5 Sep
2013
5 Sep
'13
10:45 a.m.
Fons Adriaensen <fons(a)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).