Intel vs. Amd for beginner DAW?

Rstiltskin said:
You can see the amd and intel almost tied in two apps, the amd about 30% ahead in the gameing ap, and the intel way, way, way, way, way, way, way ahead in the video compression ap. Which, in my experience, would indicate a bug in the amd processor or the chipset, or the bios. It is probably a minor thing, that could take the software vendor (divx) a day, a month, or a year to fix. Once they stop blaming each other. The motherboards are almost the same, the ram, drives, operating system, cases, etc are all the same. the processors bencmark very close to one another, so why is the amd so way behind in this one ap?

Does the opteron only run on one third party chipset? does it matter? are they all equally compatible?

If you chose a recording application and a sound card, go to those vendors and ask for a mb/ ram/ processor reccomendation you will have the best chance at compatability.

In my opinion any other advice is irresponsible, because all you are saying is what has worked for you in the past, and will PROBABLY work for him. But unless we know the soundcard and the recording ap, its just prejudice. Informed prejiduce, maybe, but prejiduce.....don't bother to flame me cause this is my last post to this thread, I know some of you will be pleased.

No, you are correct. But I still don't see how calling up the monkeys at Steinberg or M-Audio and getting their slightly more informed, prejudiced opinion is any better....
 
Quagmire02 said:
No, you are correct. But I still don't see how calling up the monkeys at Steinberg or M-Audio and getting their slightly more informed, prejudiced opinion is any better....

If they are even as informed.
 
Rstiltskin said:
why don't your go over to www.tomshardware.com...
The article you are referring to compares two specific very advanced CPUs - each priced at over $1K. The results are not relevant to the class of processors being considered in this thread. Especially since they're dual core - a new technology which is not used in the kinds of CPUs we're discussing here.

Once again, I recommend the Opteron over the Athlon64. The Opteron is a robust CPU intended for servers. Tom's published a benchmark in 2003 showing Opterons to be superior to Xeons in server applications.

Performance does matter. DAW applications stress all aspects of a system from CPU to disk I/O - much like a heavily loaded server. I don't agree that gaming requires a tougher system. The only area where gaming requires more than DAW is graphics - so save on the video card if you're not interested in gaming.
I'm sure you can max it out by running every plugin in the world, but at that point neither processor is going to help.
Working at 96KHz, it actually maxes out pretty fast. 6 channels of audio with standard Waves EQ and compression, and 2 good reverbs and a delay on the aux channels pretty much loads it up.

As PCs get faster, plugins just get more demanding (and better sounding). There's still plenty of room for improvement. I'm sure in a couple years my dual opteron will seem totally inadequate.
 
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bdemenil said:
Once again, I recommend the Opteron over the Athlon64.
Why?


The message you have entered is too short. Please lengthen your message to at least 10 characters.
 
bdemenil said:
MAudio??? LOL

I don't know if Steinberg or MAudio tech support know anything or not. I was simply refering to the average lack of technical expertise in tech support personell. And really the level of understanding necissary to answer the question, "What processor and bus work best with X," is rather beyond most tech support anywhere. The programmers and designers *might* know but the tech support crew is almost guaranteed not to.
 
Rstiltskin said:
In my opinion any other advice is irresponsible, because all you are saying is what has worked for you in the past, and will PROBABLY work for him. But unless we know the soundcard and the recording ap, its just prejudice. Informed prejiduce, maybe, but prejiduce.....don't bother to flame me cause this is my last post to this thread, I know some of you will be pleased.

It's like the horses. If he's won before, I might back him again. In the end it's all probabilities. If 9 out of 11 people say Asus, get an Asus
 
bdemenil said:
Working at 96KHz, it actually maxes out pretty fast. 6 channels of audio with standard Waves EQ and compression, and 2 good reverbs and a delay on the aux channels pretty much loads it up.

As PCs get faster, plugins just get more demanding (and better sounding). There's still plenty of room for improvement. I'm sure in a couple years my dual opteron will seem totally inadequate.


Like I said, at that point it wont matter if you have the AMD or the Intel, in this guy's case. If your AMD dual ops are maxing out with that, then this guy who is deciding between a A64 3000+ and a P4 3.0 ghz will not recieve any addition benefits from either if they are overcapacitated with processes.

Like I said, I don't know because I am in the same boat as him. I record amateur demos of myself that sound really good for what I have, and I have never even stressed my A64 3000+ running Cubase SX with a few plugins, as well as FLStudio5.
 
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