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In Reply to: RE: PS/2 Mice & other recent interesting HW comments... posted by GStew on November 20, 2011 at 19:59:29
If you must change your MB, it seems your choice is very limited and the H61 MB should be a good choice. It advantages are non-presence of unnecessary/unwanted peripheral (only 2 SATA and 2 USB controllers), hence less current consumption. I will listen to Julia@ on the H61-S2h and H55-UD2H respectively and compare with my USB converter to confirm if there is any degrade of SQ.The H55M-UD2H is a fine MB. I had no intention to change it until I tried the H61 MB, but I'm looking at H67MA-UD2H-B3, a discontinued top-of-the-line product with an 8 phase (12 chokes) CPU power circuitry. It should sound much much better than its elementary counterparts.
I like the latest Sandy Bridge chipset/CPU because the current consumption is reasonable, hence quality power supply is made more affordable.
Regarding the H55M MB and i3 530/540, I just found some second-hand H55M-USB3 in China, which was a top model with low Rds(on) mosfets, similar to the H61/67 series. Since the power circuit is superior to UD2H, it may sound better. The MB is being shipped. I'll try it when I get it.I guess our CMP machines are moving on as new CPUs/Chipsets roll out and products discontinue. I'm looking forward to the 22mn CPU technology coming next year. I guess we may be able to power the 5V rail with 500ma of current.
Edits: 11/22/11Follow Ups:
Hi Jack, great to read your very interesting posts on MB's!I changed to H55M-USB3 about a year ago, and chose this MB because of the cpu-power circuit. I must say i was a bit disappointed in SQ. At that time i moved from a medieval Asus-AMD-K7 (Athlon thunderbird) which runned @800 MHz. This board had a few interesting features, like no onboard sound, no onboard lan, adjustable VGA signal strength, very detailed BIOS. I bypassed all caps with Sikorel/Wima combo's (see photo, as per your directions, thanks a lot!), which had great influence on SQ. Of course this board couldn't do CPlay and i did SoX-upsampling by hand. This was all aimed on learning and trying to squeeze everything possible out of this 1999-MB. As a preparation for building my "real" CMP2.
The change to H55M-USB3 gave a lot nice improvements (RAMspeed, headless-opportunity, Cplay, upsampling, lower powerconsumption / battery-opportunity).
But i had expected more in terms of SQ. SQ was only a little better than the Asus/K7 board.
Other experience:
- changing CPU-speed on the h55m makes a lot of difference (900 lots better than 1200),
- playing with two cores it seems to sound tiny better than 1 core; just a little more depth and headroom. How could that be possible? larger L2 cache?I think the H55M-USB3 has good potential, but quiet a few needless noisy & powerconsuming chips have to be removed: IDE-chip, usb3-NEC, hdmi, dvi, sound, fan regulators. I think these chips overrule other improvements i did, for example on Juli@: just subtle improvements when linear psu-ing 5v and LifePo-ing 3,3v. Not the 'quantum leap' that other inmates describe. (MB has hybrid psu: linear+pico)
Since chip-removal is out of my league, and i don't need 192 KHz upsampling (88.2 is enough; my modded Benchmark-DAC1 upsamles to 176) i have a few questions:
1.
For going headless / 88.2 upsampling would it be possible / better to move to Atom?
Possible advantages:
- Asrock Atom D525 board, underclockable to 900 Mhz; fanless when underclocked
- simple design and few features (elegant)
- power consumption and -regulation is easier to control
- battery-power would be more simple
- removal of the two big regulators near CPU and battery-feeding (or replace the 78xx regs by lowdrop regulators)??
- not so many caps to bypass with Sikorel-Wima-combo
Possible disadvantage could be the small L2+L3 (1M+0M)
2.
Or should i stick to the h55m and try to cut the power-pins of the mentioned chips (and leave them on the board)?Thanks in advance!
Douwe
Edits: 11/23/11
Hi Douwe,I’m pleased that my posts on MB’s are of some use to you guys.
On the choices of MB, I strongly recommend you stay away from Atoms CPU/MB. Please see the posts below.
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/7/74567.html
http://www.audioasylum.com/forums/pcaudio/messages/7/74547.html
The 1st photo you posted is an Asus MB, not Gigabyte. I’m not sure the bypass caps are soldered to the right place as I couldn’t see the top of MB. Just a hint, all chokes, in particular those around the CPU and Ram need bypass caps.If you wish to change your CPU/MB, I recommend GA-H61M-S2P-B3 and Celeron G440, a low cost solution.
This MB doesn’t have many unnecessary devices, no DVI and HDMI chips, just sound and lan chips, 2 fan connectors. The bios is tweakable just like the S2V.
http://download.gigabyte.asia/FileList/Manual/mb_manual_ga-h61m-s2p-b3_e.pdf
One more good thing about the Gigabyte H61M MB is that, unlike H55M series there are SMD chokes filtering the powerline before the lan and sound. As such, disabling the chip is easy, just desolder the chokes. You can cut off the legs of the mosfets next to the fan connectors.I will collect my 2nd hand H55M-USB3 after work today. May be worthwhile to wait for my report on this MB.
Edits: 11/24/11
On the choices of MB, I strongly recommend you stay away from Atoms CPU/MB. Please see the posts below.
I cannot comment on the GA-H61M-S2P-B3 but neither of the "tests" you cite strongly to recommend staying away from Atom MoBos is meaningful as the test conditions are not described. Atom boards have known limitations in our scenario; it is easy to get them to perform badly, not so easy to get them to perform well.
The D510MO would in any case not be the Atom board of choice (though I've used one a dual-boot setup).
Dave
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