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I am at my wits end. I bought a Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe motherboard with an Barton 2500 Athlon CPU to upgrade my Pulsar PC. But it doesnt work, so need advice on what to replace it with. I have 2 Pulsar1s and 1 Pulsar2.

The A7N8X-E works fine with only 1 pulsar, but with more than one it produces major crackles when playing back music, and SFP.exe cpu usage shoots through the roof. I have tried every PC slot/BIOS combination, different XP installs, even removing my SATA drive and using a normal IDE drive, and tried a different graphics card (but unfortunately I only have two ATI cards to try). Just to be sure it was not a Pulsar problem, I put them all back into my "old" A7M266 1.3ghz PC and they worked fine.

So after weeks of trying to make this combo work I am now trying to figure out if there is another motherboard for my 2500 Athlon that is known to work with 2 or more Pulsars. I have searched the forums and maillist and cant find any definitive answer.

The only thing I did find was that there are known Intel combos that seem to work fine with >2 Pulsars. Should I forget my AMD 2500 and move to Intel? FYI I dont want to spend a fortune on the latest bleeding edge (hence my AMD 2500 buy).

Your help is appreciated,
Menno

Many people seem to have problems with Intel's latest chipsets & HT (especially cubase/nuendo users) so I don't know that Intel is a 'guarantee' anymore. i865perl seems more 'stable' for a Creamware platform, and the word is still out on i915P and i925X.

Also I might add that Nforce3 *might* be ok for an AMD system, although I think there's only been 1-2 reports on its use.

ht is not nessessary....

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: garyb on 2004-10-08 13:55 ]</font>

Menno, I also own a A7M266 and replaced the 1.4GHz CPU (which was very hot sometimes) with a 2000+ CPU, the fastest possible CPU on this MoBo. Works very stable. I'm satisfied with this system. This is the first time that I don't buy a new computer after 2 years.
Well, I have only 2 cards. They don't cause problems but when I use fat samples together with STW 4080L reverb, I get some crackles. But this can be solved, when I work step by step. It's a bit ennoying, but I have much patience.
Greetz, Thomas

Yes, i865perl seems to be the safest bet, then i'll have to ebay the amd motherboard and cpu.

Thomas, I was going to go that route initially and just upgrade the cpu on the A7M266, but as I wanted an extra PC to run as an mp3/divx player for my living room I thought it was a good excuse to relegate the A7M to the living room. Obviously I am regretting that at the moment! Interesting that the 2000+ cpu runs a lot cooler, my 1.3ghz is also quite hot.

Still undecided as to what to do.

Cheers,
Menno

What about keeping your A7M system as your DAW and buying an el cheapo but silent computer for your living room?
Only a thought ...