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hey all,

I'm going to be buying a new motherboard sometime in the near future. Honestly, I'm quite excited by the new ones offered by Asus (especially after seeing that Subhuman seems to recommend them...).

A friend of mine recently purchased one, and he mentioned to me that it would be able to hand 4 IDE devices (forgive me for wording this wrong)--two of which would run ATA 133 and two which would run at ATA 100. I found the one that I think he was talking about at this addy:http://usa.asus.com/mb/socket478/p4b533/overview.htm

My question for you is this: If I had a mobo that had two hard drives running on two separate IDE channels at ATA 100+, could I expect to get double the track count, or would there be some sort of a bottleneck that I would run into? I've currently got a setup that involves an ATA 100 harddrive (Western Digital), and I'm limited to about 40 tracks (not bad, but not good enough).

Also, has the problem of PCI bandwidth been addressed on these new mobos? I remember reading somewhere that Macs have a wider PCI bus (about twice that of PCs). Is that still going on, or am I completely off base about all of this stuff?

Thanks for looking,

MDC

Yes, there are other limiting factors.
Forty tracks, I assuming mono tracks, 40 is certainly not bad, but it may be the cpu, or the speed of the hard disk itself holding it back, or the computer setup.
A modern harddisk comes no where near to the top burst speeds of your average ATA controller, simply buying a motherboard with a fater ata controller will probably not make any difference

Please provide more info on the system your are using.

A mac has higher PCI capacity then some PC motherboards but lower then the best of them.

Newer Macs has higher PCI performance then older so maybe now they are close or equal.

I did the masterverb test but ran out of DSP.
I loaded 8 and was still running.

Any Motherboard that has "added" ATA133 or RAID will use the PCI bus for that. even if they are faster, you will actually get less tracks if you use those controllers rather thean the ones built into the Intel ICH chip.

the data has to pass through the PCI bus on its way to RAM (and Cubase or whatever) then back through the PCI on its way to be played on pulsar. this 2x the PCI bandwidth used for each track.

This would probably be fine if it was all you were doing, because the PCI bus is more than 2 times the max speed of any hard drive, however as soon as something else needs it (like the operating system, network, USB, etc not to mention Reverbs and delays on creamware cards) then you will get system slow downs or even a PCI overload.

with ICH controller the data only passes PCI once. from ram to sound card.

Any improvement from ATA133 would be pretty minimal anyways, it is mostly Maxtor marketing smoke and mirrors.

Thanks for the input, everyone...

Actually, I'm working with 40 mixed mono/stereo tracks, so I'm doing pretty well...I just don't like having to bounce tracks in Logic, because I find it tedious to have to revert to an unbounced form so that I can make adjustments. Guess I'm just spoiled...

A lot of my ASIO overloads do have to do with my CPU--which I will definitely be upgrading when I get the new Mobo. I was just wondering what you guys thought about this one...thanks!

Remixme, here's my setup:

PIII 800
Windows ME
Pulsar 1
2 ATA 100 hard drives (Western Digital)
512 MB Ram (PC 133)
Asus Tusl2-c Mobo
Logic 4.81

I feel like I'm forgetting something...

I was running XP, but I was getting a track count of like 28 or something...the downgrade to ME really helped out. I was running a dual boot configuration, but the XP side has crashed irretrievably and I'm kind of running a lopsided one-legged beast of a DAW. I want to buy a new computer so that I can actually have a dedicated DAW for once...sigh!

Talk to you soon...