[Ardour-Users] Motherboard hints and tips?

[Paul Winkler]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2008 at 01:56:35PM +0100, Arnold Krille wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> Am Donnerstag, 31. Januar 2008 schrieb Mark Greenwood:
> > Having delved into why I'm getting 30% CPU usage with 4 tracks in
> > Ardour, my VIA motherboard would seem to be to blame. So, it's time for
> > me to build a new PC. I want to build it from scratch, since I've never
> > done it before and I like a challenge and also I don't want to buy an
> > off-the-shelf PC and get a useless Vista CD.... Back when it was my job
> > to understand this stuff, I understood this stuff, but that was a long
> > time ago. I've been researching and find myself bewildered by the range
> > of options and makes and terminology.
> 
> Don't buy MSI. I got one of their boards and it only works "satisfactory" when 
> I disable all the interrupt-debugging/checking, because it fires spurious 
> interrupts from the PATA-irqs (where only a dvd is connected) when nothing is 
> active on that bus.

+1, I had a bad MSI too, years ago. I will also never touch a PCChips
board again. Cheap stuff is cheap for a reason. After that I had a
Soyo that seemed good until it spontaneously let out the blue smoke on
a hot summer day.  Since then I've been happy with Tyan boards,
although they're a bit pricey.  My current one is almost 2 years old
with no problems; its predecessor worked like a champ for 3 years
until the day I took it out to upgrade. And I've never had any of
these mysterious problems with bad latency or CPU usage.

-- 

Paul Winkler
http://www.slinkp.com