[ardour-users] AMD motherboard recommendations please?

[Eric]

I'm using an AMD K7D Master with two Athlon 2400's.  It's OK, but
occasionally locks up hard...I think that's been reduced by realizing
the ECC feature of my RAM was turned off in the BIOS.  Even so, it
seems to me (only anecdotal evidence to back this) that SMP actually
hurts latency due to the extra scheduling, etc. problems introduced.
I still haven't figured out how to configure my system to do any
better than "-n 3 -p 256" for jackd.  I suspect many of my problems
are the 64-bit PCI SCSI controller I have running my disks, especially
since in the AMD MP architecture it has to sit above the other, 32-bit
PCI bus where my M-Audio Delta 66 soundcard fits.  I'm crossing my
fingers that 2.6.12 with Mingo's realtime-preempt patches will solve
my problems...right now I'm running an unpatched 2.6.9 kernel since my
last attempt at rebuilding to incorporate both my ATI Radeon 9800
drivers and low-latency resulted in me losing a large chunk of my XFS
filesystem through a series of hard crashes.

In any case, should you opt for the AMD MP, i have nice quiet cooling
in my LITEON FS020 case with an Antec TRUE480 power supply, two Pabst
120mm fans, Thermalright SLK-900A heat sinks, and Zalman ZM-F2 92mm
fans on my CPU's.  This is entirely ruined by my whining FUJITSU
MAN3367MP and QUANTUM ATLAS10K2 10,000 RPM hard drives, and possibly
by the little fan on my Radeon video card.

good luck,
eric.

On Sat, Jun 11, 2005 at 09:44:18AM -0700, Kevin Cosgrove wrote:
> 
> I'm building a system and would like to have it be dual AMD.  What 
> motherboards are you using, which are still current enough to buy one 
> new?  It'd be good if the motherboard layout was such that I can fit 
> a quiet CPU cooler, Zalman or such, on each CPU.  Thanks....
> 
> 
> --
> Kevin