Use the search function to find all threads on this forum with the word ANUS in them.
(Asus Northwood Ultra System?). It's quite a mania/craze/fad right now and these machines are very fast and rock solid stable. Probably the best PC platform money can buy in a single cpu system right now.

In a nutshell, basically the best combination that exists for a P4 windows pc is:

ASUS P4B266 (DDR) or P4T-E (rambus) motherboard with a P4 "Northwood" chip (retail, make sure it says 512k cache, don't get the older 256k cache P4) put in as much memory as you can afford, CAS2 if using the DDR motherboard, Samsung 16-chip PC800 if going with the rambus motherboard. Disk drive brand choice is a religious question. A lot of folks swear the Seagates are the quietest and plenty fast. Others like the liquid-bearing Maxtors. The new 8MB buffer WD's are reportedly very fast and quiet enough, but hideously expensive. I got a pair of IBM 120GXP's and have a bit of buyer's remorse over them... would NOT buy them again. Get a big case for proper cooling, and make sure to get a premium quality power supply, not a cheapo or it can sour your whole new-machine experience.

Soundcard choice? Another religious issue, whatever you decide on, make sure it is one of the pro quality cards and if you even think of mentioning Soundbluster around here, we're all gonna gang up against you :) Myself, I think I've finally decided to try out an Aardvark Direct Pro 24/96 and will be able to buy one perhaps next payday, to finish out my system. As to your US$1200 estimate, you're probably gonna have to spend a bit more than that to piece together a reasonable quality high-performance DAW. I've got about US$1500 into mine thus far and still have not yet bought the audio interface unit, which will be another $500.

ANUS actually stands for Asus Northwood Users Society!!! just to clear things up here!! lol
Fad? My system is a fad? What are you saying man!! lol!!
Here's what you should do...this is a sure fire winner system..
Asus P4B266 or Asus P4TE..which one is better for you..doesnt matter..either one will get you where you need to go...and get you there really fast too!!!
With either of these systems you'll get a 400mhx FSB!!! the hell W/ 133!!!!!!! lol :p
Anyhue...20GB hard drive for OS & Apps..this should be placed on the primary as master..
cd burner on secondary as master..
ATA133 controller(RAID is optional) using this for your audio drives!
this setup will rock your world!!!!
of course memory...512 or more...
Well that's all I have the mental capacity to write right now
Opus

Greetings,

Ok now I'm confused...

I thought all the currect CPUs were 133 fsb. And the new motherboards for the AMD XPs at least were going up to 166 (333) along with the SD DDR 2700 (333). What is with this 400 fsb?? Did i miss something while I was taking a leak? I heard something about rambus doing some crazy speeds or something..can someone clarify?

SirRiff

hehe, I know, I'll see if I can shed some light on the subject. FSB is the bus that the RAM and the processors talk on. On most AMD Athlon processors it's either 200 or 266. On the Pentium boards, the FSB is 400 though I think they were going to up it or already have.

ANYWHO. The front side bus is not to be confused with the PCI bus (the bus that your PCI and IDE devices work on) which for AMD athlons is 133 and for Pentiums is 100. I know that AMD upped it's FSB on the NEWEST processors to 333 (don't know if they're out yet) so it could handle the ddr2700 ram (it goes at 333mhz) and in turn has a 166mhz PCI bus. The NEWEST Pentiums have upped their bus speeds too... I think it's at 533 now, and their PCI bus speed is 133. I'm not sure, but what it looks to me is that the clocks have just been upped from the PCI bus to the Memory bus. That's why AMD's which have 133mhz PCI bus have a 266mhz memory bus. THe clock is set to 2x on the memory bus, and the clock for a pentium at 100mhz PCI bus would be set to 4x to achieve 400mhz memory bus. Some one correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's the way it works.

Originally posted by Opus2000:
Asus P4B266 or Asus P4TE..which one is better for you..doesnt matter..either one will get you where you need to go...and get you there really fast too!!!

of course memory...512 or more...

Opus

...and if you choose to go the P4T-E rambus memory route, make sure to only get Samsung 16-chip 256M PC800 modules, a pair for 512MB total or four of them for 1GB total. Those particular Samsung modules are known to overclock rock stable to speeds faster than the rest of the machine can overclock to. Don't get 8-chip rambus memory modules.

Hi, it's Australia Boy again.
Thanks heaps to Opus and Nick Driver for the answers to my questions.
And thanks Nick for telling me i had a panty on my head. Phew!
I wondered why everyone in the office was staring at me....hmmm.
I also followed up some of the ANUS threads and there's plenty to
chew on there. Because the ANUS threads are many and varied
I couldn't pick up all the components that make up an ANUS monster!
I know there are definately must have items for the guts of the machine
but if someone could publish a full list it would be great to have it all
in the one post. Thank-you!

Will do Michael!!
Look for the new post!
Opus