Motherboard needed

Scott Osborne · July 13th, 2003, 10:31 AM

Charles,
The IS7-G will give you better performance because it uses the Dual DDR Ram which give almost twice the performance of normal DDR. Not to mention the 800 mHz FSB will give you more bandwidth going from the CPU to the Ram. I checked the specs on it and it only has Serial ATA Raid. Either you will have to buy SATA drives ore use the Abit Seriallel adapters to connect ATA100 or 133 drives to the SATA Raid. I figure you were interested in setting up a Raid because you were looking at boards with Raid controllers.

The IT7 Max2 has PS/2 connectors for the mouse and keyboard so you dont need to convert your current stuff to USB. Only the early version of the Max2 didnt have PS/2 connectors.

As for the onboard AC97 audio....I cant use it its much too noisy for my tastes. Your better off buying a good pro level card.

Adrian,
My P4 is very stable at that speed and it also runs pretty cool. However I bought 3 2.4Cs amd only 2 of them were good Oc'ers the other one tops out at 2.88, The other two are great at 3.24gHz. Ofcourse I dont use a stock Heatsink and fan. I use larger units that are more efficent at dispelling heat. I also had a 2 P4 2.4Bs that were stable at 3.06 gHz. When oc'ing I always stop the speed at the most stable point. High rendering speed is nothing if it crashes during a complex render.

Hope this was some help

Charles King · July 13th, 2003, 01:25 PM

Thank you Scott for that candid reply. You've been a big help. I think I'll be going for that model then.

Nigel Moore · July 13th, 2003, 01:35 PM

Scott

You state that the onboard audio's of limited use. You can probably disable it in BIOS, but does that make it completely 'invisible' to the system so that it doesn't hog IRQs and other resources?

(I'll leave my thoughts on Windows' automatic allocation of resources out of this!)

Charles King · July 13th, 2003, 02:02 PM

That's a good point Nigel. I'll also like to know. Another thing, What power supply is considered reasonable? 400W or more?

Scott Osborne · July 13th, 2003, 05:12 PM

Yes you can disable it Bios and no it doesnt use an IRQ when it is disabled.

Charles,
The power supply is were people usually skemp. I suggest getting a 400w or better PS...Made by a company with a good reputation for quality PS Antec, or Enermax are good choices. A solid PS will go a long way towards providing a stable PC. I cant tell you how many PCs I have had to replace PS because the customer was coplaining about constant crashes. Most people just purchase a case with a no name 300 watt PS and then pack there boxes full of optical and hard drives. A cheap PS just cant handle all of those devices and still deliver a constant 5 volts for your motherboard. The just dont. Despite what some people are going to say. I have years of experiance building and troubleshooting PCs I know this is the area where people always screw up.

Hope this is useful

Christopher Go · July 13th, 2003, 05:18 PM

I completely agree about the power supplies. Some of the best in the industry, with 5 year warranties instead of the usual 3, can be found at PC Power And Cooling. Their Turbo Cool series are well regarded. Easier to obtain but almost as good is Antec's Performance series power supplies. I'd go with Enermax last - from my experience I've seen voltage fluctuations from Enermax units that made me wary but so far there have been no problems with them too.

When it comes to devices you never use I always make it a habit to disable them in the BIOS, which frees up resources and can speed up boot time as well. I disable on my machines: serial ports (COM), the parallel port (I no longer use any printers that connect to the parallel port), and any unused on-board devices.

Christopher Go · July 13th, 2003, 05:25 PM

Nigel, I don't know what to make of Tyan. I have the Tyan Tiger MP motherboard with dual 1.5GHz Athlon MPs (1800MP) with 2GB of DDR memory. Its been running without any problem for close to 2 years now.

However, even though I really like the motherboard I've seen many documented reports (with pictures) of that particular motherboard's ATX connector melting down! They've been RMA'ing those boards without question because they are familiar with the problem. To me that's unacceptable from a manufacturer.

Otherwise, I hear that many of their other MP boards are rock solid - just look for one with the additional power supply connection. If you're going dual AMD, you might want to wait for the dual Opterons when they come out with one with an AGP slot (there's only one board I know of with that spec but its from Rioworks and I'd rather wait to see more competition)

Scott Osborne · July 13th, 2003, 05:44 PM

Thanks for agreeing Chris. I didnt recommend PC Power and Cooling because most people dont want to pay there prices. I love there PSs they are certainly the best in the industry. I use 2 of the redudants in my server. Never had a single power failure yet. they have been running nearly none stop for almost 2 years now.

I will say I like Antec out the more affordable PSs. I just usually always use a Antec case so I get the highend PS with it. As far as cases go there certainly not as pretty as Lian Li but there excellent and there affordable...I would highly recommens using one for your PC Charles...That is if you dont already have a case.

Charles King · July 13th, 2003, 06:32 PM

Thanks Scott. I already have a case but I'm buying a new one to go with the new setup I'm building just for editing. Just saw a good power supply for a reasonably good price - 550w. That should be enough - Well it should be.

So Christopher

If you want to print something, what do you do then?

Yi Fong Yu · July 13th, 2003, 08:03 PM

if you want DUAL processor, there's nothing better than a dual AMD cpu mobo because of cost. you can have one for under $1.5k with good planning. a xeon, on th other hand, will run you $2k+ and performance/dollar isn't really worth it. the only thing xeon has on AMD is the memory speed, which the amd 760 chipset is showing its age. i have the tiger mpx (with the fixed usb problem) and it runs flawless. make sure you get a case with good airflow. if you don't you'll suffer. modern CPUs are simply waaaay too hot.

as for sticking with intel there's some right and wrong with it. intel is heavily optimized in multimedia apps such as 3dsmax. therefore it is worth considering xeon if you have the dough and cost is no object =).

http://forums.2cpu.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=13

Christopher Go · July 13th, 2003, 08:27 PM

Hello Charles, when I want to print something I send it to my print server, which is on my network. However, many printers nowadays use the USB port so you can use that too if you don't have a print server.

When it comes to building an editing machine I really do believe the less apps and extraneous devices there are the better. It should only be used for editing. I have another machine where I do my web surfing, writing, printing, etc. Having an NLE already determines a lot of the devices you'll need and I believe you can reduce overhead and problems when the only items you're worrying about have to do with the single purpose at hand. Been very stable this way. Increasing frame rates in a game while dealing with IRQ conflicts because of the capture card is not fun.

As for the power supply its not only about the raw power but also how well it handles voltage fluctuations. Brand name ones are good for this.

I know what you mean about PC Power and Cooling, Scott, they're expensive! But I try to account for that in the budgeting since its so important to the system's health.

Don Parrish · July 13th, 2003, 09:19 PM

After researching which new motherboard to build from I decided to stay away from Asus boards because of poor quality within the last year and no answer from Asus tech support. I also now own a Asus CUSL2-C that has given me problems for a long time. I don't know why you have ruled out intel but maybe you should look again. I am currently (as we speak) building a new P4 using the new D865PERL Rock Lake board. P4 2.4c Ghz 800fsb 2gigs DDR400 ram etc. This board has built in IEEE 1394a firewire, USB 2.0 backward compatible, 8x / 4x AGP, serial ATA and more. I decided after building 4 computers over the last six years I wanted a stable motherboard. So I went Intel. I know you didn't think about Intel but maybe it would at least be worth the time of considering it. Chip $ 172 M/B $ 127 Ram $ 380. After months of research weighing the cost vs stability, board options, and speed, Intel was the only logical motherboard with all the options I was looking for.

Scott Osborne · July 13th, 2003, 09:53 PM

Absolutly Chris, a NLE PC should be a single use machine. I dont even allow mine to connect to the internet (I do all communications through the server) I dont even use my NLE PC for audio. I have a seperate PC that is dedicated to Cubase SX and WaveLab. Infact I dont even allow my special purpose Pcs to administrate themselves. All defraging and Virus scaning is done through my scheduler thats running on my server. I know this sounds extreme but having all of these machines with there own special purpose gives me the ultimate realiability.I havent seen a crash in months..No lock ups no BSODs nothing. Its like a PC utopia in my studio. Just the wonderful sound of 4 PCs and one server humming away.The only problem is the heat. I have a 20000 Btu window unit in the studio because the central air just cant handle the heat!

Don,
While the Intel SpringDale board is nice it is slow compared to the Gigibyte and the Abit this is because these boards have PAT or Hyper Path enabled. This is the memory acces architecture that the Intel 875 "canterwood" Northbridge uses.The feature is also intergrated into the 865 "Springdale" northbridge however it comes shipped from intel with PAT disabled. A few companys have suceeded in enabling PAT with a circuit that is external to the actual northbridge chip (pretty sneaky huh) This allows those 865 boards to perform about the same as a 875 board at a much lower cost. Intel does not have that enabled on there board because they would rather sell the more expensive 875 board. Th actual chip dont cost them anymore ot make so this is a good area for them to genarate more money.
If I were you I would pack that board up RMA it and pick up a Abit Ic7-G...For the money its just as stable and has much better performance

Ps Sorry about the Geek content of that last message

Charles King · July 14th, 2003, 02:15 AM

Agreed with you all. Some very valid points guys. Another question. Is there any particular type of memory I should marry together with this particular motherboard- 2700 or 2300 type cruial models?

Don Parrish · July 14th, 2003, 06:09 AM

IC7-G truly is a great board but I am not an overclocker as I like rock hard stability, even though the benchmarks are somewhat better for the IC7-G without overclocking and stability appears fine. I looked at this board but it was at least $ 70 more than the 865. The alternative plain IC7 does not support the DDR 400. It was just a choice I made because the benchmarks were not that much better, I believe the media ( mpeg 4 ) benchmarks were 63.89 for abit and 62.76 for the 865. The numbers were consistantly better for the Abit but not enough for the money.

July 13th, 2003, 10:31 AM	#16
Scott Osborne Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Rochester NY Posts: 116	Charles, The IS7-G will give you better performance because it uses the Dual DDR Ram which give almost twice the performance of normal DDR. Not to mention the 800 mHz FSB will give you more bandwidth going from the CPU to the Ram. I checked the specs on it and it only has Serial ATA Raid. Either you will have to buy SATA drives ore use the Abit Seriallel adapters to connect ATA100 or 133 drives to the SATA Raid. I figure you were interested in setting up a Raid because you were looking at boards with Raid controllers. The IT7 Max2 has PS/2 connectors for the mouse and keyboard so you dont need to convert your current stuff to USB. Only the early version of the Max2 didnt have PS/2 connectors. As for the onboard AC97 audio....I cant use it its much too noisy for my tastes. Your better off buying a good pro level card. Adrian, My P4 is very stable at that speed and it also runs pretty cool. However I bought 3 2.4Cs amd only 2 of them were good Oc'ers the other one tops out at 2.88, The other two are great at 3.24gHz. Ofcourse I dont use a stock Heatsink and fan. I use larger units that are more efficent at dispelling heat. I also had a 2 P4 2.4Bs that were stable at 3.06 gHz. When oc'ing I always stop the speed at the most stable point. High rendering speed is nothing if it crashes during a complex render. Hope this was some help __________________ Scott Osborne Infinite Video Productions

July 13th, 2003, 01:25 PM	#17
Charles King Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: sweden Posts: 795	Thank you Scott for that candid reply. You've been a big help. I think I'll be going for that model then. __________________ Charles 'What we perceive to be may not be what we believe to be.'

July 13th, 2003, 02:02 PM	#19
Charles King Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: sweden Posts: 795	That's a good point Nigel. I'll also like to know. Another thing, What power supply is considered reasonable? 400W or more? __________________ Charles 'What we perceive to be may not be what we believe to be.'

July 13th, 2003, 05:12 PM	#20
Scott Osborne Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Rochester NY Posts: 116	Yes you can disable it Bios and no it doesnt use an IRQ when it is disabled. Charles, The power supply is were people usually skemp. I suggest getting a 400w or better PS...Made by a company with a good reputation for quality PS Antec, or Enermax are good choices. A solid PS will go a long way towards providing a stable PC. I cant tell you how many PCs I have had to replace PS because the customer was coplaining about constant crashes. Most people just purchase a case with a no name 300 watt PS and then pack there boxes full of optical and hard drives. A cheap PS just cant handle all of those devices and still deliver a constant 5 volts for your motherboard. The just dont. Despite what some people are going to say. I have years of experiance building and troubleshooting PCs I know this is the area where people always screw up. Hope this is useful __________________ Scott Osborne Infinite Video Productions

July 13th, 2003, 05:44 PM	#23
Scott Osborne Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Rochester NY Posts: 116	Thanks for agreeing Chris. I didnt recommend PC Power and Cooling because most people dont want to pay there prices. I love there PSs they are certainly the best in the industry. I use 2 of the redudants in my server. Never had a single power failure yet. they have been running nearly none stop for almost 2 years now. I will say I like Antec out the more affordable PSs. I just usually always use a Antec case so I get the highend PS with it. As far as cases go there certainly not as pretty as Lian Li but there excellent and there affordable...I would highly recommens using one for your PC Charles...That is if you dont already have a case. __________________ Scott Osborne Infinite Video Productions

July 13th, 2003, 01:35 PM	#18
Nigel Moore Major Player Join Date: May 2003 Location: Switzerland Posts: 358	Scott You state that the onboard audio's of limited use. You can probably disable it in BIOS, but does that make it completely 'invisible' to the system so that it doesn't hog IRQs and other resources? (I'll leave my thoughts on Windows' automatic allocation of resources out of this!)

July 13th, 2003, 05:18 PM	#21
Christopher Go Major Player Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Honolulu, HI Posts: 429	I completely agree about the power supplies. Some of the best in the industry, with 5 year warranties instead of the usual 3, can be found at PC Power And Cooling. Their Turbo Cool series are well regarded. Easier to obtain but almost as good is Antec's Performance series power supplies. I'd go with Enermax last - from my experience I've seen voltage fluctuations from Enermax units that made me wary but so far there have been no problems with them too. When it comes to devices you never use I always make it a habit to disable them in the BIOS, which frees up resources and can speed up boot time as well. I disable on my machines: serial ports (COM), the parallel port (I no longer use any printers that connect to the parallel port), and any unused on-board devices.

July 13th, 2003, 05:25 PM	#22
Christopher Go Major Player Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Honolulu, HI Posts: 429	Nigel, I don't know what to make of Tyan. I have the Tyan Tiger MP motherboard with dual 1.5GHz Athlon MPs (1800MP) with 2GB of DDR memory. Its been running without any problem for close to 2 years now. However, even though I really like the motherboard I've seen many documented reports (with pictures) of that particular motherboard's ATX connector melting down! They've been RMA'ing those boards without question because they are familiar with the problem. To me that's unacceptable from a manufacturer. Otherwise, I hear that many of their other MP boards are rock solid - just look for one with the additional power supply connection. If you're going dual AMD, you might want to wait for the dual Opterons when they come out with one with an AGP slot (there's only one board I know of with that spec but its from Rioworks and I'd rather wait to see more competition)

July 13th, 2003, 06:32 PM	#24
Charles King Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: sweden Posts: 795	Thanks Scott. I already have a case but I'm buying a new one to go with the new setup I'm building just for editing. Just saw a good power supply for a reasonably good price - 550w. That should be enough - Well it should be. So Christopher If you want to print something, what do you do then? __________________ Charles 'What we perceive to be may not be what we believe to be.'

July 13th, 2003, 08:03 PM	#25
Yi Fong Yu Trustee Join Date: Sep 2002 Location: Vulcan Posts: 1,564	if you want DUAL processor, there's nothing better than a dual AMD cpu mobo because of cost. you can have one for under $1.5k with good planning. a xeon, on th other hand, will run you $2k+ and performance/dollar isn't really worth it. the only thing xeon has on AMD is the memory speed, which the amd 760 chipset is showing its age. i have the tiger mpx (with the fixed usb problem) and it runs flawless. make sure you get a case with good airflow. if you don't you'll suffer. modern CPUs are simply waaaay too hot. as for sticking with intel there's some right and wrong with it. intel is heavily optimized in multimedia apps such as 3dsmax. therefore it is worth considering xeon if you have the dough and cost is no object =). http://forums.2cpu.com/forumdisplay.php?forumid=13 __________________ bow wow wow

July 13th, 2003, 08:27 PM	#26
Christopher Go Major Player Join Date: Nov 2002 Location: Honolulu, HI Posts: 429	Hello Charles, when I want to print something I send it to my print server, which is on my network. However, many printers nowadays use the USB port so you can use that too if you don't have a print server. When it comes to building an editing machine I really do believe the less apps and extraneous devices there are the better. It should only be used for editing. I have another machine where I do my web surfing, writing, printing, etc. Having an NLE already determines a lot of the devices you'll need and I believe you can reduce overhead and problems when the only items you're worrying about have to do with the single purpose at hand. Been very stable this way. Increasing frame rates in a game while dealing with IRQ conflicts because of the capture card is not fun. As for the power supply its not only about the raw power but also how well it handles voltage fluctuations. Brand name ones are good for this. I know what you mean about PC Power and Cooling, Scott, they're expensive! But I try to account for that in the budgeting since its so important to the system's health.

July 13th, 2003, 09:19 PM	#27
Don Parrish Major Player Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Tavares Fla Posts: 541	After researching which new motherboard to build from I decided to stay away from Asus boards because of poor quality within the last year and no answer from Asus tech support. I also now own a Asus CUSL2-C that has given me problems for a long time. I don't know why you have ruled out intel but maybe you should look again. I am currently (as we speak) building a new P4 using the new D865PERL Rock Lake board. P4 2.4c Ghz 800fsb 2gigs DDR400 ram etc. This board has built in IEEE 1394a firewire, USB 2.0 backward compatible, 8x / 4x AGP, serial ATA and more. I decided after building 4 computers over the last six years I wanted a stable motherboard. So I went Intel. I know you didn't think about Intel but maybe it would at least be worth the time of considering it. Chip $ 172 M/B $ 127 Ram $ 380. After months of research weighing the cost vs stability, board options, and speed, Intel was the only logical motherboard with all the options I was looking for.

July 13th, 2003, 09:53 PM	#28
Scott Osborne Regular Crew Join Date: Jan 2003 Location: Rochester NY Posts: 116	Absolutly Chris, a NLE PC should be a single use machine. I dont even allow mine to connect to the internet (I do all communications through the server) I dont even use my NLE PC for audio. I have a seperate PC that is dedicated to Cubase SX and WaveLab. Infact I dont even allow my special purpose Pcs to administrate themselves. All defraging and Virus scaning is done through my scheduler thats running on my server. I know this sounds extreme but having all of these machines with there own special purpose gives me the ultimate realiability.I havent seen a crash in months..No lock ups no BSODs nothing. Its like a PC utopia in my studio. Just the wonderful sound of 4 PCs and one server humming away.The only problem is the heat. I have a 20000 Btu window unit in the studio because the central air just cant handle the heat! Don, While the Intel SpringDale board is nice it is slow compared to the Gigibyte and the Abit this is because these boards have PAT or Hyper Path enabled. This is the memory acces architecture that the Intel 875 "canterwood" Northbridge uses.The feature is also intergrated into the 865 "Springdale" northbridge however it comes shipped from intel with PAT disabled. A few companys have suceeded in enabling PAT with a circuit that is external to the actual northbridge chip (pretty sneaky huh) This allows those 865 boards to perform about the same as a 875 board at a much lower cost. Intel does not have that enabled on there board because they would rather sell the more expensive 875 board. Th actual chip dont cost them anymore ot make so this is a good area for them to genarate more money. If I were you I would pack that board up RMA it and pick up a Abit Ic7-G...For the money its just as stable and has much better performance Ps Sorry about the Geek content of that last message __________________ Scott Osborne Infinite Video Productions

July 14th, 2003, 02:15 AM	#29
Charles King Major Player Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: sweden Posts: 795	Agreed with you all. Some very valid points guys. Another question. Is there any particular type of memory I should marry together with this particular motherboard- 2700 or 2300 type cruial models? __________________ Charles 'What we perceive to be may not be what we believe to be.'

July 14th, 2003, 06:09 AM	#30
Don Parrish Major Player Join Date: Dec 2001 Location: Tavares Fla Posts: 541	IC7-G truly is a great board but I am not an overclocker as I like rock hard stability, even though the benchmarks are somewhat better for the IC7-G without overclocking and stability appears fine. I looked at this board but it was at least $ 70 more than the 865. The alternative plain IC7 does not support the DDR 400. It was just a choice I made because the benchmarks were not that much better, I believe the media ( mpeg 4 ) benchmarks were 63.89 for abit and 62.76 for the 865. The numbers were consistantly better for the Abit but not enough for the money.