[Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

[Justin M. Streiner]

On Tue, 9 Dec 2008, Mark Greenwood wrote:

> I second the vote for Gigabyte boards as being reliable and linux-freindly. I bought one about a year ago after posting a very similar poll on this list! However mine has one slight isue which apparently is a common flaw - it would randomly and falsely think it had detected me inserting a CD into the IDE CD-ROM drive. Switching to a SATA unit and disabling the IDE controller solved this.
>
> As others have said, think very carefully about the number and type of adapter cards you will want to fit. My board has a PCI-E 16x slot for the graphics card, and I duly bought a huge NVidia card with a great heantsink on it - only to find that this then obscures the slots either side because they're so close together. I would always assume now that if a board has a mixture of PCI-E and PCI slots, that you will not be able to fill them all.
>
> So, Gigabyte gets my vote as reliable and fast, but not for being particulalry cleverly designed. I hear great things about Tyan boards all the time.
>
> One thing to be really aware of is to steer well clear of anything with 
> VIA chipsets on it. There's even a statement somewhere on the Ardour 
> website saying this, and I can say from experience that if you have any 
> VIA stuff anywhere on your motherboard then you are not going to achieve 
> low latency however hard you try.

Yeah, I read that too.  I was planning to stick with Asus/Tyan/Gigabyte 
anyway.

jms