Hard to say... how's your disk and CPU meter during record and playback? Also, are your HDDs in DMA mode?

sorry about the last post yes the SATA drives are set to DMA. Arthur

dude24man, you may want to search on the multiprocessing hotfix. I've seen several threads on the topic, most of which resulted in success. If you still need help, then posting in one of those may get you the answer that you're looking for more quickly.

TSax, you also have a 5th option that you did not metion: put your SATA audio drive in an external USB2/FW HD enclosure. I've posted in threads where this worked well... I think over in the "No joy for SATA audio" thread.

Otherwise, your money may be better spent on a new MOBO. Were I in your shoes, looking to buy a replacement board at comparable cost, I'd opt for a lower-cost A64 939 board like the ASROCK Dual SATA2 or the Gigabyte K8U. Check this thread for instance. These boards are no-frills and they get the job done very well. The processor upgrade is pretty reasonable these days, especially if you go single-core (like I did with a San Diego core A64 3700+). In my case, I went from an XP2500+ and saw a huge increase in performance. The best news is that when 939 dual-cores get really cheap in the coming months, I'll be able to quite easily upgrade using the same MOBO.

Mod Bod (on this forum) just went thought the very same buying cycle recently... he started out just looking for a better board for his Athlon XP, but when he saw what was available and what he got in return, he jumped tot he A64. He's really happy with it now.

Ouch... please don't wish a support job on me... I'd rather help folks out here as God gives opportunity.

That sounds like a reasonable product choice, with a nice upgrade path. Just don't cheap out on the power supply. Get at least a 450W model from a good company like Antec (Smartpower) or OCZ (Modstream). Or, if you're going for quiet, get a SeaSonic S-series PSU.

pricewatch.com doesn't show up at resellerratings.com. Are they a known entity or a fly-by-night outfit?

You're definitely safe going with newegg.com or monarchcomputer.com (my current favorite), but there's lots of others (directron.com, tigerdirect.com, etc.)

Ouch... please don't wish a support job on me... I'd rather help folks out here as God gives opportunity.

No I didn't - I wish I had a support person like you. But I guess we all know what I mean.

That sounds like a reasonable product choice, with a nice upgrade path. Just don't cheap out on the power supply. Get at least a 450W model from a good company like Antec (Smartpower) or OCZ (Modstream). Or, if you're going for quiet, get a SeaSonic S-series PSU.

Great, that's what I wanted to hear, so thank you! Having your 'seal' of approval has a lot of weight on my decision from now on.
BTW, I already have the power supply replaced with an Antec 450 (see previous post), and to tell you the truth, upgrading power supplies would be the last piece of computer equipment I ever thought of, since mine went south and took a few items with it. Great advice.

pricewatch.com doesn't show up at resellerratings.com. Are they a known entity or a fly-by-night outfit?

Pricewatch.com is a site which collects data (or prices) from several vendors. Very similar to the froogle engine (froogle.google.com). They're in business since 1997(?) and I have bought several computer items from their listings. That said, the vendors they represent may not be, so be aware. They also have a voting system, so you can rate purchases with their vendors.

You're definitely safe going with newegg.com or monarchcomputer.com (my current favorite), but there's lots of others (directron.com, tigerdirect.com, etc.)

Absolutelly! I have bought from Newegg and MonarchComputer in the past and all I have to say are good things

Again, thank you for all your great advice and I'll keep everyone posted on the upgrade.

Tchau.

ORIGINAL: TSaxMan
I followed losguy advice and decided to go with a new MoBo! Started doing research and realized that the best would be to go with something that's just around 2 yrs old. So I decided to go with the Gigabyte GA-K8N Pro-SLI motherboard and the AMD Athlon 64 3700+ as CPU.

TSax, I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but unfortunately, you didn't follow my advice completely. The MOBO you got is PCIe, particularly nForce4, which is known to cause pops and clicks with single-core AMD 64's. I didn't metion PCIe issues specifically here because this is a SATA thread... I figured that you'd have searched around and quickly found the issue.

Your best remedy is to either move up or down from where you are... up to a dual core CPU (AMD64 X2), or down to an AGP-based MOBO. Otherwise, you'll be faced with pops and clicks. Again, sorry to have to tell you this.

TSax... are you sure that you want socket 754? Double check if your proc is socket 939, or you may be in a whale of hurt, again. Also, all else being equal, I'd recommend 939 over 754, as 754 is on its way out, while 939 gives you a clear processor upgrade path. It also gives you dual-channel memory access, while 754 does not.

ORIGINAL: TSaxMan
Thank you for keeping an eye on this thread for me

I check in here for SATA issues, but these days they sometimes migrate to other hardware as part of the solution, as is the case here (IIRC).

Hi Vic, that MOBO (assuming it's the one here) looks pretty promising. But as long as you're getting a MOBO, I'd still recommend looking into some of the lower-cost AMD939 options. It's ultimately your choice, of course, but there are some nice solutions to be had. Look at the ASROCK Dual SATA2 board, or the Gigabyte K8U boards with the ULi chipset. Both are inexpensive boards. You'll still be able to use your AGP card, and all you'll need is the processor. Even a low-end single core 939 chip will make you feel like you've died and gone to heaven (well, not exactly or literally, but you know what I mean).

I've already moved on, and I had an XP2500+. Again, not to make you feel bad, but just giving you another option, IMO a better value option for an upgrade happening now, that will hold someone over for the next year or two.

Edit: P.S. And God bless you too, in this decision, and in all you do.

I took a look at the chipset and manual for the MOBO, and it's very promising. Nothing is absolutely sure until you try, of course, but the chipset describes teh SATA ports as being integrated, and no IRQ appears for the SATA in the PCI IRQ table. So, it sure looks like it's off the PCI bus, which is an indication that it will not have the problems of the earlier nForce2's with the tack-on SATA controllers.

Great post!
Tons of attention to detail and also very well written!
WELL DONE!!

Johnny

hi there and thanks losguy for a such complete guide
the first problems i experienced were glitches and clicks when playing audio or movies from one of my two SATA drives... a problem overcomed by moving the m-audio card to another PCI-slot free from any IRQ sharing.
i own a pci tv tuner card with which i encountered similar problems when capturing to the SATA drive.

i thought the problem was solved (it was effectively) as disk accesses (i mean intensive accesses like antivirus scan or tv capture) didn't *polluted* audio or video playback and recording: clicks and pops were gone on audio playback and image artefacts and sound bubbling were gone on tv capture.

now that i'm running pro tools m-powered, troubles are coming again!
my config has not changed a bit except i borrowed an IDE drive from a friend which helped finding my problem...
-> the problem: glitches and clicks are back.
when i'm playing within pro tools an audio file laying on the SATA drive, a click occurs each time the disk is accessed (when the light blinks).
but that doesn't occur when audio is played from the IDE drive.
the options in pro tools in "playback engine" to set buffer lenght (samples) and the level of buffering (levels 0-8) don't help... the click is delayed as buffer increase from every 0.5 second (level 0) to more than 5 seconds (level 8), in fact because disk access is delayed too.

listening to a 1000hz@-18dBFS sample, the regular click is relevant and correponds to the disk access. playing is rather possible but i simply can't record as those glitches (and moreover recording gives me some 'blurps') are recorded! damn it!

it is very relevant in pro tools, i've not tried with another audio app at the moment.
in mediaplayers (winamp or media player classic), the problem is very rare (some clicks and ticks here and there) as clips are almost fully buffered on open whereas pro tools only buffers a small part of each audio file - for the multitrack purpose i believe.

reading those pages i thought i finally had found my answers and that the problem was in PCI latencies but it is not.
i tried increasing the audio card PCI latencies and lowering the others (i tried many many combinations!) but that didn't helped.
i tried also many different settings in BIOS with no changes.

btw, i noticed PCI device listing provided by the BIOS (just after the post screen) that almost all PCI and onboard devices are assigned to IRQ 10 and 11 whereas they aren't in windows (should i care?).

i hope i can find an answer here. temporary solution is to record and play only from the old 20gb IDE drive (but i don't want to buy a new one). i'm totally desperate!
help!

my PC:
athlon xp 2500+
abit nf7-s rev 2.0 with onboard sil3112
hitachi SATA hard drives (80gb and 160gb both on sil3112)
western digital IDE hard drive 20gb
m-audio delta audiophile 2496
(the card is on pci slot 3, free from IRQ sharing and currently assigned to IRQ 16 by windows - ACPI mode)

Hi don, thanks for the compliments.

you're welcome! such a thread is SO welcome!

I wonder about this... You say that you are now rinning PT M-Powered. Did you by chance change from another audio card to the M-Audio card?

i've got the m-audio, then pro tools m-powered.
btw, i haven't try sonar so far (it's certainly worth a try) cause i'm *really* used to this damned pro tools!

my PC:
...
m-audio delta audiophile 2496
...

This is a known unresolved issue. M-Audio and SiI do not get along well at all. Sorry to bear the bad news! Some remedies are in this thread... read through and you'll find references. HTH!

damn it! i haven't read the whole thread... i was posting hopefully just after trying -unsuccessfully- the tricks you provided.
bad news, bad news...
but i won't throw arms now i'll try to find something and if i do i'll keep in touch.

On Edit: Ok, I searched back. For one option, look at jredfern's last post on Page 20 (he also has a Delta 2496). He had a certain amount of success with a Promise FastTrak controller card, though I did not get follow-through on his data rate issue with that card.

i think i'll go for a brand new IDE! disk for audio if i cannot find some kind of workaround
and then, for sure, that will be cpu+mobo upgrade, hoping i won't be fooled again...

thanks again.
cu,
donpipo.

Looks about right, Simo. Apart from using one of the many workarounds in this thread, you may want to try lowering the PCI latency of your graphics card and the SiI controller. For example values to use, see the end of my first post in this thread (also my first post on the forum). ;)