ASUS A7M266 & ASIO ? PCI question!

Chrisp · Post by **Chrisp** » Sun Feb 24, 2002 9:48 am

Hi! This is my first post in this forum so: Hello to all of you!

I´m about to exchange my brand new Elitegroup K7S5A for the ASUS A7M266 and have one more inquiry. When I mixdown I need about 20-25 ASIO channels into the pulsar mixer. With the 16 bit ASIO modules this is no problem but with the ASIO 32 bit Floats I get PCI overflows after 10 ASIO
sources which is too little.
Can anyone of you ASUS owners confirm the following to be possible before I buy this board?

25 ASIO 32 bit float sources
1 ASIO 32 bit float stereo dest
1 Pulsar mixer
2 Masterverbs hooked to Aux 1 & 2

Does anyone of you have a project similar to this or would
be so kind and create one? (I know this is great favour
to ask, your help is greatly appreciated).
Shouldn´t be too much hassle to set it up: record a
mono 30 second 32 bit float file in Cubase using True Tape,
hardcopy the actual file (not the segment)
25 times and import and play them in Cubase.
How many ASIO sources can you open in Pulsar before the
PCI bus craps out?
I can live without 5 Masterverbs but I can´t with only
ten channels. In this case I would either have to use 16
(or maybe 24 bit, haven´t tried those yet) modules or
bite the bullet (=wallet) and go Intel. My dealer agreed
to swap my board/machine if it doesn´t work for me but once
I order the ASUS i´m done so I have to know this before I
decide.I would love to stick to AMD though since everything
else with my machine is just fine (e.g. the slow GUI is
COMPLETELY gone, it´s lightning fast now).
The problem seem to be the PCI bandwidth eating 32 bit floats.
One does need them if one wants to use True Tape doesn´t one?
Or is this just for recording them as opposed to mixing them?
Have I got something wrong here?

Thanks for any help

Chrisp

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 10:09 am

AMD761 is the best chipset for Pulsar & AMD. I think with some time spent on optimizing, you can get what you want from the A7M266. Please note, however, that motherboard is picky about the type of ram you use. I would suggest going Crucial/Micron PC2100 on the A7M26.

Chrisp · Post by **Chrisp** » Mon Feb 25, 2002 4:45 pm

Thanks, Subhuman. Would the Gigabyte 7DXR be easier to handle or same-same?
And about Intel: I know you prefer them for a reliable performance but man, here in Europe I can´t find the northwoods below 2 Ghz at about 450 Dollars which I refuse to pay for a CPU. The "old" P4 at 1,5 costs some 100 bucks but it seems kinda hard to buy that one knowing it´ll have to ditched for a Northwood soon.