Ok update on the audio card question.

Card chosen = SB Audigy RX - 100% natively supported. Please note this card has an optical io port that is ON by default when first installed. Turn it off to activate the 1/8 jacks. Otherwise there will be no signal out or in (no audio/mic/ or linein).

The sound quality is as good as the card it replaced which is now in Gary's (brother from another mother) computer. He's having fun. Sadly, the RX, doesn't have a break out box like the Platinum does, so I have to make one. No biggy, 3 wires in a project box.

According to the headaches I gave out freely at Creative Labs and a variety of other source. Any emu10kx chip is native on linux and, infact, has better support than mac and windows. Yeeeah for us.

So.. solved, concluded, moving on (if anyone has any question please feel free to ask).

Next...

As I said I'm rebuilding me 20 year old machine.

Here's a basics parts list.

Asus Prime x299-a 2 (great bloody board)

32G Corsair RAM (32K I think)

Intel Core i9-10980XE Cascade Lake 3.0 GHz LGA 2066

The computer has 7 hard drives, 1 BR optical drive (the board has 8 sata ports).

1 Seagate (sg) 500g ssd root / boot drive (sda)

1 sg 2tb ssd home (sdb)

5 (ssd & spin drives) are work drives and archives for redudant backups.

Then there are 2 hotswap bays with can hold 2 drives a piece on an addon pci-e sata controller.

The board uses uefi. So, I'd like some advice on the sda drive setup.

Here's what I was going for essentially.

Swap = 32G (I know it seems like overkill but lots of 4k video work so it helps plus need to hibernate).

ESP partition of vfat32 / XX mbs. There's the first question, how big should it be? Test install is using 32mb. No other OSes will be installed.

The remaining space will be used for / and all the software.

sda1 = swap - 32g

sda2 = esp - xx size

sda3 = / - remaining space

Second question, partition order. Good or are there better arrangements.

sb1 /home (in case anyone needs to know).

All input is welcomed.

As always, thank you again collective,

Kate