Build it and they will come.........
I'm an Athlon man.
Other than that my only words of advice is to stay away from any MOTU product unless you own a MAC. Motu is a MAC based company and PC drivers are always 6 months to a year behind MAC upgrades. I've been wanting to change to Win2k for awhile now, but I can't because my motu midi/smpte interfaces don't have a Win2k driver, because MOTU won't spend the resources to develop it....but their MAC drivers are up to date with the latest MAC OS. Now I have to buy new midi interfaces...expect the same from your 2408's down the road. I will never buy another MOTU piece of hardware again.

tchau,
rednroll

But hasn't MOTU just released really good WDM drivers for all of their cards now? I was thinking of getting the 828 firewire card coupled with an Apogee AD8000 for my setup. 8 channels of MOTU A/D and eight channels of Apogee A/D 16 channels in total. Sounds good to me! Good WDM, ASIO and MME drivers too supposively. And all out side of the computer cos there's no internal card! Anyone know if this'd be a good box to get?

here's my recommended PC setup 4 the moment:

1) As big a monitor as possible... pref. 19" or 21"

2)Abit Athlon DDR motherboard, based on AMD 761 chipset. - there will be no VIA chipset issues!

3) 2x 256MB CAS 2 DDR modules - quick and cheap.

4) AMD Athlon 1.4Ghz (266 FSB)

5) Midi tower case with 300W power supply. (those Athlons suck up the juice.)

6) ATI or NVIDIA graphics card... but not the top of the line.. too expensive, and drivers will be less stable.

7)Microsoft mouse with Intellieye (infrared, so no stupid ball to get clogged)

8) Microsoft or Cherry key board

9) Floppy Drive, DVD drive, CDR drive. lots of choices here. go with big names. HP, Yamaha or Plextor.

10) 2x IBM Deskstar 60GXP 40GB EIDE hard drives. Best value, and darn quick.

11) build a cupboard into a wall, with an open back on the other side of the wall, to stop annoying computer noise.

12) A modem (US robotics 56K) so you can get all the driver updates and patches u will need.

I think that's about it. I'm sure there's something I will have missed out, but that's a pretty good base to start with.

Or, you could always wait for the new version of the Athlon to come out this fall, and hook it up with an Nvidia N-force based chipset, which would be a superb setup. Dual channel DDR memory :oP

good luck,

Jason

Hi Rednroll
Im running the Win2k drivers on my 2408,1296,24I and MTPAV (parallel). Yea you are right MOTU is very slow about the PC side of the house but I got an e-mail from MOTU Tech Support, a guy named Jack Harrah who said MOTU is putting major time into the Windows and has answered any questions about the Win2k stuff. I have a P4 1.7 w/1Gb PC800 ram.
We are running Win2k sp2 on 3 of 4 systems here.
I read this forum everyday and I don't see the 3/4 problems with audio or midi. I can't wait until SF releases Acid, Vegas and SF with WDM drivers.
George Ware

Cool, next time you're talking to MOTU ask them when they're gonna create win2k drivers for their Micro express and Pocket Express midi interfaces?...I use these 2 devices to lock 2 PC's up to Smpte time code and control my keyboads.....They'll give you the same response they gave me. "Currently we don't have any plans to update the drivers on our midi interfaces"....but they did update their MAC drivers on the same devices. Win XP is the next step....ask them if they've even heard of that? You'll be crying for a year for that driver update, while everyone else is running a smooth Win XP setup with no problems. A working hardware device is better than one with Apogee converters sitting there not knowing what to do with a new OS.

Hehe... Isn't this the ultimate irony? I've long-time borrowed a MOTU MIDI Express for about three years, and all the time I've bothered the MOTU developers about WDM drivers (for 98, W2K and XP).

I had just returned the Express to the guy who originally owned it, yelling a loud "good riddance!", when MOTU announces on their new, stylish website that they from now on can provide WDM drivers for ALL their products. ALL. I'm not changing back, though, since I now am the proud owner of an Emagic AMT-8 which kicks serious ass.

But I guess MOTU owners with W2K wishes can stop sending mailbombs to suggestions@motu.com now.

Holy Shit!!!!....I just visited MOTU's website and there is win2k WDM drivers for my midi interfaces just released? Even for my paralel port devices!? You mean I can finally go to win2k? Damn!!!! It's only been 2 years since win2k was released!!!

I'm finally happy....except now, I'm gonna wait for Win XP to hit the stores, so now I'm gonna have to wait for everyone else to release XP drivers.

I still will never buy another MOTU product with such shity PC support from that company. I guess all the arguing and bitching me and everyone else did finally paid off and they said..."Dahhh...hey...there's a big PC based market out there....uhhhh...geee george..what do you think we should do?" You'll notice even with the new website there isn't a "user forum" like every other audio software company...that's because it would have been bombed with angry PC users that couldn't get drivers for win2k, and they had no answer to if they where gonna ever develop them. Did a programmer from Sonic Foundry leave and go over to MOTU, so they finally had someone who could turn on a Wintel machine and write drivers for their hardware?

Hey MOTU....since you don't have a forum....I hope you can hear me from here!!!!!

IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME!!!!!!

In Motu and everybody else's defense, it is a big hassle to write new drivers every time a new OS or driver model comes out. Takes time, costs whoever does it many thousands of dollars, and diverts resources away from new product development. That's why its always "somebody else's responsibility" on the development side, and a pain for the users who have to stick with an older OS just because of driver issues.

Supposedly XP starts the migration to a unified driver model (we'll see about that...). If true, hardware and software developers, as well as end users, will benefit big time.