[Ardour-Users] Motherboard hints and tips?

[Mark Greenwood]

Well, thanks all for your tips last week on motherboards and the like. 
My new system is now up and running and, so far, seems to be doing very 
nicely. No VIA chipsets anywhere, projects which were 30% CPU usage on 
the old machine are 2% CPU usage on this one.

In case anyone's interested, here's what I bought:

Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6750 S775 2.66ghz 4mb Cache 1333FSB (awaits howls of 
derision from the 64-bit crowd ;))
Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Case - EarthWatts 500W PSU
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (well worth the money - much 
quieter than the stock Intel cooler)
Corsair 2GB DDR2 800MHz RAM
Hitachi Deskstar T7K500 400GB SATA-II hard disc - with my linux kernel 
and this mobo I can run this in 'native SATA (AHCI)' mode, which gives 
me almost 3GB/sec of data transfer!
Gigabyte GeForce 8600 GT 256MB - yeah OK, a bit overkill, but it sure 
plays Quake3 well :-)
I'm also using a pretty bog-standard PCI express firewire card to 
connect my Edirol FA-66 to.

It's not completely silent, but it is very quiet - most of the noise 
comes from the PSU fan. And boy, it's fast. :)

Thanks all for the advice, it gave me the confidence to do it!

Mark.