18 Feb
2004
18 Feb
'04
5:05 a.m.
Steve,
Steve Harris wrote:
If the obove are not an issue to you, then SMP is
great. I'm upset that
theres nothing to replace the PIII that had SMP as standard and led to
cheap, reliable, desktop SMP motherboards.
There are Athlon SMP solutions that are not very expensive. Not the
latest technology for sure, but they work. Dual Athlon MP motherboards
can be had for about $250, and an Athlon MP 2800+ chip can be had for
$170. They will take standard DDR, but ECC is preferred. I am using an
Asus A7M266-D myself, with a pair of Athlon MP 1500+, built just over 2
years ago. I would say it's an excellent motherboard for Linux, not good
for windows at all though. My Athlon MP system actually can't record
audio properly in Windows with any soundcard (tried the built-in AC97,
SB Live, Delta 66). It just gets about 30 clicks and pops per second in
all recordings under Win2K. I think it's a problem with the Win2K SMP
kernel. Never got a chance to install the uni Win2K kernel - the install
doesn't give me a choice since it detects SMP support in the BIOS. I am
however able to do clean recordings in OS/2 and Linux (both with SMP
kernels), using the SB Live, but still the ADC isn't the greatest and
it's only 16 bits 48 kHz max. I sold my Delta 66 recently to help pay
for my dedicated Roland DAW (VS-2400CD), which I find more powerful than
software available for OS/2 and Linux currently. I'm still toying with
the idea of using Linux for things the Roland won't do, like MIDI, but
again there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of applications, so I might
go for a hardware sequencer instead also. I'll go through any reasonable
expense to meet my needs and not have to run Windows code ...