[LAD] zita1 RIP

[Eric Wong]

Fons Adriaensen <fons at linuxaudio.org> wrote:
> The new zita1 will probably be a Fujitsu P510, one of the 
> reasons being that this is one of the few still having at
> least one PCI slot, so I can still use my sound cards. Any
> suggestions for alternatives are welcome !

I just built a Haswell Xeon-based workstation with a Supermicro X10SAE-O
motherboard which has 2 regular PCI slots.  ECC is a requirement of
mine[1], so I didn't have a lot of choices regarding motherboards (and
I also wanted a TSX-capable CPU).

If you do go with a Haswell Xeon, beware GPUs are built into the CPUs
nowadays and not the motherboard (even though the motherboard has video
outputs).  I didn't know that, but it's a good thing I don't care for
graphics and a friend had an unused Radeon card.

I also have a fanless Zalman FX100 CPU cooler, fanless PSU, with only
one slow, giant case fan.  It's inaudible unless I'm focusing on it over
other ambient noise.

[1] - I surprised ECC memory hasn't taken off at all in the audio world
      (from what I can tell).  I often work on servers, so it's strangely
      uncomfortable to have any important data/work on a machine without
      ECC (especially given the size of memory and the aggressiveness
      of Linux VFS caching).