[NBLUG/talk] Intermittent USB failures getting worse; search for new motherboard becomes more urgent (long)

[Lincoln Peters]

On Friday 16 March 2007 11:03, Jippen wrote:
> As far as video cards go, I'm running Beryl on a nVidia 6600 GX
> without an issue. Got mine off newegg for ~100 bucks with 2 DVI ports.
> I use a DVI-VGA adaptor to connect to my 21 inch Viewsonic CRT and the
> quality is just spiffy. Also, a major benefit of going with nVidia
> cards rather then ATI is easier setup, and SLI. Get an SLI motherboard
> and a SLI-capable card, and get to the point where you need more
> graphical power? Just buy a second, matching card to what you have and
> plug it in.

I doubt I've used more than a small fraction of the graphical power of my 
Radeon 9200 (although the old nVidia RIVA TNT2 that I use for the second 
monitor is sometimes visibly slow to redraw the screen).  I don't think SLI 
is going to be an issue here.

> As far as ram, you'll prolly have to get new stuff, but a 1 GB stick
> won't set you back that much. And, as far as CAS latency goes, IMHO 1
> gig of ram at 3 CAS isn't gonna be as useful as 2 gigs at 5. But thats
> just me. 

I suspected as much.  And I'm definitely going to shoot for at least 2GB, 
since I'm currently seeing an unpleasant amount of disk swapping with 1GB 
(although I suspect memory leaks are the real culprit).

> And, to save a good bit of money now, just get 1 quad-core 
> CPU. If you decide later that you would enjoy the speed of having two,
> go ahead and get it. 

I'm a bit skeptical here.  In practice, I do these kinds of upgrades 
infrequently enough that, when I do need to upgrade, the standards have 
changed enough that replacing one core component mandates the replacement of 
at least a few others.  Thus, I can't help but wonder: if/when I decide to 
add a second CPU, would the socket layout have changed, or would the new 
CPU's otherwise be rendered incompatible with present-day motherboards?

> I would also note that unless you are doing 
> high-end sound stuff, integrated sound cards have come a long way and
> are really great on new mobos. Might wanna just use that instead of an
> expansion card if you have it.

No jitter when reading or writing to the hard disk?  I remember that was a big 
problem with both my current motherboard and the motherboard that it 
replaced, hence the PCI sound card.

And, no, I am not one of those rare people who can hear the difference between 
an audio CD and a 128Kb/s MP3 file.

> Also, 10/100/1000 ethernet ports are fairly standard on motherboards
> now, so that should be easy to get.

That would be very nice, as long as it doesn't have the same packet loss 
issues as the built-in Ethernet port on my current motherboard (which are 
documented in a previous discussion on this list).


-- 
Lincoln Peters		<sampln at sbcglobal.net>

... Had this been an actual emergency, we would have fled in terror,
and you would not have been informed.