Hi Peter!

No problem - there are loads of issues to weigh up when considering a new dual-core motherboard, so everyone's views are welcome.

The problem with nForce4 is whether or not the problems 'largely vanish', are 'masked', or just still exist but at a rather less annoying level. Scott says on his web site that nForce4 'now seems to work' with dual-core Athlons, but the fact remains that no-one has yet given this chipset a clean bill of health for audio - its performance still seems to be less than that of an nForce3 motherboard at low latency, and for those who won't initially (or perhaps ever) be using their x1 PCI Express slots, nForce 4 would therefore seem to offer no advantages and possibly a small disadvantage in performance terms with low-latency audio.

I can fully understand your preference for either a fully PCI or fully PCIe solution, since this should hopefully help to avoid 'some' of the PCI bridging issues of the hybrid approach. However, once again, a fully PCIe solution doesn't currently offer musicians any advantage over a fully PCI solution as far as I can see - at the moment. Everything hinges on what PCIe peripherals are released during 2006. PCIe offers some tremendous technological improvements over PCI, but until products are released that take advantage of these (other than amazingly fast graphic cards or tandem graphic cards that are irrelevant to most musicians except those who run video) I can see no practical advantage to owning a PCIe system.

And as I've always said in the pages of SOS, you should buy based on what's available now, and not on promises (or in this case partly guesswork on our collective parts) of what's going to be available in the future. And although I could be wrong, I still have a feeling that the majority of audio interface manufacturers will stick with FireWire.

Sorry if I'm having a 'bit of a downer' on nForce4 and PCI Express in general, but the case for the prosecution does still seem to be stronger than that of the defence


Martin

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YewTreeMagic

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