New PC for 3 Pulsar2 cards + Syncplate + SFP 4.0

[alsound2]

Hi everybody
I'm looking for suggestions to buy a new machine for my 3 Creamware Pulsar2 cards (+ Syncplate) / using Sfp 4.0. In fact my old Asus P4P800 motherboard died a couple of days ago....
I think there are two ways (am I wrong?):

- OLD MACHINE: I could try to find on ebay or similar an old motherboard (just like the Asus...) and try to set up (for the third time....in fact it was my second P4P800 to die...) and old machine with WinXP installed in order to work with my Pulsar cards... in this case, is there any preferable old motherboard (what about Asus?) to avoid IRQ issues? And what about CPU and video/graphic card? Suggestions?

- NEW MACHINE: Is there any way to get my 3 Pulsar2 cards and SFP 4.0 working with a new machine? I mean, a "these days" motherboard, cpu ecc.... Any experience? And in this case, any suggestions about brands, models ecc?

What would you do?

Thank you in advance for your help.....
I really need help...without Creamware cards I cannot work at the moment...
Thank you!

Stef

[dawman]

Here's a Xeon motherboard w/ 3 x 32bit PCI slots.
The CPUs for running a DAW w/ plug ins should be around 2.4GHz minimum.
4 x DIMMs for 16GBs or RAM is very cheap now too.
The SATA connectors appear to be too close for the cards, but all Supermicro Motherboards are tested and designed with all slots loaded, including the Graphics PCI-e-16X.
This isn't a fancy bells and whisltes design. It's meant for stability, stock speeds, and years of use. Perfect for audio and it is more mature now which means they need to sell older Xeons to clear out inventory.
This is what I would get for an audio only rig using 3 x Scope cards.
But if you like Turbo Boost, coffee made and other gamers delights, there's always cheaper consumer grade boards.

[Shamk]

http://forums.planetz.com/viewtopic.php ... 70#p299570 ?

[dawman]

Sorry the link didn't post.
But this board looks to be a dream for DSP card users.

X10SLA-F has 5 x 32bit slots.
Uses the cheaper Xeons, has 2 x SATA III for 500+MBps SSD drive, leaving the SATA II slot for a hybrid drive or 3.5" HDD.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/nfo/ ... .cfm?pg=MB

[garyb]

there you go.

[alsound2]

Thank you for your replies!
I've just bought a HP XW6000 Dual Xeon 5.6Ghz HT 2GB RAM 120GB on Ebay and It is here in front of me.....but they made a mistake: there's a pci graphic card, and not an agp graphic card Since the pc has 4 pci slots and I need just three of them for the pulsar cards, is it possible to use a PCI graphic card too??? Is there any possibilities of conflict? What do you suggest to do? I could try asking the seller to resend an agp graphic card, but is it so important?
Thank you again
Stef

[jhulk]

first thing to do is try it if you get conflicts then get an agp card

if i remember rightly audio and video cards both use the same resources so you could get blips in the audio

i have a spare matrox dual head card if you cant get one from them agp interface

[garyb]

an old system like that should definitely use an AGP graphics card.