OK I've finally over-taxed my PC

[tioshi]

I just bought a TC works Native Bundle plug-in set, a VST and Direct-X format bundle which I'm using with Cubase VST 3.7. I used a few plug-ins and and the PC is slowing up. I realize that processing and plug-ins tax the Processor (a Celeron running normally at 333) and the drive. The rest of my set-up is 128meg PC100 ram, Maxtor 7200 rpm 20 gig UDMA 33 Hard Drive which my dedicated drive for audio files.

OK now to my questions,I'm planning on upgrading my CPU to either a Pentium 3 600, or Celeron 600. Is there really any benefit with Pentium 3 vs. Celeron? Is there any benefit to using dual processors for audio?

I've read that defragging my hard drive will help performance (yes my 20 gig hard drive is about 1/2 full). Is this a substantial benefit? I've heard that I should back up all my audio files prior to doing this. I was planning on backing up to CD-r's (a lot of them I geuss). I was going to get Norton's Disc Doctor to do the defrag. Will I have to restore my files? Or is that only for precaution?

Please help!

Sincerely needing more power,

Tioshi

 

[JMarcomb]

here I did the dirty work for ya---In summary, the main differences between Celerons and Pentiums are in the areas of bus speed and L2 cache features. Both Pentium-II's and -III's ship with 512kB of secondary (L2) CPU instruction cache. This allows the CPU to store recently used instructions close by and is responsible for much of their high performance.

The Celerons that Intel first introduced as a low-cost CPU alternative (266 & 300MHz versions) were basically just Pentium-II's without any L2 cache at all. This deficiency really punished Celeron performance when compared to competitive AMD and Cyrix chips. In response, subsequent Celeron versions (300A and up) were provided with 128kB of L2 cache. Though only one-quarter the size of the Pentium cache, it was built to run at the full speed of the respective CPU, rather than at half-speed as in the Pentiums. Due to its higher manufacturing cost and technical issues, the larger Pentium cache memory has always been set to run at only half the speed of the CPU itself. For a full-speed L2 in a Pentium design, you need to get into Intel's (much more expensive) Xeon line.

What Intel plays down-- but nearly everyone knows-- is that the full-speed, quarter-size Celeron cache gives them almost the same performance as the half-speed, full-size cache gives Pentiums. Thus you'll find that, for most applications, Celerons rated at the same MHz will equal or better an equivalent Pentium-II, for a much lower price

I bought the Pentium... for compatibilites issues.. you make the call

Defragging should be done monthly, if your removing, moving, or overwriting files on a daily basis. It can increase harddisk performance by 30% in some cases.

Depening on how valuable your music is to you depends on if you should backup before you defrag. There might be a slight risk, but Ive never had any prob. If I was making a $2 million album, I might consider the time backing up my data to Zip or something, but for homerecording -- dont worry about it.

As with Norton ..your wasting your time, you have defrag utilities on your OS.. most of there programs embeds itself into the Pc making it impossible to get ride of the full program...

Jeff

 

[Diragor]

I'd definitely get a PIII over a Celeron just for the bus speed. A Celeron runs on a 66MHz bus (unless you overclock it) but a PIII runs on 100MHz. That difference alone with give you an increase in performance that's well worth the extra money because it affects more that just your CPU speed. My DAW system is very similar to yours, and I'm planning an upgrade too. If you can shell out a few extra bucks, I'd go for a PIII 800, which looks like the sweet spot price-wise. You can get one for well under $200, just look around on Pricewatch. And I don't know how much you've researched the dual processor thing, but if you didn't already know it'll only do you any good if you're running Windows 2000 or Linux. Windows 95/98/ME doesn't support it.