I disagree. I've built on Asus boards for linux several times now including
the SiS chipsets, which worked just fine, and the latest nforce4 chipsets
which also performed under a modern kernel and distro just dandy "out of the
box". Nvidia is linux friend :D
> Power Supply needs to be rated at least 500w, higher if you are going
Actually anything you do visually will require a video card. The more
capable the card and the drivers the less resources it will take away from
the remaining system that is busy processing your audio. With a good video
card that handles the majority of graphical rendering I experience almost NO
xruns, that's at 5.8ms latency using an onboard (nforce4) chipset, and lower
than that with a dedicated soundcard like the M-Audio stuff. Relying on the
CPU and system ram to render FFT graphics and such will cause xruns, a good
video card will not.
Further more gaming is pretty much on the forefront of graphics as far as
linux is concerned. Gamers under linux means big money to any game company
that chooses to support linux as well as hardware manufacturers like Nvidia
or ATI. I know you aren't talking about wanting to play games here but any
piece of hardware that is optimized for gaming WILL be optimized for audio
as well, I guarantee it. Nvidia's proprietary drivers work quite well. I
can't really comment on ATI's drivers because I've long been an Nvidia fan.
> dual monitor (dvi) is something I couldn't live without in my studio.
When I'm composing music I'd rather not have to touch the keyboard at all.
Most modern video cards support multiple monitors these days... why not make
use of it? Half the desktop space when you don't have to? Why? Throw a
dozen samples at Ardour (plus it's mixer), envy24control, qjackctl, seq24,
plus a handful of DSSI or VSTi plugins and you have a very busy desktop.
Why worry about flipping between virtual desktops when you can see all of it
at the same time?
> I run a pair of Western Digital IDE drives but if I could afford the
The original thread asked a question about rack mounted arrays. RAID is a
natural for this discussion. If I'm recording several takes of several live
feeds I can easily burn up many gigs of storage in a single session. Also
the cost of harddrives is going down rapidly. Soft RAID now offers an easy
and relatively inexpensive way to not only increase storage performance but
redundancy at the same time. I wouldn't consult on a serious studio setup
without pushing for redundant storage regardless. Anything worth recording
is worth protecting, don't you think?
> I run a Delta44 which works great under linux but do most of my actual
I run an Enermax 500w "Liberty" in my personal studio machine. It is so
quiet that for a long time I would catch myself holding my hand by the back
of the case, on occasion, to make sure it was actually moving air at all!
It uses a 120mm fan at relatively low RPM to do the cooling. An excellent
unit. Other companies make similar hardware as well.
As for graphics card? It is exactly as Kjetil has said, without meaning to,
I'm sure... it's *either* "a lot of heat OR a large fan". Which do you
prefer? Modern cards, at least Nvidia's, are almost dead silent in relation
to ambient noise levels in a recording enviroment. Especially if you plan
on running anything that requires OpenGL accelloration or VSTi
compatibility, as many of them are quite graphically intensive. If you run
dual monitors as I have suggested then *definately* pass on anything that
doesn't have dedicated active cooling! Anything that relies on passive
cooling (without getting into water cooling and other exotics) is just
asking for trouble in this sort of enviroment.