[mdlug] Well, shucks - motherboard/CPU advice needed

[Michael Rudas]

--- Raymond Ingles wrote:

> My main linux box is officially toast.
>   The main issue is that it's PATA - in other words, ribbon cable IDE for the
>  drives. I have two 120GB hard drives, a DVD-ROM drive, and a DVD-RW drive. I
>  could lose the extra DVD drive, but I've gotta have the disks and the burner.
>  It's got an AGP video card, but any onboard Nvidia chipset these days would be
>  better than the card I have, so I'm not *too* worried about that.
>
>   I need firewire to pull data off our camcorder, either built onto the
>  motherboard or else a PCI slot so I can put in my existing firewire card. I
>  also have a SoundBlaster Live that I want to keep using - it's pretty good at
>  sound capture and I doubt if onboard sound would do as well.
>   Gotta have:
>    - at least one parallel ATA hookup, ideally two
>    - FireWire or PCI slot
>    - AGP slot or on-board nVidia graphics
>
>   Strongly desired:
>    - SBLive audio, either built-in or another PCI slot
>    - PCI Express slot for upgradeable video later.

You're not going to be able to re-use your DDR RAM -- new MBs use DDR2
-- but in all other respects, you should be OK.  Many current MBs have
a mix of PCI and PCI Express slots, as well as two ATA headers to go
along with the SATA interface.

There are a variety of MBs available at Micro Center that should fill
your needs.  Something like this:
<http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0259059>

You could put in a SATA-in/ATA-out adapter on the burner to gain that
extra interface free.  I, too, like having both a DVD-ROM and a DVD
burner in my systems:
<http://www.microcenter.com/single_product_results.phtml?product_id=0266720>

~~ Mikey