12 Nov
2002
12 Nov
'02
11:47 p.m.
On Wednesday 13 November 2002 07:09, Jason MacDermott wrote:
Hi folks,
Just a quick question regarding Motherboard selection for AMD-based
machines being used for Linux music applications... What models are
recommended? There are a bunch of them being listed in the local computer
papers:
-M758
-M810
-K7S5A
-A7S333
Are there any pros/cons to going with these or others? I know you usually
get what you pay for, but these are all in about the same price range.
There isn't a lot of info available out there regarding this somewhat
specialized application (low-latency Linux setup with ALSA, JACK, etc.).
Thanks in advance for any suggestions and/or advice!
Jay
Well, I can't give you a proper advice since I don't know exact specs of those
MBs. But there are some things to watch out:
- watch out for the chipset: it's not good enough to be well-built, it must
also be nicely supported by the kernel. (Just look at the menuconfig help
entries and you'll find a small but present collection of buggy and unstable
ones)
- if you are going to work with EIDE disks, go for the best ATA. Watch out for
problems of specific southbridges with some disks (my A7A266's ALi is rather
peaky with WD disks)
- avoid motherboards with on-board stuff. These are too handled as PCI
interfaces and if you get trouble trying to isolate an IRQ for your soundcard
they can only make life harder.
- I think mentioning that you better use DDR is redundant...
That's it. Give them a hard time examining specs before you buy anything. :-)