Fri Mar 01, 2002 3:51 pm
Hmmm.
Well, if you want to go with a PCI-bus hogging Creative sound card, you should use a board that has a non-VIA southbridge (and thus non-VIA PCI bus). This means an AMD 761 north/766 south board (using an AMD 761/VIA 686B does not solve this problem), or an SiS 735, an nVidia nForce, or an (ugh) ALi Magic 1.
Forget the ALi, its' memeory performance is lousy. The AMD 761/766 boards are hard to find and pricy, not the best memroy throughput, but very stable. The SiS boards seem to be great performers, but the ECS K75A is the only easily available one, and it has only 2 DDR-DIMM slots (the other DIMM slots it has are for SDRAM) and reliability seems to be an issue with the ECS; about 1/10 are funky. This leaves the nForce, which seems to have decent performance and stability, but you would have to disable the integrated sound.
Perhaps a better solution would be to ditch the Audigy, so that you would have a wider range of motherboard options, including the VIA KT-266A or AMD761/VIA 686B hybird boards, which are great performers but have PCI issues.
I utilized an ABit KG7 (an AMD/VIA hybrid) for my most recent box, and am very happy with it. I was able to do so because I chose a Philips Acoustic Edge Dolby Digital 5.1 sound card, which does not have the issues with the VIA PCI implemetation that the Soundblaster products have.
The other issue is the CTX monitors. I have had very lousy ecxperiences with them. Poor reliability, sub-par image quality. Very curvy screen. Spend another $20-50 to get a Viewsonic or Samsung flatscreen. Or another $100 to get a monitor based on the Sony FD-Tritron tube (which can be Sonys, Mitsubishis, or third-party companies that buy the tubes from Sony & Mitsubishi.)
Other than those two things, everything looks great.