On 15 May 2002 13:02:09 -0400, Lyvim Xaphir <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> On Wed, 2002-05-15 at 01:18, Sridhar Dhanapalan wrote:
> With regard to IDE controllers, I can tell you that a HPT37X IDE
> controller is better than anything I've seen yet for IDE drives;
> including the Promise options. I've got my primary Raid 0 array on the
> integrated Highpoint controller. This frees up the vanilla IDE
> controller on the mainboard for such mundane stuff like CDrom or zip, or
> experimentation; keeping the Highpoint channels free and dedicated to
> soft Raid.
>
> Since you're board searching, check this out:
>
> http://www.enmic.de/www/produkte/boards/8ttx2+/8ttx2+.htm
>
> First board from a German company I've ever seen; impressive. In the
> Uncle Tom roundup OpenGL standings, here is where it stood:
>
> http://www6.tomshardware.com/mainboard/02q2/020509/kt333-29.html
>
> Originally I was leaning towards the Epox, but the german Enmic board is
> touted by Pabst as being supremely stable; by comparison he said there
> were some crashes with the Epox 8k3a+. This is interesting since
> externally the Epox and the Enmic are virtually indistinguishable. The
> stability statement doesn't bother me much, (the Epox) I take that with
> a grain of salt, since he got a weeks worth of benches out of this
> board, after it went thru the standard burn in process. If he had
> gotten some real trouble he would have raised holy hell. Or I should
> say unholy hell.
I must've overlooked the Enmic the first time I read the review. The Gigabyte
board (the review winner) initially looked the most attractive to me. It has a
good price, great performance and a decent feature set. If i can find an Enmic
supplier here is Australia, I might buy one of those instead.
> What does bother me is the same thing that might be attractive to you,
> namely the onboard sound. I'd rather not have onboard sound, I think
> it's evil; I've already got two sound cards here that are exceptional.
This is the way I see it. Sound hardware has been reasonably decent for almost
ten years now, and advances in sound hardware since the Sound Blaster 16 have
relatively been minor in comparison to advances in components like CPUs and
video cards. I don't need Audigy-quality sound, but I would like something nice
and affordable. Integrated sound seems to fit the bill well. My brother has an
older machine (circa 2000) with integrated audio. The sound tends to distort
under high CPU loads (e.g. when playing a game), and this has made me wary of
integrated solutions. Today, it seems as if manufacturers have gotten around
this problem (otherwise, I suppose, reviewers would complain about it), and I
find myself again considering integrated audio. The Gigabyte board, for example,
uses the same chipset as the Sound Blaster PCI 128, which isn't too shabby.
Another feature of the Gigabyte board is integrated ethernet. Most of the boards
in the review with integrated ethernet use the VIA chipset for networking. I am
wary of these -- I get the feeling that these rely on the CPU just like a
winmodem (I'm only speculating, though). The Gigabyte board, on the other hand,
uses a Realtek 8100BL, which is of the same family as the 8139 (which I've been
using for the past few years without any problem).
Thanks for the help!
--
Sridhar Dhanapalan
"If you want to travel around the world and be invited to speak at a lot of
different places, just write a Unix operating system."
-- Linus Torvalds
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