?? Is the MSI™ 865PE Neo2 a good one for CW stuff??
Well, the MSI offers top notch performance matter of fact, the problem with that board is how it did it. The boards that perform well are the ones with corecell technology, which can be a good and bad thing. It dynamically overclocks your CPU within a safe level of course. But then that might not be what you are looking for right? It "shouldn't" give you any problem and you probably wont' notice the overclocking while enjoy the performance, but something you should be aware of, of course that can be turn off in the BIOS as well.
The current market leader would be ASUS, in terms of performance, the problem with thier 875/865 boards are the Gigabit ethernet. They use 3com chipset, which will have to be shared with the pulsar. If you do have a networked fileserver which I do. The fact that your ethernet is running it's own bus is a bonus. Asus also offer the E Deluxe variation which uses the Intel Gigabit chip, and that's the one you get. Pay speical attention with Asus board on which chip they use for Gigabit ethernet.
I would personally go with Gigabyte, not the performance leader but not too far off. Provide the highest flexibility, and offer the greatest amount of expendability. One of their board can actually have up to 3 different RAID, and 12 IDE devices (HD, optical drives) all goes to the motherboard.
Sure, you might not need that much drives and that much RAID, But I think it would be nice to have the option... and room to grow.
The current market leader would be ASUS, in terms of performance, the problem with thier 875/865 boards are the Gigabit ethernet. They use 3com chipset, which will have to be shared with the pulsar. If you do have a networked fileserver which I do. The fact that your ethernet is running it's own bus is a bonus. Asus also offer the E Deluxe variation which uses the Intel Gigabit chip, and that's the one you get. Pay speical attention with Asus board on which chip they use for Gigabit ethernet.
I would personally go with Gigabyte, not the performance leader but not too far off. Provide the highest flexibility, and offer the greatest amount of expendability. One of their board can actually have up to 3 different RAID, and 12 IDE devices (HD, optical drives) all goes to the motherboard.
Sure, you might not need that much drives and that much RAID, But I think it would be nice to have the option... and room to grow.
I don't think the sharing of gigabit ethernet with the pulsar should be too much of a problem with the 3com chipset. Firstly, because (as a user of a 3com pci card) they are one of the most efficient band-users in their market. Secondly, because a) the southbridge chipsets these days are just so much bigger than any that were being designed when the current creamware cards came out, so should easily cope with it, and b) because its really unlikely that you would be using all that bandwidth on ethernet anyway.
err, could stand corrected on all this, just the way it seems to me . . .
err, could stand corrected on all this, just the way it seems to me . . .
Well, if never do anything network related with your DAW, you probably won't even care if the board got Gigabit ethernet or not...
And by that, I ain't saying ICQ and Stuff, but let's say, load samples from a file server and or access audio files. It's probably gonna help. Sure, I know you probably won't play no idea with pulsar while loading anyways, but if you want to keep your option open keep that in mind isn't that bad of an idea.
The current PCI bus runs at 32Bit/33Mhz which gives you 133MB/Sec of bandwidth. Gigabit ethernet is capable of 1000Gbps, which is 125MB/Sec, but they max out at about 70% of that. So, say 87.5MB/Sec. That's about 65% of your PCI bandwidth, and that to me makes a difference if you do need to use ethernet and the pulsar at the same time.
If you use the RAID on those board, unless it's ICH5R SATA, which gives 2 SATA. You are using the PCI bus, too. Like those onboard Promise chip...
So, that brings to another issue. If you want the best performance out of the pulsar and you have enough DSP and stuff running let's say. Are you better off without a 4 Disc RAID running on PCI bus performance wise? The ICH5R can give you RAID and another 4 PATA devices... without taxing your PCI bus bandwidth, and even a PATA100 7200rpm disc alone is capable of handling serious audio task, if it's a dedicated drive and OS is installed else where...
Now that gets more interesting...
And by that, I ain't saying ICQ and Stuff, but let's say, load samples from a file server and or access audio files. It's probably gonna help. Sure, I know you probably won't play no idea with pulsar while loading anyways, but if you want to keep your option open keep that in mind isn't that bad of an idea.
The current PCI bus runs at 32Bit/33Mhz which gives you 133MB/Sec of bandwidth. Gigabit ethernet is capable of 1000Gbps, which is 125MB/Sec, but they max out at about 70% of that. So, say 87.5MB/Sec. That's about 65% of your PCI bandwidth, and that to me makes a difference if you do need to use ethernet and the pulsar at the same time.
If you use the RAID on those board, unless it's ICH5R SATA, which gives 2 SATA. You are using the PCI bus, too. Like those onboard Promise chip...
So, that brings to another issue. If you want the best performance out of the pulsar and you have enough DSP and stuff running let's say. Are you better off without a 4 Disc RAID running on PCI bus performance wise? The ICH5R can give you RAID and another 4 PATA devices... without taxing your PCI bus bandwidth, and even a PATA100 7200rpm disc alone is capable of handling serious audio task, if it's a dedicated drive and OS is installed else where...
Now that gets more interesting...