[LAU] hardware - Intel CPUs

Further to choosing mother boards and processors: There are current (released Q1 2014) CPUs in the Xeon and i5 (i5 has turbo) lines (atom too, for a good headless system - with 8 cores?) that come without Intel® Turbo Boost Technology or Intel® Hyper-Threading Technology. Better yet, they are cheaper too. I don't know how easy they are to come by though. See: http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&TBTVersion=No&HyperThread… So for an audio system start with the chip and find out what socket you need, then go looking for a matching MB. I don't know what the difference is between the i5 and xeon once the extras have been stripped off. But at least the chip price is pretty much dead even. The new atoms have an intel hd graphics proc for easier access to drivers than the older ones. The big problem with the atom is the MB tend to small with only one pci(e) slot. Both the atom and the xeon seem to be addressed towards server use and are know to have reasonable low latency performance. I too will be looking at updating my music computer (P4 single core 5 PCI slots, 2.5G ram, USB 2, etc, etc, but good latency). I would realy like to stay away from having to use a USB or FW audio IF. In fact I would like to be able to continue to use my delta 66 for as long as I can before I spend more money :) The list of PCIe audio IFs is pretty small and the music stores don't seem to want to stock them... I guess musicians don't know how to open a computer. The audio science ASI 554* boards are kind of expensive (8 i/o ~ $1000), but the same could be said for RME stuff... about the same price (by the time an adat box is added). The computer is going to be the cheap part in any case. -- Len Ovens www.ovenwerks.net