Except that its not dual CPU capable?

ORIGINAL: Scott Reams
The AthlonFX 51 may as well be called an Opteron 148. It's the exact same CPU.

the Northbridge is now in the CPU... and Via is just handling Southbridge functionality

Hmm good point. hadnt thought of that, dang it now i have another board to validate...
Scott

Aardavark wont even work on a HT system, they claim no compatibility with dual therefore 4 CPUs no way..
however i have had an Aardvark working on duals.
powercore wont work with HT either (unless they fixed it)
nor will UAD-1.
but we do have several running on dual systems, which i find odd.
Giga seems fine on Dual.

however with the Xeons with HT (shows 4 CPU)
we have had a few issues and many have had to turn off HT.
i would say its a major crop shoot.
Scott
ADK

Of course!

If price was a factor in this, I wouldn't take this approach at all! I would never actually buy this 4-way monstrosity. It's just available for testing and I would like to explore its possibilities. In fact the fan noise alone from this beast would probably disqualify from a useful life as a DAW. I'll know when I actually get to see/touch/hear.

For GigaStudio I think streaming will be a breeze, since the box comes with a native set of three 36GB SCSI 160 drives. Secondarily, with 5GB of RAM is attractive in that I might be able to fiddle with the registry to get GigaStudio to use more of the RAM than it usually does.

One potential showstopper is the fact that there is no AGP slot in this thing, and the motherboard video runs on one of two or three (independent?) PCI busses. I haven't figured out how the PCI-X is implemented on this machine and I want to run dual monitors. I want to keep the monitor PCI bus isolated from the audio PCI bus and I'll be adding a PCI video card (remember those?).

Right now I have a GigaStudio machine 1.9ghz P4 and separate Sonar DAW 2.4ghz P4. The 1.9 GS (512MB RAM) is a small form factor PC which has space for only one physical hard-drive. The native GigaStudio grand piano takes a long time (6 minutes?) to load from the logical D drive. Before I take the option to use external FireWire drives, or simply go to another full-sized machine (or XPC) I plan play with the 4-way Xeon solution.

The machine is an IBM xSeries 360. An 8686-1RX

Thanks for taking the time to look into this. It'll be at least six weeks before I get a chance to actually fire up this machine. Until that time I'll keep poking around for additional data.

I'd like to develop a satisfactory remote consolte/dual screen solution since I saw the noise specification as 6.3 Bels !!! 63dB is one loud box!
I just need my remote console solution to be CHEAP! Before I try any fancy KVM-over-LAN solutions, I think I'll simply try long cables and see how well my screen images hold together. Along with that I may have to go for a MOTU AudioWire solution since that'll allow more than 15 feet from the rack to the DAW. The other option is to minimize the noise in a DAW sound suppression box. I have a homemade version of the ISORAXX working today. It's adequate but not outstanding.

I'll keep you posted.
Thanks again.

I finally got this 4-way Xeon server and tested it under Win2003 server. I ran into the ultimate showstopper: None of my audio cards would go into the 3.3v PCI slots.

As it turns out, this motherboard exclusively supports 3.3v PCI, (two bridges on the 32-bit slot), so no MOTU, Aardvark, ESI-WaveTerminal or Cport would fit! Game over!

...what a drag...

It's really ok, though, this thing was so loud, it would have taken me two weeks to build a suitable box to muffle this beast while maintaining reasonable airflow. Furthermore, the 300+ watts it draws at idle would exacerbate my studio heat problem during the summer.

Supposedly MOTU makes a variant of the PCI424 that works in Mac G5s which only has 3.3v slots (that's why they made it). My guess is that it's a 3.3v variant of the regular 5v-only PCI424 (that is, it's still only 32-bit/33MHz), though I haven't actually seen it so I'm not certain.