Quote Stevedog:

---

That system has to be worth a few pics in the magazine under the heading of... You lucky bar steward..

---

How about a new tv show, Pimp my daw?

--------------------
Woa-h, livin' on a prayer...

Hi chaps!

I read this thread with much interest, as i too am about to embark on building a machine primarily for music use. Initially i started by thinking about an X2 CPU, 4400+ or 4800+, with an Asus nForce 4 board and 2Gb of of low latency RAM. But after reading up about all the potential problems i'm now kinda 'confused'!

All i want is a machine that works 'right now', i don't need a big hairy a'r's'e'd' GPU, no SLI for me. So after reading this thread i'm thinking about perhaps going down in spec' to save problems.

I've mananged to find this board:

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3P2B

to use with this CPU:

http://www.dabs.com/productview.aspx?Quicklinx=3P75

I dont plan to run massive amounts of VSTi's or any DSP cards.

Sorry if i'm clogging up the thread, but does this look any good in terms of potential probs?

It's a minefield and i'm standing at the edge, wondering which path to take!!

Cheers

I've cracked what was worng with my system. Installing UAD-1 drivers v3.9/4.0 and upgrading to 4.1 left me with problems with UAD-1s in slots 1, 3 and 5. I had to install 3.7 and upgrade to 4.1 for the UAD-1s to be recognised in any slot, and not just 2 or 4. So now I've the cards in 1 and 2, with my AP192 in slot 4. Seems to work perfectly now. What a palava.

Andy - please go dual core if your board supports it (grab a 3800 X2 for a few more quid than that CPU). It's the way all music software will be heading, and is a joy to work with. True multitasking stability.

--------------------
ochremusic.com

Quote from me before:

"Like previous Intel posters I was a little unnerved by the normal running temperature (about 60C) but as the fan wasn't working hard I didn't worry too much. I have a fairly new Silenx 450W PSU which has a 20-pin MoBo connector (MoBo has 24-pin socket) but works fine. The extra 4 pins are only more of the same volts and ground connections. When browsing in a computer shop I found a 20-pin to 24-pin adaptor cable. When I hooked it up to my system, the better distribution of the volts somehow has made the normal operating temp drop to about 53C - well worth the AU$15."


I have now installed a ThermalTake Big Typhoon CPU cooler and now my idle temp is 39C rather than 53C, and loaded temp is 54C rather than 70C. The Typhoon has a 120mm fan which has a max speed of 1600 rpm and noise level of 16dBA so its great for recording.

I'd recommend that anyone looking at purchasing an Intel dual-core cpu should factor in a third-party cooler, because the stock Intel cooler is not up to the job.

Cheers,
Marty.

I finally did it!

MoBo: ASUS A8V (Via KT800 PRO)
cpu: Athlon64 X2 4200+ (2.2GHz)
cpu cooler: Zalman CNPS7000B-Cu
ram: Corsair TWINX1024 3200 XL (2x512MB DDR400 2,2,2,5)
svga: Palit ATI Radeon 9550 256MB (fanless)
audio: Lexicon Omega Desktop, Sek'd PRODIF 96
disk sub-system:
1) ata133 7200rpm 20GB (sys)
2) ata133 7200rpm 40GB (backup & swap)
3) 2 x sata 7200rpm 200GB in raid0 (audio & video)
case: Antec Sonata II

In risposta di:

---

Please indicate how pleased (or not) you are with its performance,

---

Pleased is not enough! This is much more than what I need for audio. I only use it at its full power in video editing.
In Cubase, 24 tracks @48KHz/24bit (8 stereo, 16 mono), plenty of plugins (compressor-gate nearly everywhere, 4 different reverb, 4 tube simulator, 8 eq, 2 amp simulator, and more) and cpu marks only 25%.

In risposta di:

---

how this compares with your previous machine (and briefly what that was) in terms of the different CPU meter readings when opening up existing songs

---

It's not a fair comparison. The previous system is a PIII 1GHz on a CUSL2C equipped with 512MB of generic PC133 ram.
It served me well for a long time (@44.1/16) and now it will me my "web&office PC"
The song I've reported above, spun the PIII at an insane overload.

In risposta di:

---

and mention any problems you've encountered.

---

NONE

I was attempting to build a more powerful and silent system. Even though I've a separate room for tracking, I like to listen at low level and the old pc was very noisy.
I gave a try to an Athlon64 3500+ (2,2GHz) on the same machine and it was ok for my needs as a daw, but I choose the X2 in order to have more processing power on video editing.
I use a multi-boot environment, with two XP partitions, one for audio and one for video, and a Win98SE, to use the Sek'd board whose driver developing stopped there.
I use "no frills" XP setups and do some tweaks on services and PCI latency (by default the Radeon is very bus-hungry)

S.

Just done the upgrade but using my original hardrives, soundcard and Gfx card:

-Asus A8v (not Deluxe)
-Athlon X2 4400+ dual-core(2.2ghz)
-Tagen 430W PSU
-2GB 400mhz Corsair ram
-Delta 1010 PCI soundcard with breakout box
-Matrox P650 Dual DVI AGP GFX
-Western Digital IDE 80GB system
-Western Digital IDE 250GB audio

I was initially worried about having to flash the bios of the Asus or the Matrox seen as I don't know how to do this, but luckily it all seems to work.I already had a driver update for the Delta 1010 for Pro Tools M-powered and this still works fine. The default wndows drivers for the matrox were crap so I installed the ones from the cd and all is fine now. The motherboard for some reason doesn't come with any usb2 drivers which I thought was a little wierd, service pack 2 sorted this out.

I haven't fully tested it to see how much it can handle but I loaded up a new cubase sx project with a few vstis and plug ins of the kind of thing I wanted to do.I had 3 ARP 2600s, 1 fully loaded Stylus RMX some channels with fx, 3 reaktors, absynth and a couple of waves reverb plug ins and the vst performance was on nothing (i think this isn't working).I left the song playing and ctl+alt+del task manager and cpu was on about 35%. Has anyone else had a none responsive vst performance meter?

thanks

Quote little person:

---

Has anyone else had a none responsive vst performance meter?

---

Is multi-processing checked under devices -> expert?

Yes multi-processing is checked. I'm on SX2, do you think I'll need an update or a quick fix?It would be good to keep an idea on the load within sx rather than checking processes under task manager!

Currently Using
ABIT AN8 Ultra Mobo (Nforce4 Ultra Silent chipset heatsink)
Opteron 170
E-MU 1820M
HIS X700 dual DVI


Work smooth, and fast.

My system before this:
Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939 (Nforce3 Ultra), problem with the BIOS
AMD X2 4200
E-MU 1820M
Gigabyte Radeon 9800XT
Work well, but sometimes the VST performance jump to around 80%, and no going down again (Cubase SX3).
Close the Cubase and reopen it cure the problem.

Your saying you found a difference between an opteron 170 and an x2 4200?

I cant believe that to be true.

Hi Biohazard,
please check my post again, the difference not only in the CPU, but the MOBO, and the GPU too.

And just for your information, my X2 cannot pass Prime more than 40 minutes with my Nforce 3 Ultra system, one of the Prime always fail while the other still running.
But that not happen with my Nforce 4 Ultra system + Opteron. I'm not sure that because of the CPU or the whole system, since I already sold my Nforce 3 system, and didn't have any change to interchange my peripherals .

Regards,
Gabriel Temmy

Quote:

---

And just for your information, my X2 cannot pass Prime more than 40 minutes with my Nforce 3 Ultra system, one of the Prime always fail while the other still running

---

Care to elucidate on what that actually means in plain english for us computer illiterate??

--------------------
nibbled to death by an Okapi http://www.soundclick.com/tubilahdog

Im doubtful the Opteron made a difference. More likely the nF4 in my opinion. I feel this is what the DAW machines should be moving to anyway whether they like it or not.

Quote Nescafe:

---

And just for your information, my X2 cannot pass Prime more than 40 minutes with my Nforce 3 Ultra system, one of the Prime always fail while the other still running.
But that not happen with my Nforce 4 Ultra system + Opteron. I'm not sure that because of the CPU or the whole system, since I already sold my Nforce 3 system, and didn't have any change to interchange my peripherals .

---

That's a clear heat buil-up problem. Nothiong to do with the mobo or any othe component in the system per se, except the Heatsink and cooling arrangements.



Peter

--------------------
PaQ

Ok I loaded up SX2 last night and the cpu in SX came to life.I had 1 reaktor(small ensemble), 1 moog and 1 Stylus RMX (not fully loaded) and performance was full at 100% even though the task manager was at 19%. Doe's anyone know what's happening here? Not sure if I trust SX performance meter anymore!

Some Reaktor ensembles can take a lot of juice, and if that's an Arturia Moog VSTi than that can take a fair amount as well. Even so, I wouldn't expect a Cubase SX CPU performance reading of 100% running that lot on my ancient P4 2.8GHz PC, and certanly not on an X2 4400+.

You're not by any chance running with a 1.5mS latency are you?


Martin

--------------------
YewTreeMagic

Quote Peter C:

---

Quote Nescafe:

---

And just for your information, my X2 cannot pass Prime more than 40 minutes with my Nforce 3 Ultra system, one of the Prime always fail while the other still running.
But that not happen with my Nforce 4 Ultra system + Opteron. I'm not sure that because of the CPU or the whole system, since I already sold my Nforce 3 system, and didn't have any change to interchange my peripherals .

---

That's a clear heat buil-up problem. Nothiong to do with the mobo or any othe component in the system per se, except the Heatsink and cooling arrangements.



Peter

---

Peter, I use the same CPU HSF with both system (Thermalright XP120 + Panaflo), the difference about the cooling:
Nforce 3: Gigabyte K8NS Ultra 939 using HSF for chipset
Nforce 4: ABIT AN8 Ultra using passive heatpipe cooling for the chipset.

So?????

OK, here's a "ready made". Dell Dimension 9150. Dual Intel 820 with Intel 945 P chipset-this made me take the chance as the Pci-e prob was supposed to be solved with this. My biggest anxiety was that it wouldn't match up to the results on the Cubase 5 tower test, It did (22 stop, 38 play..it also got down to 64 samples in either this or other tests like Thonex...whew...relief. I'm just getting lazy and got a good price ($580), It works like a charm so far. And I found out the new 900 series dual Intels will drop right in. It had room for a second hard drive so I put a 300 gb sata there. This machine is so clean and easily accessible. Latch on top and side drops off. I requested a complete version of XP on a cd and they mailed it free. Reformatted and valla..so far no probs. The heatsinc and fan unit are enormous and circulation is tight.
I haven't yet given this a pounding but so far so good.
PS-there's no temp sensors to read and that is good, kind of like not having to look at dashboard temps in car all the time. It might have lost a couple of points in not using the very best board. It's an Intel-Dell board with 3 pci slots and I haven't seen any Intel boards with this array, it's either 4 pcis or less than 2. There's the pci-e video card(x-300 Radeon, one considered good in that it's not a hog) and an extra pci-e slot. Also anxiety about room for cards...unwaranted. Impulsive chance I took and it all worked out....so far. Oh, and the machine is quiet.

Edit- Oh I forgot. 2 cards..Echo Darla 20 and a Yamaha SW 1000 XG. I tried to drop a Delta 66 Omni studio in but it would only show stereo inputs and outputs would not pass the sync test in Cubase SX 3. But it did pass the "ordinary" test. So there was so much to do (ghosting etc)I just put the Darla it and it tested perfect.

Thanks for that info moocha, and welcome to the SOS Forums!

It's reassuring to know that at least some mainstream desktop PCs don't have issues with music software and hardware


Martin

--------------------
YewTreeMagic

this might be interesting - i built a system this week and was also concerned about PCie, so as a test we decided to try the onboard graphics first to see if there'd be any issues (NVIDIA GeForce 6150) - The reasoning was, we didn't need a pcie card to build it, and if on completion the onboard graphics caused any problems we could always go back and get a pcie card.

we used the Asus A8N-VM CSM micro ATX - nForce 430 - Socket 939 - UDMA133, Serial ATA-300 (RAID)

This board supports Athlon 64, Athlon 64 FX & Athlon 64 X2 - We decided to cut cost with the small board because the client would never need more than one PCI slot & other micro ATX's i've built have been flawless, so you can put more dosh into the PSU etc. I'm starting to use these small boards all the time now as it goes - As little bonus this particular board has firewire.

We added a budget AMD 3200 cpu and m-audio delta 1010LT and actualy the onboard graphics don't seem to be a problem so far

it's using all IDE drives - 40gb booter + 1/2 terrabyte for audio + pioneer 110 dvdrw. The client is doing mostly audio record work & not much VSTi's

--------------------
www.7161.com
Free online music space & Homepages

"decided to try the onboard graphics first to see if there'd be any issues (NVIDIA GeForce 6150) - The reasoning was, we didn't need a pcie card to build it,"

That IS interesting.

"it's using all IDE drives - 40gb booter + 1/2 terrabyte for audio + pioneer 110 dvdrw. The client is doing mostly audio record work & not much VSTi's"

Yes, I forgot...that was another cause for anxiety...sata audio...I'd read probs (I had lots of IDE drives ready to go). But my ide channel was taken up with dvd rom and my "relocated" dvd r/rw. So I took ANOTHER chance(Seagate 300 gb sata $130 compusa(not bad huh?). I was very lucky. But remember, this system has not yet been totally tested over a period of time but I must say it's promising . Yes, vstis really put things to the task,that is also why I use Cubase. With Asio for all, who can tell..maybe even onboard audio could be used rudimentarily or even satisfactorily for 16 bit/44khz. I don't think I have on board video.

J
PS-I don't really know much about sata board input, whether I could have put an ide in it, I wanted to take the chance and see if I could be "SATAsified"...as to versus "Hanitized" (Sean Hannity?).



(fingers crossed)

I've just built my own system :

MB/Chipset : Asus A8N5X Nfoce 4
Processor : AMD X2 3800
Graphics : Sapphire X800GTO (PCI-Express)
Audio : Tascam FW1082 (Firewire)
Power : CoolerMaster 450W
2x IDE HD (Maxtor, WD)

I'm running Windows Pro SP2. At first I had some issues (freezing) with applications that don't support dual core cpu's. Now that I installed the latest chipset drivers, the AMD X2 driver and the Windows XP dual core hotfix, everything runs very fast and stable. I can clearly see a performance difference between this system and my 'old' Athlon 2400+.

Startup time of my system (standalone) is about 5 seconds. Once in Cubase SX3.1 (latest update) and playing full chord pad sound on the built-in Embracer, I can hardly see the CPU-meter going up ! Audio tracks play back smoothly and processing them in real time with FX doesn't cause any glitches or clicks.

I still have to do some thourough testing with lots of synths and audio tracks, but I don't think this will be a problem. I'm very happy so far.

Peter.

Just as a matter of interest all you dual corers out there- is anyone using Logic successfully on a dual core system?

I'd like to upgrade eventually,and I'm weaning myself(slowly) onto Cubase, but with so much back catalogue on Logic it would be essential for me that I could use Logic and that it ran smoothly.

Anyone tried it?

--------------------
www.myspace.com/thegroovegoblins

Typo in my last post :

Startup time is 15 seconds.

I don't know if Logic supports dual core, but if you install the AMD dual core drivers and the Windows XP hotfix, you shouldn't have problems running single core applications.

Peter.

Quote 2thick4uni:
Hi,
I've just built myself a new music pc with the following spec:-

x2 3800+ dual CPU with Zalman CNPS9500 cooler
Abit AV8 Motherboard (Via K8T800 chipset)
2GB Corsair XMS3200C2PT Ram
XFX GeForce 6200 AGP passive cooled Video Card
Western Digital 250gb SATA2 H/drive
M-Audio Audiophile 2496 PCI
Akasa Ultra quiet 400w PSU
Antec P180 case

However I've overclocked the CPU to 2520mhz (from 2000mhz std) and this thing REALLY flies.


Hi 2thick4uni (ps sorry to hear that!) and hello to all - this is my firt post here, though I've read SOS for donkeys.

I just bought the same board and cpu as you. I've got a Philip Rees bare bones (Antec Sonata + psu desktop full form factor ATX, Asus P5P800 mobo, P4 3.0 GHz, 2GHz DDR333 RAM). Its guts are coming out tonight to make room for the new lot (though I've got to stick with th RAM for now). Did you just overclock the CPU? Or did you mess with fsb, RAM, voltages etc? It'd be nice to have some kind of headstart before delving in!

I'm running an Echo Mia MIDI, and I'll get back to the forum on whether it's happy in the Abit, unlike the Asus. Interestingly the Abit has optical spdif - does anyone know if it is good enough for interfacing with preamps/channel strips? It is digital, after all.

regs to all


Gary

Oh, I apologise for the improper quote format, but when I tried I got the quote but none of my text, or the other way round. So I went manual...

Gary

Has anyone reading this successfully built a dualcore DAW using the ATI Xpress 200 Athlon chipset? There is a new ASUS board out at the moment based on this, which is getting some good reviews

If this board works well, it may be another option for those that want to have a PCIe based board to be a bit more futureproof, but dont want all the (reported) problems with the nF4 boards. Which is the situation I am in... I've been thinking of building a new machine, I want to do AMD because they run cooler, and I think dualcore is def the way to go now. But all these glitches people have been reporting is making choosing the parts feel like

Andy

For anyone interested in keeping their old Mia MIDI with an Athlon X2 system, here are the boards Echoaudio remommend:

- MSI K8T Neo-2F
- ECS nForce4 A754
- ASUS SK8V

I don't know which, bar the second, uses nForce4, but this came directly from their tech support.

I have just put together an Abit AV8, X2 4200 with a Delta 66 card, 2x 1GB ram sticks and 2 x Maxtor 250 Sata drives. So far so good, although a couple of niggles with popping and clicking when I try to overclock using the guru facility, but so long as I stick to the default settings it rockets along compared to the original 2.8 Athlon...
Shame, as it would be good to push it - Im sure Ill figure it out eventually..

Unless anyone else has had a similar problem??

--------------------
Marvellous.

Interesting news.void(0)

Todays research on the upgrade path of the Dell 9150/XPS series (all dual core):
Europe offers the same Dell Dimension 9150(same motherboard and chipset) with the 900 series(4 mb L2 cache) dual core instead of the 800 as they do in the states. Also of note: Both the Euro and US manual are exactly the same - except for one thing: they tell you how to take out and install the cpu in the Euro manual, not in the US one . Also, this board (US+Euro identicle) is hyperthreading capable and capable of a 1066 bus. The Intel EE cpu is the only one of the dual cores that utilizes hyperthreading and this bus speed. And they claim their Dell will offer the 900 series EE (955), but now only offer up to the 950. Does this mean the 945p chipset is EE capable? That would be news.

Hi all,

I'm just about to build my new system, after much research. System will be as follows:

Athlon64 4400 X2 Dual Core
Asus A8V Deluxe (Rev.2)
2gb G.Skill ZX RAM
2 x 250gb Samsung Spinpoint HDDs
M-Audio Delta 2496
NEC 4550 DVD writer
Chenbro RM422 rackmount case, fitted with SilenX 120mm & 2 x 80mm fans
Hiper 580w Type-R PSU
Coolermaster Cooldrive6 fan controller/drive cooler

The main components are swift and quiet, and so i'm hoping for good things!

My question here however, is in regards to the drives and partitioning.
I am dual booting, as i have done in the past, and I was going to format and partition as follows:

sata1: 100gb Audioboot, 150gb Genboot
sata2: 50gb Projects, 200gb Samples
pata1: 70gb Genspace, 5gb AudioScratch, 5gb GenScratch

Can anyone give advice as to whether this looks cool before i go ahead?

I'll also be taking pictures of the build, as i'm reviewing the case. It's a really nice piece of kit and is going to be my gigging machine when built, after i deciced against getting a laptop.

Quote:

---

So far so good, although a couple of niggles with popping and clicking when I try to overclock using the guru facility, but so long as I stick to the default settings it rockets along compared to the original 2.8 Athlon...

---

Overclocking won't cause more clicks and pops unless you're overclocking the PCI bus too - this is a NOT a good idea. Check in the bios that you have the PCI frequency locked and you're only o/cing the cpu and fsb. Also, only overclock from the bios (rather than guru), you have lots more control. You will have to increase the cpu core voltage to get more than about 10%, also need to play with multiplier for ram as it probably won't overclock as well as cpu.

Allan

--------------------
Top Tip: RAPPERS. Avoid having to say 'know what I'm sayin' all the time by actually speaking clearly in the first place. (Viz Comic)

I am surprised no one has mentioned the Asrock939Dual motherboard. I went through the upgrade quandry last fall and got this little inexpensive board that has both AGP and PCIe configurations. Works great with a Athlon X24200+ and two DSPF cards.i discussed the whole upgrade process on the SONAR Forums. It is the best of both worlds. You can keep your current hardware and upgrade to PCIe as it becomes more prevelant and reliable. Plus, it has a CPU upgrade path to the AM2.

To contribute to the survey:
Motherboard/chipset: ASrock939Dual/ULiM1695
Processor: Athlon X2 4200+
Graphics card: ATI Radeon X800XL(AGP)
Audio interface: (2 Yamaha DSPF's)

Best,

Andy

Edited by AndyWMusic (11/03/06 11:23 PM)

Well I built an AMD Dual Core system for all the wrong reasons! There is an old saying in life if it isn’t broke don’t fix it, never a truer word! I had a dual processor PC comprising of the following. MSI K7D Master –L server main board VIA chipsets 762 and 768, socket 462,sporting two AMD 2200 MP Processors. Adaptec 29320 Raid host Scsi card running two Raid 0, two disk configurations a 36GB for the windows XP Pro system and the other a 72 GB data volume using IBM Deskstar 160 Mb/sec disks, very expensive! A Matrox G-550 AGP graphics card, a Giga of Ram. I originally built the machine as a very fast Photoshop and all was well for nearly three years with trouble free and very fast number crunching. Later as my interest in home recording grew I added a Esi-Julia card which I used mainly with the Co-Axial digital in and out for mastering with waves plugins in Audition after tracking on my Korg D1600 MkII. It all worked very nicely. Faultlessly actually! THEN!!! Impressed by the review of the ESI Maxio XD in SOS I decided to buy the ESI Maxio 032 and replace the Julia, that was early January, I haven’t made one single piece of music on my PC since! Take note!!! I installed the Maxio 032 and was impressed with the quality of the sound it’s a great card,except the computer from that day on started to either Blue screen reporting the Maxio and specifically audio.sys to be the culprit ,or screech with a high pitched whistle and all levels on the Maxio software panel reading in the red. Bearing in mind the Maxio was sharing the PCI bus with a Adaptec 29320 bus mastering Raid card and two additional USB cards and a Fire wire card I spent the next week playing with latencies and Ddawg etc. Anyhow to cut a long story short after removing all cards except the Maxio and the Scsi card and fiddling with PCI latencies with Ddawg there was no progress basically Blue screens or screaming was a common occurrence. So I decided on a Dual core based around the following

MSI Neo K8T F V 2.0 with the VIA® K8T800 Pro Chipset
AMD dual core 4400+ with 2 GB Kingston Ram
and the original Matrox G550 dual head AGP Graphic card.
WD 10,000 rpm serial ATA disk
Win Pro XP etc Audition

The Maxio 032 is the only card currently in the PCI slot and the only original components are the case, power supply, Graphic card and DVD drive and 100MB internal Zip drive and floppy. Everything else is New. First Is it faster than my Dual processor Scsi raid 0 machine? .Answer no it’s not about the same, based on day to day computing tasks. Has it cured my sound card problems.
NO IT HASN’T…….argggggggggggggggggg…… .So be warned if it works spend your precious time making music not faffing about with F’ing Pc’s…. its just the same has blue screened once and works for anything from ten mins to three hours just listening to music or real player etc and then just goes screeching mode, or a new development it freezes! Checked everything except another graphic card!! All drivers, XP Pro are the latest graphic card Bios and main board bios are the latest. I have tried everything…any suggestions gratefully received .Have I bought a duffer? All in all this needless desire to upgrade has cost me approx £950 including the Maxio 032, so be warned next time someone says “oh have you read the latest review of x, y or z” whack him over the head with that dusty old acoustic guitar you got in the corner then tune it up and go write some songs!

Ps I should add the computer itself works fine as I ran it for a few days with just the standard soundcard without the Maxio 032 and it's a great machine.

Edited by fdotbone (19/03/06 06:07 PM)

"wack him over the head", can i just say I think its your fault you've spent so much money here. Why did you go an upgrade a computer? Just because one PCI card wasnt working in an older setup?

Did you contact the manufacturer? Ask anyone else here why the card wasnt working?

Yes and yes is the answer to that.I was always lead to believe that the original computer chipset was NOT a good choice for Sound cards, this i learnt from many posts on the protools user Forums.That may be or may not be the case.I fail however to see how it's my fault.My choice to fork out the money perhaps but one would expect a working machine after all its not an unusual configuration and the ESI MaXio series has in the pages of this magizine at least a good reputation for stability etc etc.As for "whacking anyone over the head" its called a sense of humour in the face of adversity.You may have had the transplant?

The Card should however work in the present setup and it doesn't , how is that my fault? Please can I ask ppl only to post here if you have both a sense of humour and something useful to say or suggest or have overcome similar difficulties with this card. Thanks

Edited by fdotbone (20/03/06 06:38 PM)

Quote:

---

MSI Neo K8T F V 2.0 with the VIA® K8T800 Pro Chipset

---

To hazard a guess, i'd say there lies part, if not all, of your problem. Interested to know why you went for an MSI board when ASUS and Gigabyte are "de rigeur" in just about every DAW i know. I cant honestly think of any person or computer magazine that recommends MSI boards over ASUS and Gigabyte, the only other boards i know that seem to be attracting praise are the 939 socket DFLan party models.

--------------------
nibbled to death by an Okapi http://www.soundclick.com/tubilahdog

Hi Steve dog , thanks for taking time to respond, well yes I went for the MSI grounded on "Very bad research" obviously on my part basically the logic was that ppl seem to like the Asus A8V and it has the same Chipset and I wanted to stick with a pure PCI board etc . Also several ppl above said they had built machines with this board “Peter C” being one and I had read about some poor chap having fried an Asus board and processor etc. Also read somewhere about the gigabyte being a difficult board to setup. Maybe I dreamt that, I can’t tell anymore! Anyhow I think we have established that I have made bad decisions and am a total waste of space! Looking back now I am totally to blame for being a mere consumer with not enough “Expertise” in the subject of modern computing for boys .I don’t buy computer magazines ,and I don’t know anyone else with any knowledge in this area.I was probably short of time on the day also, wanting to get on with writing a new song or something, I sort of thought my original post would be a friendly warning to other inexperienced twats like myself as to the pitfalls. If it’s only a question of swapping out a main board well hey I’ll give it a shot. So ok being in my position which board would you go for now? Thanks for your time.

Im with you about the getting on with the music part.. That being said, simply by dint of its importance i have had to bite the bullet and get into understanding what makes a comp work to some degree.

Funny thing is, i also had a *bad experience* with an ASUS board, but 1000s are happy with their performance. For that reason alone i tend to go for the Gigabyte option these days.

Gigabyte GA-K8NPro SLi K8939 nF4..... That would be my choice and ,incidentally, Gigabyte and ASUS nearly all use the n4 chipset not the Via

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nibbled to death by an Okapi http://www.soundclick.com/tubilahdog

Wow That was quick! thanks for that stevedog you're a star.I must admit I am a bit confused as I thought there was issues with Pci express boards? Anyhow i think I will give it a shot as my local PC supplier has one of the these gigabyte boards in stock.Don't worry if i still have problems you're not to blame.My call I respect your advice I seem to remember you helped me out once before.I might have dreamed that as well..lol anyhow many thanks cheers.