Hi John! On Sun, Jun 22, 2008 at 02:55:19PM +0100, John Molohan wrote: > Does anyone have any opinions on either of these two boards: > > Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS4 > ASUS P5K-E/WIFI-AP
Personally, I'd prefer the Asus board. Last december I built a new PC with at Gigabyte P35-DS3R board (rev. 2.0), Core2Duo 6750 and 4x1GB Kingston DDR2-800 memory (as listed in the mainboard compatibility list). It didn't run stable until I changed the (almost undocumented) "Performance Enhance" setting in the BIOS from "Turbo" (the default for both "fail safe" and "optimized" BIOS settings) to "Standard". I also tried other BIOS versions, one of them (F10) had a severe bug, and since january Gigabyte didn't release any new versions at all (but they released a rev 2.1 of this mainboard and then the EP35 series). I even tried to email Gigabyte support but never got a reply. It seems that the board is fine if you want to play around with settings (or if you want to overclock, which I don't), but it's not recommendable if you want to have a rock solid system out of the box. A few weeks later I bought a PC for a friend, with an Asus P5K mainboard (ICH9, no wlan etc.) and it worked rock solid, out of the box... > Also does anyone use maudio or other sound cards over the on board sound > and if so what would you recommend? Yes, here, I've an M-Audio Delta Audiophile 2496 in my freevo box. It is an excellent soundcard with really good analog I/Os and, most important for me, it doesn't do any resampling when using the digital output. After tweaking with the mplayer settings (format=s32le in mplayer.conf) even 96khz/24bit output works fine. At first, the quite complex internal structure of the card may be a little bit confusing (you don't have just a simple mixer but actually a very flexible patchbay), but once you understood the concept it works really great. BTW: I've connected the digital output to an external DAC (Behringer SRC2496, also a good and cheap box), but this was mainly because I had no analog inputs left on my amplifier but still a free digital input on my DAC. I also tested the analog output of the soundcard and couldn't hear a difference to the external DAC. I have to admit I didn't try to configure freevo to control the volume (I just wanted the sound data to leave my PC unchanged). Maybe it could be a little bit tricky to get this working, as freevo would have to change the left volume of one mixer and the right volume of another mixer to achieve this. But then, maybe freevo already supports this and I just don't know about it :-) so long, Hias ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Check out the new SourceForge.net Marketplace. It's the best place to buy or sell services for just about anything Open Source. http://sourceforge.net/services/buy/index.php _______________________________________________ Freevo-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freevo-users
