PlanetZ forums - scopeusers.com

Hi all,
Does anyone can recommend it?
I'm going to buy a new mobo-cpu and I'm a bit confused about all those possibilities/marketing stuff
The features I'm interested in are:
- PCI slots (at least three)
- 1394b on board
- good chipset performance
- native command queueing

I'm cannot find anymore P4 Northwoods, so I was considering the 6xx series Prescotts... they say with 6xx thermal problems are solved

My doubts are:
- is it always good to stay with intel cpus/chipsets
- is native command queueing a really useful thing
- is nforce4 anything better than 945 chipset, or 945 than 915
- is all that hardware compatible with Win98se/me

any suggestion is appreciated
TIA
Fede

-Intel chipsets are the best bet when using Intel cpu's, Nforce3 is currently best for Creamware users using AMD chips.
-Native command queing is useful (allows the drive to optimize its path across the disk when doing read & writes so it reduces wear&tear and increases speeds)
-Nforce4 for AMD is a NO GO for DSP cards (seems to be a really buggy chipset in general)
-If you're moving to a modern OS then I highly suggest you move to WinXP as well. The days of 98SE and ME being 'more stable' are long behind us (although it will take a bit to learn the 'newer' OS's ins and outs).

Since Win2000 & WinXP are based off of NT I think that many musicians were put off of moving away from 98SE.

Back in 97/98 NT4 didn't support much at all and what was available (mainly Pro Tools and Cakewalk 9 but no DirectX5 etc) was often buggy as developers were used to coding for the Preemptive Multitasking environment of 16-bit windows (95/98/ME). Also NT didn't allow any direct hardware access at the time so unless someone custom wrote hooks into the HAL (like SGI did with their NT boxes) latencies were a severe issue.

Win2000 was introduced with the WDM driver model (first introduced under 98SE) and allowed direct hardware access and less stringent requirements on the coding side (more compatible DOM and API support etc). However since Win2000 allowed driver and applications developers to 'break' a lot of what made NT stable (2k readded direct hardware access and opened up the ability for drivers to step on memory again) and since it required work on the part of developers to learn to code for the NT API's for the most stability, many musicians found Win98SE a lot more stable (again since they were familiar with system tuning on 98SE and since developers had a few years to get their code stable on 98SE).

WinXP has addressed much of what made Win2000 'finicky' (for example improved ACPI support) and the tweaks to get WinXP stable are less than those for 98SE even (imo). Also pretty much every company now develops drivers only for WinXP and has had several years to 'work out the bugs'. So the only remaining argument for 98SE the speed benefit that older systems get when running the legacy OS (versus XP on older hardware which feels more sluggish). However if you're buying NEW hardware then that's not really an issue either.

Just seems a better fit to me although it might mean spending a bit of time at sites like http://www.musicxp.net/ for and our own Planetz those who still haven't made the transition.