[LAU] CPU and mobo

[Brent Busby]

On Thu, 17 Dec 2015, Ralf Mardorf wrote:

> ASAP I need to buy a new mobo, so most likely a new CPU and RAM too. 
> It must be cheap and provide PCIe for audio and PCI for at least one 
> additional sound card used for MIDI. In the low cost price range my 
> favored dealer seems to provide ASRock, ASUS and Gigabyte that fulfill 
> these requirements. Is one of those vendors known to be better or less 
> good in the low price range than the others or is it better to chose 
> another vendor?

I've had nothing but good luck with Asus for years.  Their Linux and BSD 
compatibility is excellent, and they're always fast boards.

As far as an additional sound card for Midi (I assume this means in 
addition to whatever card you're recording with), I wouldn't really 
bother.  Typically all motherboards these days have decent desktop audio 
integrated into the board, and you can cheaply get Midi from a USB 
interface from Edirol or M-Audio or such.  The days of getting Midi 
through your Soundblaster's game port are long over.

> Regarding issues old AMD CPUs relatively often had with new rt 
> kernels, I suspect an Intel CPU could be the better choice. Are there 
> any of the cheaper AMD or Intel CPUs known to cause issues for audio 
> and MIDI work, resp. known to work flawlessly?

I've used nothing but AMD CPU's for a decade or so, and I've never had 
any RT problems, at least not once they got things worked out in the 
standard Linus kernel the way they are now.  I normally just use the 
latest stable from kernel.org, and it works fine without patches on an 
AMD CPU.

> Is there something to consider regarding UEFI? I don't need it and I 
> wonder if it could be disabled for all new mobos.

Standard PC BIOS is dead.  Any new motherboard will have UEFI.

-- 
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