ASUS P5ND2 w/nForce4 SL1 Intel Edition

[gpo]

Am building a high-end Intel PC. Using ASUS mobo P5ND2 to take advantage of PCI-express double 8x ports (one for graphics, one for SCSI dual-channel controller card). Read about audio pops/clicks from earlier versions of nVidia's nForce4 chipset. Anyone have experience with the newer nForce4 SL1-Intel Edition (Crush 19) -- MCP-04 edition, regarding audio pops/clicks? Thanks. GPO

[james vogts]

Check out the RME-Audio website. Obviously a great gaming board, but if your going to make an audio DAW, NF3/D875 are mature, and proven to be audio friendly. But I have friends who seem to enjoy waiting for bugs to be fixed,etc. I prefer to make music rather than tweaking computers. Who knows maybe someone will make an SLI souncard setup.

[gpo]

Check out the RME-Audio website. Obviously a great gaming board, but if your going to make an audio DAW, NF3/D875 are mature, and proven to be audio friendly. But I have friends who seem to enjoy waiting for bugs to be fixed,etc. I prefer to make music rather than tweaking computers. Who knows maybe someone will make an SLI souncard setup.

Thanks for the reply, James. Actually, I had reviewed the RME website prior to posting, and neither that site nor any other had any info on the specific MOBO/Nforce chipset I'd mentioned in the post. Unfortunately, this particular Asus MOBO is (at least at the moment) the only one on the market that provides two, 8x PCI-express lanes. My planned use is one 8x for the graphics card, and the second 8x for a dual-channel Intel SCSI controller card with 640 MB/s throughput for Giga samples. Thanks for the feedback.

[james vogts]

A mature platform for audio is a must. Would you rather tweak computers or work on your project. That's the question. 600+ mbps is overkill in my opinion. However 133mbps isn't enough in RAID 0 scenarios. The rig I use for live performance is set up for stability, so I use RAID 1. Since I play live, and don't sequence, due to improv. It's more important for me to have a no frills mobo with stable, mature chipsets that have been proven. I use a Supermicro P4SCT+II. All audio from hard drives is sent to the PCI-X buss. That leaves my DSP card all by itself on the meagher PCI buss. There is no built in sound, short PCB traces, 4 phase power, vertically aligned DIMMs ( GS3 heats up RAM big time ) which sit right under rear case fan. This company designs their boards for workstation use, not consumer. But thats what GS3 is. If you must have NVidia, go with NF3/Gigabyte combo. I heard you can go dual core on these now. I prefer the slower, stabler Intel design. Besides, when Tascam rewrote their GS3 code, it's safe to assume it was done on a Intel P4 chipset. Good luck if you go PCI-e.