[LAU] hardware - Intel CPUs

Further to choosing mother boards and processors:

There are current (released Q1 2014) CPUs in the Xeon and i5 (i5 has
turbo) lines (atom too, for a good headless system - with 8 cores?) that
come without Intel® Turbo Boost Technology or Intel® Hyper-Threading
Technology. Better yet, they are cheaper too. I don't know how easy they
are to come by though. See:

http://ark.intel.com/search/advanced/?s=t&TBTVersion=No&HyperThreading=false

So for an audio system start with the chip and find out what socket you
need, then go looking for a matching MB.

I don't know what the difference is between the i5 and xeon once the
extras have been stripped off. But at least the chip price is pretty much
dead even.

The new atoms have an intel hd graphics proc for easier access to drivers
than the older ones. The big problem with the atom is the MB tend to small
with only one pci(e) slot. Both the atom and the xeon seem to be addressed
towards server use and are know to have reasonable low latency
performance.

I too will be looking at updating my music computer (P4 single core 5 PCI
slots, 2.5G ram, USB 2, etc, etc, but good latency). I would realy like to
stay away from having to use a USB or FW audio IF. In fact I would like to
be able to continue to use my delta 66 for as long as I can before I spend
more money :) The list of PCIe audio IFs is pretty small and the music
stores don't seem to want to stock them... I guess musicians don't know
how to open a computer. The audio science ASI 554* boards are kind of
expensive (8 i/o ~ $1000), but the same could be said for RME stuff...
about the same price (by the time an adat box is added). The computer is
going to be the cheap part in any case.

--
Len Ovens
www.ovenwerks.net

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Received on Mon Apr 14 04:15:03 2014