New setup with Home ... need your advice

firubbi · Post by **firubbi** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 7:33 am

hello all,
i want to make another setup for gigasampler and few vsti. so i plan to do a new setup with cramware home and a good pc setup. i want to put lots a sample in there and want quick/fast response. and will rec all tracks to my old 1.4 p4 machine(1gb ram).

So what should be the best machine for running gigasample and few vsti?
does anyone running two machine at a time?
should i go for pci express vga or old pci?
do i need ECC or Non-ECC ram? 2 or 4 gb? is DDR2 is faster than Old RD(i running 1gb for my old machine)
what about sync between 2 machine by midi.. anyone test before?
is xeon 3.0 is faster than todays 3.2 P4? should i go for 2Mb L2 chache?
thanks in advice

#Hard disk- i don't know much about sata..

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: firubbi on 2005-10-19 09:57 ]</font>

Shayne White · Post by **Shayne White** » Wed Oct 19, 2005 3:37 pm

I can answer a few of those questions, but not all.

PCI Express is only good for PCI Express cards. The new protocol is so fast that it eats up legacy PCI performance, resulting in poor performance with Scope and other PCI cards. Apple is not even including PCI in their new PowerMacs because they've moved onto PCI Express. So to run Scope, you should get an AGP system.

In my studio I have a PowerMac that I have hooked up to my Scope PC via MIDI and ADAT. It works great.

Any modern memory setup should work fine. I still don't know what ECC is, though. Some kind of memory checking system I think.

SATA is supposed to be a lot faster than PATA. I've never used it though.

Have fun building your new system!

Shayne

AndreD · Post by **AndreD** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 12:03 am

On 2005-10-19 16:37, Shayne White wrote:
I can answer a few of those questions, but not all.

PCI Express is only good for PCI Express cards. The new protocol is so fast that it eats up legacy PCI performance, resulting in poor performance with Scope and other PCI cards.

You must be really sure

To be honest, the opposite seems to be the truth.
There are a lot of "old" mainboards with a "PCI to AGP-Bridge", that´kills PCI-performance.
We had the best test-result with ASUS P5 AD2 E Premium.
(PCI and Native-Performance/Nuendo 3.1/SX 3.1)

<font size=-1>[ This Message was edited by: AndreD on 2005-10-20 01:51 ]</font>

symbiote · Post by **symbiote** » Thu Oct 20, 2005 4:21 am

ECC RAM is error-correcting memory (hence the name, which stands for "error correcting codes.") It's slower than Non-ECC RAM performance wise, but it's more reliable. It's mostly aimed at servers that have to stay up for months and deal with multi-gigabytes/second throughputs. For desktop/audio use, Non-ECC RAM is fine, and will actually be faster.

If you plan on using lots of samples, the more memory the better. It should have good throughput also if you plan to playback lots of samples at the same time.

I think Windows XP might have a per-process memory limitation of 2Gb, but I'm pretty sure it's possible to set it higher by some registery-munging.) Being a 32-bit OS I don't think it'll handle more than 4Gb of RAM anyway.

I've upgraded from IDE to SATA drives lately, and can't say I noticed a drastic differences performance-wise (can't say I made really precise measurements either tho.) This being said, the SATA drives have been performing really nicely and handled all the stuff I've thrown at them (i.e. recording 32 channels of 24/96, which I had never tried with IDE, etc.) Plus, the connectors (between the motherboard and harddrive) are *SO MUCH NICER* than those stupid huge bulky horror-inducing IDE cables/connectors (even the rounded ones, that hideous 80-pin connector had to die anyway.) I love them (they are Seagate Barracuda IV 7200 160gb and 200gb, really silent too) and am never going back to IDE, so I'd say go for it.

Xeon is probably faster than the P4 because of the bigger cache, but they're both slower than Opterons =P. You should be able to find some proper benchmarks by Googling around a bit. Also the Xeons will probably sink more power than the P4, so they most likely will get hotter and will need more efficient cooling (i.e. bigger and noisier fans.)

firubbi · Post by **firubbi** » Wed Nov 02, 2005 10:01 pm

Andre i didn't find Asus P5AD2-E Premium Motherboard in my local market. anyway can you tell me your whole setup in detail...
MOBO- Asus P5AD2-E Premium Motherboard
CPU- ? including part number.
video card - is it asus too?
Ram-?
power-?
thanks
** another mobo i liked is: Intel D955XBK Motherboard. its the same as Asus P5AD2-E Premium but that also Support SATA2.
check this:
http://geek.pricegrabber.com/search_tec ... id=9154018

firubbi · Post by **firubbi** » Sun Nov 20, 2005 6:58 am

http://www.asus.com/products3.aspx?l1=2 ... eon%20X600

Whats the prob with "Native PCI Express".. does it gonna use my Ram? i mean it don't has its own ram. what could be a good video card for mobo asus Asus P5AD2E Deluxe( its the only good mobo that i got here in our country)
thanks

ScofieldKid · Post by **ScofieldKid** » Sun Nov 20, 2005 9:11 pm

Check out the systems on the website at ADK Pro Audio http://www.adkproaudio.com/

Those guys have done a lot of testing of performance related to RME interfaces. You can get a pretty good idea of platform capability there. And you can see which paltforms they have seen as problematic as well.