[LAU] HW upgrade - new computer

[Clemens Ladisch]

Len Ovens wrote:
> Memory: 8G, all one stick, which is slower than two 4G sticks...
>     maybe not the best choice, but seems ok.

I doubt that the difference is measurable, let alone noticeable.
In any case, this allows easier upgrading to 16 GB. :)

> Disk: 2TB sata about 5 years old (as I recall)

Nowadays, not using an SSD tends to be the bottleneck.
(But this is probably not the case for streaming audio.)

> I chose this MB because it had three pci slots

The PCIe/PCI bridges built into chipsets are reliable, but motherboards
that have a separate chip for this tend to use cheap crap.

Your ASM1083 is infamous.  Revision 1 was unusably buggy; rev. 3 mostly
works (except for virtualization).  Which one do you have (lspci)?

> ASUS was nice enough to list the irq layout of the pci(e) slots in the
> user guide.

"Nice" isn't enough, it should be _correct_ (which was not the case for
my last Asus manual).

Anyway, PCIe devices that support MSI use a completely separate
interrupt line.  (USB3 ports, graphics, and built-in audio should be
harmless then.)

You need to check /proc/interrupts to be sure.


Regards,
Clemens