Personal computing discussed
Moderators: renee, Flying Fox, Thresher
raginghobo wrote:A second question I've had is: ic-based sound does or does not make the audiophile puke? What I'm saying is should I spring to replace that Awesometek-56628 or whatever "sound" with a dedicated soundcard on usb? (anyway I also have an old SB Live here, that might find a new lease on life)
ozymandias wrote:personally, if you want stability, I'd opt for intel + intel. Some current intel (alternative: asus) motherboard with an i3 would do nicely. Add kingston ram (in my opinion the ram with the least compatibility problems) and an intel SSD (or plextor). Nothing fancy about that, but everything will work nicely. And it will be only slightly more expensive than other choises.
just brew it! wrote:ozymandias wrote:personally, if you want stability, I'd opt for intel + intel. Some current intel (alternative: asus) motherboard with an i3 would do nicely. Add kingston ram (in my opinion the ram with the least compatibility problems) and an intel SSD (or plextor). Nothing fancy about that, but everything will work nicely. And it will be only slightly more expensive than other choises.
Unless you want ECC RAM.
Flying Fox wrote:Asus/Supermicro/AsRock workstation boards with C2xx chipset, you can get ECC support with low end Xeon's, i3's and Pentium G's. It is not too much more expensive.
just brew it! wrote:... as someone who uses an M5A97 Evo at work and an M5A97 R2.0 at home on a daily basis, I can say from first-hand experience that they have been rock solid. The only time either one of them ever gets rebooted is when Ubuntu pushes out a kernel update.
raginghobo wrote:
Actually, I wouldn't object so much to a Xeon if it meant even another $100-150 extra on the cpu+mobo together, but having 0 experience with that group of hardware I'm at a loss to say exactly why I or anyone would go that specific route. Is the Xeon bringing anything to the table that a discerning but not overly specific user might gain from? I've been working under the assumption that these "server boards" necessarily come with > 4 ram slots, or tricked out controllers; and some type of super-RAIDing capacity, basically a huge supply of something which I don't demand.