Re: [linux-audio-user] hardware recommendations?

From: Frank Barknecht <fbar@email-addr-hidden>
Date: Tue Jun 14 2005 - 21:40:38 EEST

Hallo,
aljordan@email-addr-hidden hat gesagt: // aljordan@email-addr-hidden wrote:

> Interesting,
>
> I have an Abit AV8 with an Athlon 64 3700+ and I must say that it has
> been by far my most stable system in years. I haven't had a single
> crash and I am primarily using it as an audio workstation. I was going
> to give the board a high recommendation. I would be interested to hear
> the specifics of your hardware.

Well, currently there is only a Matrox G450 in it, 512MB Samsung DDR
(yes, I ran memtest), a cheap Realtek network card and a M-Audio
Audiophile. Distribution in Debian stable (sarge) in 32bit mode.

I was having sudden hangs (not even ssh or ping was possible) all the
time without doing anything specific at that time. So I went on to
disable stuff, at first Cool'n'Quiet (which is very disappointing,
because I was hoping to be able to use exactly that), then
ACPI/APIC/DMPS/APM, I "fixed" the CPU/PCI overclocking, that ABit
seems to think reasonable to have enabled as default (sic!), then I
disabled the onboard network card, Firewire, AGP Fast Write, I gave
the Audiophile its own interrupt. I couldn't do this for the GFX card,
because it seems to be impossible to give the AGP-card its own
interrupt, which is always shared with the USB hub (sic++!)

So basically I now only have things running, which I could have
running with a much cheaper mainboard, and still I got sudden hangs
and another curious kind of hang: If I switch off my monitor and leave
it switched off for some time, like half an hour or more, I also got
these hangs and freezes.

My best success then came yesterday, when in my despair I disabled the
Xfree86 screensaver ("xset s off"). After that the machine stayed
alive a whole night, even with the monitor off, and is also on since
then this day. I now will try to reenable various things again to see,
if I can get some of the features I paid 99 Euro for back again. Ah
well, these last two weeks have been a very frustrating experience,
which in great parts I must credit to the mainboard (most other
components were and are fully functional in other machines.)

Oh, and lmsensors doesn't support Abit's "uGuru" chip, because Abit
doesn't provide specs, but I found openguru, which is a reverse
engineered system monitor for Abit boards.

In my experience I must say: I should have bought MSI again like the
last five years. But as always: YMMV and it seems it did. ;)

Ciao

-- 
 Frank Barknecht                               _ ______footils.org__
             
          _ __latest track: "scans" _ http://footils.org/cms/show/41
Received on Wed Jun 15 00:15:14 2005

This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.8 : Wed Jun 15 2005 - 00:15:14 EEST