Wait or else take a trip to the bleeding edge. Intel have changed the entire design of mobos. AGP is gone and PCI is now only for legacy support.
PCI Express changes many things including giving you very much higher bandwidth on the bus.

Bob.

and of course do not get any INTERGRATED audio or video. USB is now 2.1 I think.

and of course do not get any INTERGRATED audio or video. USB is now 2.1 I think.
AND space for all the fast current RAM you can afford.

IF you can believe what Intel have to say the new integrated audio is a lot better. The only mobos I've seen have the audio integrated but that's not a real drama, just turn it off in the bios.

Good thing though is you can have 1GB network and fwire 800.

I haven't seen firewire 800 (1394b) on the board yet but GB ethernet could be very nice if you have more than one system that supports it (duh, huh?)

PCI express might be a good thing but it's really bleeding edge right now. Next spring would be a great time to buy these new boards. One thing about PCI Express x16 graphics card slots is that they're bidirectional. It implies that we might see some graphics processing on these cards. Maybe something that vegas can use. That's my hope, anyway.

Rob Mack

Intergrated audio has come a long way in the last couple years. Some boards ythat have it have build-in 5-1 sound even. Again it depends what you're trying to do. For listening it isn't half bad and equal to typical external comsumer grade audio cards unless you need more of a "pro" version for professional recording something to consider.

Older nForce boards had 5.1 AC-3 on the fly hardware encoding(I believe this is the platform for XBOX). Current ones apparently don't but the next generation ones are supposed to being it back. I don't know if that's really of any use to this crowd, but it is kind of cool to have 5.1 digital out with on the fly hardware based encoding.

This is from memory, though, and might be wrong.

-Jayson

I always try the on board audio, and so far have always been disappointed - doesn't mean it won't be fine for you. In the past year I've tried it on Asus and Gigabyte boards, and both times have gone to using old SB Live cards I had left over. You can get them cheap from ebay if needed.

<edit> I agree with the multi-IDE connector idea. My editing machine had two, and I added a PCI card to get more.

The Abit IS7 is a great bang for the buck motherboard. It does not have features out the wazoo which keeps its costs down.
2XIDE, 2XSATA, firewire, many USB2 ports
fan on the northbridge chip (makes noise)
low price
Intel 865PE chipset (you do not need the more expensive 875)
lots of tweaking options (especially PAT, which is enabled on 875 chipset boards. You have a good chance of getting PAT on the abit board. PAT makes no difference in performance for video editing)
Not an off-brand motherboard like PCChips or ECS

2- Multiple hard drive channels is a good idea if you have lots of hard drives. The Abit IS7 should be able to support at least 4 HDDs + 2 opticals. 4HDDs is a lot of space for DV.

3- SB Live is a crap sound card (hissy, weird limiters on the inputs) with crappy drivers. Get something better like an M-Audio Revolution 7.1. If you game primarily then an Audigy2 would be a good choice too.

Just make sure your processor will work with the board you get as also the memory and the Video card. Every time there is an upgrade you trash everything and start over. Now you have to get DDR2 Memory, PCI express video cards, and a processor that is compatible. It aint easy anymore.

JJK

Concerning the Asus P4P800-E Deluxe:

1 - Somebody knows if the IEEE1394 port is OHCI compatible on this card? (It's a VIA controler (yuk!) that makes the job...)

Memory:
2 - is there a big difference between low-latency and ordinary memory?
3 - I would think that having the most memory is the best: am I wrong ? Apart from RAM preview, any benefits? On the forum some seem to say yes while other say "mmm...maybe" If it's just RAM previews that benefit, I might just get 1Go and live with it for a while...

Hard Drives:
4 - I'm seeing that you can fit 7200 AND 10 000 RPM drives (s-ata) in new systems. I would probably go with two identical drives in RAID to take care of WinXP. Will I see a lot of difference between 7200 and 10000?
5 - Is it better to run RAID with both WinXP and apps on the same drives
OR
run non-RAID with XP on one drive and programs on the other (like I'm doing now)? Would I see a big difference in performance (no "safety" involved, just "speed")


Oh, yes. If you're thinking of upgrading, like me, Intel just announced a drop in prices on Socket 478 CPUs above 3.0 GHz for august 22nd; just wait! (18% drop on 3GHz / 22%drop on 3.2 GHz / 33%drop on 3.4 GHz )

Thanks for comments!

>>Somebody knows if the IEEE1394 port is OHCI compatible on this card?
>>It's a VIA controler

On my Via controller (another motherboard), it *is* OHCI compliant.

>>I would think that having the most memory is the best: am I wrong ?

No. You are correct. I have 1 GB of RAM and I actually use it all (when doing a lot of stuff at once). I am thinking about 2 GB.

>>Will I see a lot of difference between 7200 and 10000?

I know that I read that the difference between 5400 and 7200 RPM was negligible. Well, I disagree. I could definitely "feel" the difference between 5400 and 7200. It wasn't *huge,* but it was noticiable. I would certainly think that 10000rpm would follow suit.

>>Intel just announced a drop in prices on Socket 478 CPUs...

That is the reason I stay with AMD. Same socket all the time. When they do change it, no one can complain. With AMD you can actually upgrade *only* the CPU. I like that.

...and there ya' go.

3- SB Live is a crap sound card (hissy, weird ...

I assume this is in response to my post - these weren't video editing or high-end gaming machines I used these in, and in both cases the sblive was better than the onboard audio, period. Of course, m-audio and the audigy are even better than that.

2 - is there a big difference between low-latency and ordinary memory?

2- For vegas, there's no measurable difference with low latency memory. This is going from PAT enabled 2-3-2-5 to non-PAT 3-4-4-8. In other things low latency makes a few percent difference, but it's still not worth paying the premium for it. Spend money on the CPU instead.

3- I still can't figure out why I'd need more than 512MB. If I were doing some insane RAM previews then I can see more RAM being useful.