Basic motherboard qualities....

SirRiff

Junior Member
Nov 29, 2001
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Greetings,

new to the board...Greetings!

I am a musican who is designing my Digital Audio Workstation and I wanted some informed opinions...

Since the consumer level Athlon 1900+ XP and 512 megs SD DDR will give you top of the line performance these days...

what are the qualities that i would look for in a motherboard, considering the computer is built to actually do things
by this i mean, I don't wan to build a mainframe for the sake of building a mainframe (which is cool if you are into that) I want a tower of power to do the day to day stuff for the next 10 years (which it should suit me for if i buy top of the line stuff)

if there any reasonable qualites i am overlooking?

total ram memory -most have 3 G's which is more then most of us need
PCI slots -5 is standard which should be good... (1 video, 2x audio, 1X LAN)
IDE channels, stand is like 4 drives? thats more then i would ever use....
preferably no onboad audio/video?
what about onboad LAN? has it come of age?
USB ports?...one for the mouse....can't see more then that

all the benchmarks i have seen put most of the 266a's pretty damn close performance wise
stabilty is good i guess, so maybe an Asus, Soltek, Soyo (as recommended by TomsHardware tests)
I don't think i will "need" raid but maybe a few years down the line i might be happy to have it onboard

is there any other "prosumer" level qualities i am overlooking?



what else would be important?
what am i missing?

Thankyou
SirRiff