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I´m thinking about building a new main DAW for my studio, and the way the development of intel and AMD have turned out in the past year, I´m not liking the idea of buying an overpriced, noisy feet heater... in other words, I´d rather like to go for an amd64 based system, which can run much cooler.
Now: I´ve never been a real friend of nvidia products, and also the pricing of the chipsets would rather point towards a VIA board as well.
Does anyone here have a setup like that, what´s with IRQ assignement, PCI load..? I have 1x Power Pulsar + 1x Pulsar2, and I plan to stick with my 2 sweet SCSI drives, too, so I need to have enough resources for the controller as well.
For general use PCs, my experience with the newer VIA chipsets has been very good, I just remember the "PCI overflow error" issues with the old chipset generations (kt266, kt333).
A "Masterverb test" result with a state-of-the-art VIA/AMD system would help me with my decision very much.

cheers, Joe

As has been mentioned many times saving $30-40 on a motherboard that you will plug hundreds if not thousands of dollars of dsp cards into doesn't make much sense. Beyond questions about the stability of the *older* VIA chipsets I have found that most VIA mainboard makers scrimp on other parts for their inexpensive VIA motherboards, chipset alone does not reduce prices.

For the record I'm all Intel here for many years (my VIA experiences are always trying to 'save' someone else's machine) but Nvidia seems to have done really well with their mainboard lines, especially in the Nforce3 & 4 motherboards. Avoid the excessive features like 6 channel onboard sound and you should have a cost-competitive well performing system.

Or you can pioneer the VIA kt800 testing for us

maybe I´ll really do so...
I can´t second that VIA based boards would suffer from lower quality, tho. Both my home PCs are via/athlon systems, one xp3k on an aopen ak77-600max, and the other xp2k5 oc´ed on an oldy Asrock k7vt2 and believe it or not, that super-duper cheapo asrock board with kt266a runs like a charm, absolutely bulletproof solid, even tho it has a cpu on it that is over the regular specs for that board.



<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: JoeKa on 2005-02-01 17:03 ]</font>

What kind of load to you put on the PCI buses of those machines? There's a good chance that some heavy-on-PCI reverbs (the newer Sonic Timeworks ones for example.) won't work with your setup if you go with VIA. Especially if you use SCSI drives, unless the SCSI controller doesn't sit on the PCI bus.

Your system will probably be stable with a VIA chipset, but you'll almost surely get dreadful PCI performances.

Don't say no one told you =P.

In regards to lower quality, for example search for a recent class action suit that was filed against MSI for using cheap (exploding) capacitors on its more recent motherboards. MSI supposedly is having to replace the boards in question. Asus is no award winner anymore either (recent post somewhere else about several people having problems with the same model board). Asus took over making motherboards for Dell and a few other large manufacturers and the quality really slipped with their new volume imho...

So what's best? I'm having problems with my Asus. It's not VIA. The trouble seems to be the PCI overflow. I bought sonictimeworks ambience and I can not use it at all.

i have had no problems with genuine intel. definitely the choice if you're not overclocking...

You'll get the highest possible PCI bandwidth with NForce pro based Opteron boards - far beyond anything offered elsewhere...

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: wsippel on 2005-02-03 22:20 ]</font>

Which ones specifically do you like?