New PC specs

[Gene Colburn — email address bounces notices]

The chipset may work for dual graphics card, but we could never get it to reliably run a multibridge extreme with a 4 lane PCIe adapter, no matter what BIOS settings, or versions. It would boot and run one time, but not the next. Also if it did boot and run, our 4 drive SATA array would quit recognizing associated drives (with SSC enabled, and NCQ fixes installed). The ASUS forum is full of similiar complaints. We have it running fine with AMD4800 and Nvidia 7800GTX and as a 1394 dv editor only. Rock solid, and fast. I am curious if you are running it with Decklink Extreme PCI or PCIe card? One of the problems with this chipset is the lack of a southbridge controller like the K8WE. and with all iteritations of Nvidia 4 chipset motherboards. I have a feeling that future BIOS releases may address some additional setup tweaks for PCIe. But PEG link settings are usless in setting this pup up.
PS I don’t usually post these kind of replies, as they end up being my setup works better than yours kind of matches. I am just letting you know what we found with the A8N series boards, and sometimes its good to share if it saves some other guy some headaches.

Gene Colburn

[Gene Colburn — email address bounces notices]

The A8N-VM does have southbridge, so I should not say all of the A8 series boards, and who knows, there may be some others out there.
GC

[Norman Lafranchi]

Our Decklink board is PCI only. But we may reconsider the Brand for our next purchase, which is coming soon, based on what you’ve said. Any recommendations?

[Gene Colburn — email address bounces notices]

OK Ok… I wasn’t going to do this. Once its in print, you can’t take it back…
And hopefully not sounding like some kind of snobby authority, I am partial to the K8WE,(Thunder) and the Opteron 254’s which are coming down to affordable. There are other dual core options, but with very little gain when none of the video apps use the additional core technology effectively. The K8 is an expensive solution because of ECC ram and SSI power supply and cooling requirements. The downside to this MB is that neither the onboard Nvidia SATA raid, nor the dual channel U320 SCSI controller are internally fast enough for herking uncompressed HD. However they are plenty fast enough to do 10 bit 4.2.2 digibeta stuff, and other HD storage solutions are options.
We build K8WE systems for other clients, with the Quadro 4500, and Multi Bridge Extreme. Its a great solution for Premiere Suite of apps. If you hold your breath long enough Vista will ship, and Adobe will eventually take advantage of 64 bit CPU technology, be it Intel AMD or both. In the mean time you have an editor that will edit and keep up with the best of them, and the BM MBE drivers so far are very stable.
I love the Adobe Suite. I’ve been lucky enough in the last ten years of working with almost every other branded editing solution. However it is becoming apparent to me that the above solution is more capable than many other solutions in the frey. I wanted mixed format editing, better asset management,and better audio editing from Adobe, but there are no show stoppers. Instead we got dynamic link, bridge, and awesome integration. It has taken us a while to warm up to them, but now were happy. With above compliment of hardware and Adobe, there really aren’t any stoppers. Avids OMF isnt exactly the cats meow, ask any Avid editor. Its essentially a closed system. FCP… once your past the pazazz, what do you have? Great cookies, but its not Adobe. I do love MACs, and unix, but its not Adobe. Hardware is expensive, and plugins are too. And now ( I can’t beleive it X86 archetecture on the MAC) If I had the money would I go there. No…. I was almost ready to build the G5 dream machine,and trade in all of our Adobe stuff, especially after Premiere 1.5.

(As a side note, the Asus A8N32SLI referrered to in previous post with a dual core 4800 cpu is as fast to render HD stuff as the K8 with 254’s. It just won’t run the additional hardware reliably, I’m sorry… And the OB audio sucks. Premiere went not responding numerous times on a simple system build. What else can I say. Maybe someone else can build it better. We keep looking for the best of all worlds, but it just seems you spend and spend more, and every solution has some downside. Many times they are stoppers. So far the K8WE runs, but there’s always a bigger kid on the block. You asked me for reccomendation. I don’t really have any other than the above experiences.

Regards
GC