Building a silent recording pc advice welcomed

I just purchased an Dual Core Atom based asus AT5M10-1 fan-less miniITX motherboard. I am going to zip it up with 4 gig of ddr2 800. 

I play and record classical music and have for years been very disappointed with the PC when it comes to recording high definition audio from quality mics and my mackie mixer.

Fan and device noise has always made recording in the same room or at least close to the pc impossible!

Does anybody out there have experience with the IDT 92HD73C codec and Asus boards. I have read that Dells top of the line laptops use the chip.

My new board has the six channel version so it is fully 24/192 DAC capable and has 24/96 ADC stereo line in capability the same time just like as my good old M-Audio Audiophile 24/96 that I currently use.

The SNR specs are decent and although the ADC is only rated at 95db this is more than made up for by the ability to handle a hot line level signal at 1.2 Vrms! The same as the M-audio card, so distortion at high volume inputs from my mixer pre-amp should not be a problem if Asus has used decent caps and other components with this incredible mini!

I am thinking of using laptop drives on my device instead of 3.5 to further reduce the size, heat generation and wattage and therefore completely eliminate the need for fans. I have a fan-less power supply already and find that if it runs at less than 60 watts it is completely silent. However when it powers my current pc and shoots up to 240 watts (I am currently using it with an AMD 7750 power hog) it has a tendency to sing a little bit.

So the current hardware that I am using needs to be shut away from where I record, which is a pita to say the least.

Again any suggestions regarding software and setup would be very welcomed. I am fluent in Linux as well so it might just become Windows7/Linux dual boot machine ...to boot, though pulse audio in Linux is a dog and has barfed on my M-audio ADC and DAC line ios it still might work fine with the IDT onboard. I might just sell the good old M-audio card if the IDTHD73C onboard turns out to be reliable and stable for a change.

If the onboard chip turns out to be a dog I can still put in the good old M-audio card because there are now Windows7 64 bit drivers for it even though it has been around for over ten years!...

too bad Pulse audio has made the Audiophile 24/96 unusable with Linux though, once upon a time it worked perfectly ...you still can use it correctly if you dump pulse and all the other gnome-pulse dependant stuff. If you have the patience and enough hair left on your head.

Quote:

Originally Posted by MrQ 

If you want quiet drives have you considered SSD?

 

I'll pm you an article on an audio pc used in music production that uses SSDs and is reviewed as being very quiet. 

Yes I will get an SSD or two when I can afford it. There are only two sata connectors on the board so my options are quite limited. I find that the WD green series is not a bad choice for a sata drive though. I use one in my living room HD PVR and it runs really quiet. What I really like about the WD green series is the fact that they will spin down to 5400 under low load and there should be no trouble recording to disk in real time at 24/96 without having the disk churning away and heating up.

I will be one happy camper if I can completely avoid the use of fans. They are the biggest cause of rf in a pc case. Even the big expensive ones do not have adequate shielding on their wiring! Back when I first did recording on a pc I had a setup that caused hum that would be intermittent..turned out it was a stupid power supply fan that was switching on an off ...needless to say this caused another trip to the store.

Another important issue is file system performance when it comes to recording in real time. This is the good thing about Linux, really great file systems can be used. Like the one created by SGI

I think if the onboard audio turns out to be any good for high bit rate recording then the pci slot can be used for a secondary firewire card and make some of the really great studio audio stuff usable as well. The asus bios on this board will allow dedicated IRQs like most asus boards.

This is the main reason why I like to use asus boards. In the past doing high bit rate with the onboard has always caused trouble with shared IRQs unless I make sure that the USB and network IRQs are not the same as the onboard audio.

This inevitably causes pops and clicks on most intel high definition pc based hardware the worst being laptops.  The first time that I used my Audiophile 24/96 I had to really mess with things to make it work right because of the stupid IRQ settings on a cheapo intel based board. In fact I finally gave up and bought an asus A7V with more bios options.

I guess I must be one of the first around to try to create a recording PC out of this board, just hope it works as well as I think it should!