For discussion about setting up your studio and advice on the gear and equipment within it.
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By Lampdog Sun May 05, 2024 11:07 am
richie wrote:LGA1156 motherboards.


Remember OFF TOPIC, “Monster pc I’m building” thread I made decades ago, I think it was this motherboard, lol.
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By Telefunky Sun May 05, 2024 4:51 pm
richie wrote:Interesting - The reason why I asked was to potentially determine "newer" systems with multi core and native PCI slots in them, should you ever need them.
...
Alternatively, you can easily find LGA1156 motherboards on the cheap, which will have upwards of 4 native PCI slots on them, SATA3, PCIE as well. I have a couple of those motherboards for backup, with nice cheap $10 Xeon chips with 4 core 8 thread.

Hopefully your board doesn't die on you but at least there's more readily available options for the future.

thanks, I remember various LGA boards, but PCI performance wasn‘t great and power consumption was enormous.
A modern design that‘s known to work in that domain is the MSL Z97 Gaming 3
https://de.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMI ... cification

I happened to find the Asus P4C800 in the neighborhood for a few bucks and knew it would support a mobile Pentium 4 on a desktop board.
Still needs the bent VCore pin, otherwise the Bios won’t allow to choose low voltages.
(verified by a 2nd CPU with the pin in place)

It‘s a highly specific case because audio processing is exclusively done on the DSP cards, so neither the 2Ghz clock nor 2GB memory limit bother me.
(according to docs it supports 4GB, but all slots filled turns it into snail mode) :hmmm:
I already have a spare CPU and may get another board on occasion.

Practically all my native processing demands (Valhalla, Zynaptiq, Relab, Polyverse) have been shifted to a MacMini M1 (Motu 828 mkII, USB), via security „hack“ Monterey accepts the interface. I‘m not interested in Apple‘s Sonoma or Ventura rubbish :vomit:

Dunno if the thread starter can make any use of this... as a bottom line my MPC4K may connect to Pro Tools, Creamware Scope and Mac (Monterey) by switching Adat lines, on channel level, not only in groups of 8.
(this would apply to cables as well, but then a lot of would be required).
Imho a good connectivity (per channel) can reduce the need for SCSI transfer, which (afaik) is mostly based on cd/lib data or respective applications.
I‘m not Windows savvy in that domain, though.
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By richie Tue May 07, 2024 8:37 am
Lampdog wrote:
richie wrote:LGA1156 motherboards.


Remember OFF TOPIC, “Monster pc I’m building” thread I made decades ago, I think it was this motherboard, lol.


It might've been man, hopefully you're not reliant on an old system anymore now though man.
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By richie Tue May 07, 2024 8:47 am
Telefunky wrote:
thanks, I remember various LGA boards, but PCI performance wasn‘t great and power consumption was enormous.
A modern design that‘s known to work in that domain is the MSL Z97 Gaming 3
https://de.msi.com/Motherboard/Z97-GAMI ... cification

I happened to find the Asus P4C800 in the neighborhood for a few bucks and knew it would support a mobile Pentium 4 on a desktop board.
Still needs the bent VCore pin, otherwise the Bios won’t allow to choose low voltages.
(verified by a 2nd CPU with the pin in place)

It‘s a highly specific case because audio processing is exclusively done on the DSP cards, so neither the 2Ghz clock nor 2GB memory limit bother me.
(according to docs it supports 4GB, but all slots filled turns it into snail mode) :hmmm:
I already have a spare CPU and may get another board on occasion.



That Z97 board looks dope, the only thing I'm not clear on (and is an important thing with using our audio related PCI hardware) is to determine if the board is native (non bridged) instead of emulated PCI - emulated can be a factor in causing crackling and other sh*t like ithat. The last I checked, the cheaper business class boards with chipsets B75, Q67, Q77, X79 (my favorite due to having 8 DDR3 slots and cheap high core count Xeon's). So if anyone else is reading this, there's an avenue to explore.

I've also read of some people using the texas instruments PCI to PCIE adapter, the controller on that seems to work well on newer 2020+ series systems without any drop out issues. One thing to note though, last I checked that the GPU can still be a factor in causing audio crackles / latency spikes when using Nvidia cards, I don't know if they've yet resolved it but I was super pissed off when I was getting spikes when upgrading to an RTX series card.

I remember finding this board online when doing research, https://www.asus.com/ca-en/commercial-s ... ns/p8bc4l/ which has 5 native pci slots but at the time it didn't make sense cost wise for me to grab it when i didn't have that many cards to populate.

There are some recent AMD Ryzen based motherboards with NATIVE PCI on them which was crazy to see, but I guess those were one offs made for a certain portion of the population. But it's only 1 slots.

You should come and join us on Discord man,
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By Telefunky Tue May 07, 2024 12:23 pm
richie wrote:That Z97 board looks dope, the only thing I'm not clear on (and is an important thing with using our audio related PCI hardware) is to determine if the board is native (non bridged) instead of emulated PCI - emulated can be a factor in causing crackling and other sh*t like ithat.

I‘m pretty sure it‘s not emulated, because a fellow runs his Scope system on that board with the same PCI score as my Asus with i875 chipset. Or that would be a damn great emulation. 8)

I remember finding this board online when doing research, https://www.asus.com/ca-en/commercial-s ... ns/p8bc4l/ which has 5 native pci slots but at the time it didn't make sense cost wise for me to grab it when i didn't have that many cards to populate.

Then you were lucky... LGA1155 isn‘t that great in PCI performance. I have one that scores 25% of the i875, another user yielded 40%, LGA1150, 1151 are considered solid, though.
(the benchmark is stupid, but a real-world one: loading instances of a certain reverb until a PCI overflow message pops up)
You should come and join us on Discord man,

thanks for the invitation, but I simply lack time to mess with motherboards and my experience is restricted to what I had to solve to get the (Scope) system running. :hmmm:
It‘s not very popular (probably not even known), but imho still cutting edge in many cases, even 25years after it‘s release.
I only recently started to use the development kit (better late than never) ... as with the MPC4K, and already got some motivating results. :smoker:
(the MPC is cool as an instant test source while Scope adds unique sound textures to a beat ... or it simply provides midi triggers and sequencing)