Ableton Forum

H20nly wrote:

McQ714 wrote:you want either an Asus board or a Gigabyte board. Gigabyte tends to use TI firewire chips. check their website to see which boards have it. for the RAM, i'd opt for corsair or crucial over transcend. western digital is fine for hard drives. and personally i like AMD/ATI cards better than Nvidia and so does Apple apparentely.

agreed.

all this.

Gigabye *used* to use TI FW chips - the latest P67X are using apparently using VIA, so it seems both Asus and Gigabyte have dumped decent FW support.

PCI-e FW cards are however quite cheap if you need FW.

This to me was one of the arguments for getting high end motherboards (RAID ettc support sometiimes as well), but if you cant use / dont need the onboard FW chip, then may as well just get a board that only supports what you do really need - might save you a fair bit of cash to spend on faster CPU etc.

Definately stick with Asus or Gigabyte, definately stick with intel chipset. Also for sandybridge - make sure its a revision B3 (ie the fixed revision). P67 is the high performance chipset, PH67/H61 are the cheaper versions with embedded GPU. You can find quite cheapboards from Asus and Gigabyte that dont include all the bells and whistles (extra non intela SATA, USB, LAN, eSata etc, overcloking support for K CPUs etc), but do have the intel chips essentials (SATA, USB, single 1GB LAN etc). Also these cheap less endowed boards can be available in smaller formats for smaller cases to suit more minimal systems.

As something a bit random, but thinking of other motherboards, I have in the past had great experiences with Shuttle PCs as well - in fact still have a 3Ghz P4 shuttle PC that actually spent 4 years being on 24/7 under heavy load as an internet game server - its been retired for a quiet life now.

H20nly wrote:i think when you get to the specs CPUs are boasting these days, after a certain point, its about just that... boasting. i say save your loot. bigger, faster, higher spec is probably better, definitely more expensive, and questionably necessary. truth is you could do it all on a single core 3.4 - but why?


you're running XP. use the extra loot to get Windows 7 64 bit. then in a few months when your bank account recovers, get more RAM.

I'm not sure I want to invest more money in this laptop. I am quite familiar with the BSOD fella over here.