as everyone knows, the newly released PCI-Express bus is quickly becoming the standard bus for computing. probably most everybody here doesn’t have a motherboard with it YET, but in 1-3 years, pretty much EVERYBODY will have it, because just about all new motherboards are PCI-express only.
this means that much of our current hardware will be outdated and un-usable, including our soundcards.
now i have been wanting to get a decent soundcard for a while now… and i was looking at m-audio audiophile… but… since they are old pci, it would be a waste of my money to get one because i am planning on buying a new motherboard in about a year
so… what do i do in the meantime?
the only decent option i have thought of is getting a USB soundcard. but i don’t really know much about them. it seems like the USB bus isn’t really fast enough for music writing applications, and it would have a lot of latency, which would really suck for timing, playing live, etc…
are there any usb soundcards that don’t suck?
i’m hoping that nice pci express soundcards come out pretty soon also
well i did a google search immediately after you posted that and i thought i found evidence that it was backward compatible, but i must have read the wrong thing… because now i found this
“PCI Express maintains software compatibility with traditional PCI, but replaces the physical bus with a high-speed (2.5 Gb/s) serial bus. Because of this architecture change, the connectors themselves are not compatible. However, during the transition from PCI to PCI Express, most computer motherboards will provide a combination of PCI and PCI Express connectors.”
from this site: http://64.233.161.104/search?q=cache:_RscP…ompatible&hl=en
so… back to the original problem… guess i will try to find a pci express board that has legacy pci slots AND an agp slot (so i don’t have to buy a new video card at the same time too)
almost all motherboards have and wil have pci express AND pci slots for quite some time… so i dont think this will be big problem… pci will be around for some 2-3 years for sure.
it will be like transitition from ISA to PCI. they cant and wount cut it off just like that…
EDIT: by the way, does anybody know of any pci express sound card anyway? i havent heard of any yet
yeah, i remember when most boards had both pci and isa, and then around the time athlons came out it was really hard to get isa slots on your board anymore, there were sometimes boards with 1 isa slot, but not many
Then I should suggest an Asrock 939 Dual SATA II. They’re very cheap, have PCI-E & AGP slots (which you can run together), an upgrade slot for 940 sockets and very good performance overall.
Their build quality isn’t amazing, and I would sugest making a few minor additions beforehand, but for the options you have, you’d save yourself buying a mobo for a while, especially after a good overclock!
My config is as follows (Just to give an example of useability:
939Dual SATAII - OCWB1 (modded bios)
Athlon 64 XP3200+ @ 2.45GHz with Zalman 9500LED
1GB Nanya DDR400 @ 205 2-3-2-5
Nvidia 7800GT hooked up to two 17" TFTs (Spanned mode runs renoise in WIDE screen)
Radeon 9800Pro (If i ever wanted to play doom whilst gigging)
M-Audio Delta 1010 & Midisport 2x4
2xSATA250GB Seagates in RAID1 (Music drive)
200GB Seagate & 40GB WD
Jeantech Arctic 600W PSU
2xDVDRW’s
Akasa fan controller Pro - hooked up to 5x Sharkoon silent eagle 2000 fans
Blah Blah Blah…
The closest you can get is the K7upgrade from ASrock, they planned to offer 939 upgrade support, but only got as far as 754. I had one of these but never used the upgrade option, plus it never had PCI-E, so really your best option would be the 939dual. This would only need a new mobo’ & processor. Mine came to a total of around £150 (the mobo being less than £50). It’s upgradeability will save you bucks for the future, but they’re becoming limited in numbers, so if you don’t wanna shell out for an additional, decent graphics card, I suggest you get there as quick as you can! If you do, feel fre to PM me about any queries on the mobo’ or even overclocking.
i dont know why do you make such big issue out of that… computers age morally so fast that you will replace it in 2-3 years anyway. its not like we are buying them for life or something
i recommend you to buy whatever is good price/performance wise right now and not to worry too much about what will happen later…
EDIT: and computers are getting cheaper and cheaper…
You probably don’t want an AGP slot if it contains a 16x pci-eX.
Most video card made for Pci-X perform better than AGP 8x
And when the 16x pciX video cards will see daylight, you won’t have any match anymore.
The 16x agp bus will AFAIK not be developed.
My point is about not having to shell out for more parts in one go, and still use your old graphics card.
I plan to sell my 9800 so I can get either a better motherboard, or processor, which is what a lot of others are doing going by some forums. I don’t plan to use the socket 940 option, but do plan to go SLI, for which ASRock provide a nice solution for under £60, it’s really about what suits you best at the time, I was only trying to offer advice .
Besides, even the latest PCI-E cards wouldn’t exceed the AGP 8x bandwidth, hence why they are still releasing AGP versions of the X800’s and other models. My 9800 suffered no performance loss when running at 4x either, simply because it never used the bandwidth! The high bandwidth of PCI-E is really to accommodate SLI, multi GPU cards, and future proofing. Actually, CPUs have a bit of catching up to do because they’re now becoming the bottleneck, especially in SLI systems.
guess i will try to find a pci express board that has legacy pci slots AND an agp slot (so i don’t have to buy a new video card at the same time too)
