[ardour-users] Machine configurations

[Joe Cooper]

Ctirad Fertr wrote:
>>I have a Gigabyte motherboard with a Via KT400 chip set (Athlon 2200+
>>and 1GB of DDR333 RAM), and I've tried for 8 months to make it play
>>audio reliably without skips and have failed.  It can't even play an mp3
>>or ogg with XMMS without skipping horribly when I open new windows or
>>move large ones--it will sometimes pause for as much as two or three
>>seconds. 
> 
> 
> Your system is most probably misconfigured. I have had smooth mp3 playback 
> even on a 486DX5 at 133MHz  with AWE64 card several years ago. 
> 
> Try to boot some linux LiveCD (Knoppix, SlaX or so) a test if the problem 
> exists also there. 

It has the same problem under Knoppix--these days Knoppix is my first 
response to "hardware" problems...if it works with Knoppix, I know it 
isn't the hardware that's broke.  I've also installed Fedora onto 
another disk in the same system, and the same problems occur--with both 
OSS and Alsa sound drivers (same behavior as under Red Hat 9).  I won't 
claim to be an expert at configuring sound on Linux, and in fact it took 
me weeks of effort to get everything working with Alsa the first time, 
but I don't think misconfiguration can be to blame in this case.

Sound skips whether I use the on-board sound or the Delta.  I've never 
had problems with Gigabyte boards before (we ship Gigabyte Intel-based 
boards in most of our servers and they are rock solid--which is why I 
bought a Gigabyte board for my own home desktop machine), but I'm 
unlikely to buy another one for audio purposes any time soon.

Also worth mentioning is that the problem occurred before the SCSI card 
and disks were installed, as well.  So even with only two PCI slots 
filled (Delta66 and NetGear NIC), it still has the problem.  Seems 
pretty broken to me.

I am still marginally hopeful that switching all of the cards around 
might improve things, but as it stands, this board is useless for audio. 
  Perhaps you'd like to buy a gently used Gigabyte 7VAXP Ultra and see 
how well it works for you when properly configured?  ;-)
-- 
Joe Cooper <joe at swelltech.com>
Web caching appliances and support.
http://www.swelltech.com