[linux-audio-user] Preferred Motherboards for AMD?

[Gerasimos Grammatikopoulos]

On Wednesday 13 November 2002 07:09, Jason MacDermott wrote:
> Hi folks,
>
> Just a quick question regarding Motherboard selection for AMD-based
> machines being used for Linux music applications...  What models are
> recommended? There are a bunch of them being listed in the local computer
> papers:
>
> -M758
> -M810
> -K7S5A
> -A7S333
>
> Are there any pros/cons to going with these or others?  I know you usually
> get what you pay for, but these are all in about the same price range.
> There isn't a lot of info available out there regarding this somewhat
> specialized application (low-latency Linux setup with ALSA, JACK, etc.).
>
> Thanks in advance for any suggestions and/or advice!
> Jay

Well, I can't give you a proper advice since I don't know exact specs of those 
MBs. But there are some things to watch out:
- watch out for the chipset: it's not good enough to be well-built, it must 
also be nicely supported by the kernel. (Just look at the menuconfig help 
entries and you'll find a small but present collection of buggy and unstable 
ones) 
- if you are going to work with EIDE disks, go for the best ATA. Watch out for 
problems of specific southbridges with some disks (my A7A266's ALi is rather 
peaky with WD disks)
- avoid motherboards with on-board stuff. These are too handled as PCI 
interfaces and if you get trouble trying to isolate an IRQ for your soundcard 
they can only make life harder.
- I think mentioning that you better use DDR is redundant...

That's it. Give them a hard time examining specs before you buy anything. :-)