[linux-audio-user] Motherboard for flawless low latencz operation recomendation ?

[Joe Hartley]

On Sat, 16 Oct 2004 12:20:19 +0200
"Robert Rozman" <rozman at fri.uni-lj.si> wrote:
> Could you please be so kind to recomend me brand or type of motherboards
> that are working flawlessly for low latency applications under Linux
> (Gigabyte, Asus, Intel, some
> other...) ?

I recently upgraded to an ASUS P4P800 SE motherboard and a P4 3GHz.
It's been running extremely well for me over the past couple of days.
I had been using a Fujitsu-Siemens D1219 mobo with a 1GHz PIII.  I had
been happy with that, but it's got an on-board limitation of 512MB of
RAM, and I have been working on a large session which pushed it to its
limits.  Since I got the ASUS/P4 combo, I've not seen any xruns, not
even the ones I used to see when exiting Ardour (my primary tool).

Latency's not a big issue for me, as I use a Delta 1010, and use hardware
monitoring.  My only complaint is that the fan on the heatsink for the
P4 is much louder than the one for the PIII, and my machine's noticably
noisier now.  (I also had to swap out a non-quiet power supply from the
case I put the PIII in for my son - the P4s need an extra power connection
that the old P/S didn't have.  I intend to get a quieter P/S next!

For what it's worth, I have jack using 256 frames/period, which gives me
11ms latency.

When I first booted, my 1010 got an IRQ 5 assignment - ick!!  It was easy
to force it to 9 in the BIOS, but then I found it was sharing it with the
ethernet controller.  I checked the manual, which lists the onboard devices
each PCI slot might share an IRQ with, and moved the 1010 to the next slot
over, which could have shared an IRQ with the USB controller, but I'd
disabled that in the BIOS (along with the serial, parallel and game ports,
and the onboard audio) and now the 1010 has IRQ 9 all to itself.

The beautiful thing for me was that after all the hardware swapping (I 
also upgraded the video card to an nVidia 5700 from an nVidia 5200), I had
to change *one* driver for the LAN connection, and the system came up,
just as I had left it :)  Trying to boot my son's old Windows hard drive on
a new Mobo...  that was painful.

-- 
======================================================================
       Joe Hartley - UNIX/network Consultant - jh at brainiac.com
Without deviation from the norm, "progress" is not possible. - FZappa