- Jun 13, 2014
- 1
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- 4,510
Hi, this is my first post but I've often come here to get the answers I need when it comes to PC tech hyper-mysteries that I just can't suss out. I have a hard time keeping things short, so I apologize in advance, I'll try to keep it as short as possible!
I've just bought myself some studio equipment for my music production, but now I find out that a lot of it will suffer from incopatibility and slowdows, unless I get a new motherboard. Problem is, I've been out of the PC tech loop for SO long, I feel as if I dont know anything anymore so I can't make any decisions with confidence.
The immediate problem comes from me assuming I had USB2.0 (like a fool), then realising my mobo only has 1.0 so I cant use my audio interface, although I'm PRETTY sure an old HDD enclosure I owned was USB2.0 only, but that worked, how can that be? Thats where the false assumption came from anyway. Rather than getting some kind of USB2.0 adapter/bridge, I've decided the best choice would be to do a real upgrade. I've had this old beast for years now, and the CPU is really starting to show its age and I think its causing the bottlenecks in Ableton Live (CPU meter choking to death on a lot of my projects) and some games even though I have 3GB RAM & a pretty tough graphics card (GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB, best I could afford lol). I'm sure it must be my CPU holding everything else back. I could get a new CPU on its own if thats a more economical choice, but I'm not sure if it'll be bottlenecked by anything else on my mobo.
My main needs for a mobo are something that can handle gaming, graphic design and music production smoothly, with ease, so I'm guessing this means a fairly beefy CPU? However, I'm far from rolling in money, so with my budget, I really can't spend more than £200 (maybe £250 absolute max, but I'll feel dirty afterwards and need to shower it off).
What other factors besides the CPU should I be considering when choosing a new mobo? I know I'll need atleast 'PCI-E 2.0 X16' compatibility (I'm not bothered about 3.0 as of yet), and I'll need atleast 2x PCI slots, 4x SATA-II ports, atleast 1x IDE slot (I still have an old IDE HDD...), atleast 2x DDR2 DIMM RAM slots, and apart from that, I'm not sure what else I should be looking for, but I know there will be a few blatant things I'm missing! My OS is XP Pro SP3 running at 32bit, so although I want to upgrade to 64, I only have 32 right now, and I'm also worried a lot of my older programs wont work with 64.
Currently I'm trawling through "best for the money" lists, but I'd love to hear if you guys have any advice or suggestions based on my needs/uses so I can feel confident with my purchase. Here are the specs of my current board:-
-ASRock ConRoe1333-D667
-Intel Pentium D 925 dual core CPU at 3.0GHz (no overclock)
-x86-64, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3
It did its job well, but now I've got to let her go! If you need any more info, just let me know and I'll add it!
Thanks in advance!
I've just bought myself some studio equipment for my music production, but now I find out that a lot of it will suffer from incopatibility and slowdows, unless I get a new motherboard. Problem is, I've been out of the PC tech loop for SO long, I feel as if I dont know anything anymore so I can't make any decisions with confidence.
The immediate problem comes from me assuming I had USB2.0 (like a fool), then realising my mobo only has 1.0 so I cant use my audio interface, although I'm PRETTY sure an old HDD enclosure I owned was USB2.0 only, but that worked, how can that be? Thats where the false assumption came from anyway. Rather than getting some kind of USB2.0 adapter/bridge, I've decided the best choice would be to do a real upgrade. I've had this old beast for years now, and the CPU is really starting to show its age and I think its causing the bottlenecks in Ableton Live (CPU meter choking to death on a lot of my projects) and some games even though I have 3GB RAM & a pretty tough graphics card (GTX 650 Ti Boost 2GB, best I could afford lol). I'm sure it must be my CPU holding everything else back. I could get a new CPU on its own if thats a more economical choice, but I'm not sure if it'll be bottlenecked by anything else on my mobo.
My main needs for a mobo are something that can handle gaming, graphic design and music production smoothly, with ease, so I'm guessing this means a fairly beefy CPU? However, I'm far from rolling in money, so with my budget, I really can't spend more than £200 (maybe £250 absolute max, but I'll feel dirty afterwards and need to shower it off).
What other factors besides the CPU should I be considering when choosing a new mobo? I know I'll need atleast 'PCI-E 2.0 X16' compatibility (I'm not bothered about 3.0 as of yet), and I'll need atleast 2x PCI slots, 4x SATA-II ports, atleast 1x IDE slot (I still have an old IDE HDD...), atleast 2x DDR2 DIMM RAM slots, and apart from that, I'm not sure what else I should be looking for, but I know there will be a few blatant things I'm missing! My OS is XP Pro SP3 running at 32bit, so although I want to upgrade to 64, I only have 32 right now, and I'm also worried a lot of my older programs wont work with 64.
Currently I'm trawling through "best for the money" lists, but I'd love to hear if you guys have any advice or suggestions based on my needs/uses so I can feel confident with my purchase. Here are the specs of my current board:-
-ASRock ConRoe1333-D667
-Intel Pentium D 925 dual core CPU at 3.0GHz (no overclock)
-x86-64, MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3
It did its job well, but now I've got to let her go! If you need any more info, just let me know and I'll add it!
Thanks in advance!
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