed but particularly disk speed. If you do 44.1/16 work then I agree disk speed is not as important.
Those 10,000 RPM SATA drives are great…until they crash. Then they make me want to go get a job flipping burgers somewhere. HEAT IS A PROBLEM.
Screw it, go Fibre Channel. 15k RPM optical SCSI in a nice 30 drive RAID 10 array is the way to go. A few gig of cache on the storage processor, you’ll get to 25 tracks at least.
Those 10,000 RPM SATA drives are great...until they crash. Then they make me want to go get a job flipping burgers somewhere. HEAT IS A PROBLEM.
Which is another reason why I use 7000 RPM SATA drives. However, how come SCSI drives have achieved these speeds for years?
Which is another reason why I use 7000 RPM SATA drives. However, how come SCSI drives have achieved these speeds for years?
dolar bills…you paid for the luxury of speed. Believe me, early SCSI drives went through the same heat issues in breaking the 10K and 15K barriers. Old Seagate barracuda drives were the bane of my existence a few years back!
Because folks are willing to pay $800 for a 73GB drive. People balk at $150 for a 250GB ATA drive any more. SCSI drives are made for industrial applications and are simply built better.
Bubbagump is right. It’s all about the benjamins. If it’s mission critical, SCSI baby!