New Computer!! ...good for recording??

F

fretwire3d

New member
I'm upgrading from a worthless piece of crap. And i'm about ready to order...

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8-SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

pqi TURBO 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory

AOpen GF6200TC DV64 Geforce 6200TC Supporting 256MB* 64-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

This is a 2.2ghz 64 bit processor... so does that mean that it equivalent to a 4.4 ghz 32bit processor?
The motherboard has 2 PCI express slots...will that make my delta 66 run better?
Is this a good combo for recording with nuendo?

thanks!
nathan
 
fretwire3d said:
I'm upgrading from a worthless piece of crap. And i'm about ready to order...

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8-SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

pqi TURBO 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory

AOpen GF6200TC DV64 Geforce 6200TC Supporting 256MB* 64-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

This is a 2.2ghz 64 bit processor... so does that mean that it equivalent to a 4.4 ghz 32bit processor?
The motherboard has 2 PCI express slots...will that make my delta 66 run better?
Is this a good combo for recording with nuendo?

thanks!
nathan
Click to expand...

That board is the worst audio board available. Not because of compatibility, but because it'll be louder than a freight train.

Your 2.2ghz 64bit does not mean it will run like a 4400+ 32bit. Don't worry though, it's more than fast enough. The Delta 66 is not compatible with PCI-E. Use the regular PCI slots.
 
fretwire3d said:
It's a pretty kick ass board. One of the best on the market. i think i'll just keep it away from the mics.
Click to expand...

I guess you're a gamer then, but it serves little purpose in the audio realm. But it'll work.
 
rumorzzzzzzzz.........

fretwire3d said:
I'm upgrading from a worthless piece of crap. And i'm about ready to order...

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 1GHz FSB 512KB L2 Cache Socket 939 Processor

ABIT Fatal1ty AN8-SLI Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard

pqi TURBO 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM Unbuffered DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel Kit System Memory

AOpen GF6200TC DV64 Geforce 6200TC Supporting 256MB* 64-bit DDR PCI Express x16 Video Card

This is a 2.2ghz 64 bit processor... so does that mean that it equivalent to a 4.4 ghz 32bit processor?
The motherboard has 2 PCI express slots...will that make my delta 66 run better?
Is this a good combo for recording with nuendo?

thanks!
nathan
Click to expand...


I am thinking that abit discontinued one of the fatality boards (if they have more than one)? check over at www.tomshardware.com , I think they tested this with a bunch of other amd64 boards.

also, can it be upgraded to the dual core amd 64's that are just starting to hit the market? or does it take a 940 pin socket?

the sli means scan line interface, meaning you can get two video cards (must use nvidia chipset and be made for it) and put them in the pcix video slots, then link them together with a little jumper board along the top to get almost double the frame rates on games. that is two video cards powering one monitor, each card doing every other scanline on the screen.

HOWEVER.....would you reather have 5% lower frame rates but a more stable system? if you are in the middle of a game and have to reboot you will be pissed, if your system locks up in the middle of that once in a lifetime take, you will be majorly bummed.

I also suggest a video card that lets you power two monitors, for extra screen real estate, like plugins on one and mixer and tracks on the other.

once you try a dual monitor system for work, you will never go back.

amd processors get more work done (generally) in one clock cycle than intel does, so you can't really compare gigahertz to gigahertz. rest assured, the amd64 you are looking at will do fine, but dual core is the upgrade path, and I would be sure my mb will take it.

i have had 2 abit motherboards, and will only use asus for work. here again, check www.tomshardware.com

for audio, i reccommend dual monitors and raid zero for the data. bare in mind a lot of motherboards get finicky above 1 gig of ram, the mb's and os's and aplication programs are usually developed on systems with 1gig or less, and sometimes bugs don't show up till you get more ram out in the real world.

the cheapest time to buy is now, rather then get what 'will do' now and have to upgrade later.

find out how long you have to get this together and find out if anything is doa? if it sits around you house for a month till you get to it, you may not be able to return anything, and check for a 'restocking fee' gotcha.

IMO, YMMV
 
I decided to save some money and order a mother board with one pci-e slot since my soundcard doesn't use it. anyway it's a

ABIT AN8-ULTRA Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

I don't have enough money for the convienience of two monitors. so i'm going to skip that suggestion.

Whats the advantage of RAID zero? I think this system will support it.
 
what about dual core chip upgrade path?...

fretwire3d said:
I decided to save some money and order a mother board with one pci-e slot since my soundcard doesn't use it. anyway it's a

ABIT AN8-ULTRA Socket 939 NVIDIA nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Motherboard

I don't have enough money for the convienience of two monitors. so i'm going to skip that suggestion.

Whats the advantage of RAID zero? I think this system will support it.
Click to expand...


for an optimum setup with raid, you want one 80 to 200 gig 7200 rpm system drive, then two identical fast drives set up in a raid 0 configuration. you would have your system software on the first drive, then stream your data on and off your raid array. what this does is give you the max number of tracks on record or playback.

how it does this is by alternating drives for each sector of your data. you start to read or write to the first sector of your first drive in the array, and before it even completes, you can move on to the next sector which is on the second drive in the array. you can increase the read and write rate from 50 to 100 percent, meaning more tracks, or less processor overhead on data writing and more for plugins. it does mean three disks, however, and that may be over your budget. I would strongly reccomend at least two, one for your os and aplication programs, and one for your data. that is what most people have, and it works fine for them. raid 0 is better, but not required.

let me know if any of this helps, or not, even.
 
Also keep in mind that RAID 0 is less reliable than a single drive. If either drive crashes, you've lost all your data. Make sure you have a way of backing things up if you do this.
 
Something I don't really get is that over here nobody seems to have trouble with the nforce4 chipset. At other forums (fora?) there is a lot of noise about problems at high audio loads. they seem rather prone to have pops and clicks. Even rme warns about it on their website.

I would have added a reference to several threads on the sound-on-sound forum, but that seems to have serious problems these days.

Do some here have good experiences with it?
 
I think he is right......

HangDawg said:
Ummmm think about what you just said. :rolleyes: :confused:
Click to expand...

the data is striped alternatly. there is no way to rebuild a dual drive raid 0 if one of the two fails. That is why you would store the data on your system drive, or burn it to cd or dvd, and just use the raid array for work, when you need the throughput that raid 0 DOES provide. of course with 4 drives you can mirror and stripe, or with three you can have striping with rebuild info on a parity+ 3rd drive.

the reason you are not hearing anything about chipset problems is that most people over here belive what they belive, that amd is better, all glue chipsets are equal, and people like me that generally advise against bleeding edge tech have there head handed to them. I have tried to steer people to www.videoguys.com and www.tomshardware.com buy most folks think I have it out for amd and am a intel robot.
 
HangDawg said:
Ummmm think about what you just said. :rolleyes: :confused:
Click to expand...

OK, I'll go ahead and do that. RAID 0 shouldn't even be called RAID, because it's not redundant. The data is striped across two drives, and that's why it is fast. But if you lose one drive, ALL of your data is lost, because you can't salvage a partial RAID 0 array.

If you want striping and mirroring, you need RAID 5, not 0.

So I'll go ahead and roll my eyes now :rolleyes:
 
If you want striping and mirroring, you need RAID 5, not 0.
Click to expand...

Raid 0 is striping. http://www.real-storage.com/raid-level.html

the reason you are not hearing anything about chipset problems is that most people over here belive what they belive, that amd is better, all glue chipsets are equal,
Click to expand...

Don't really follow this reasoning. I can only say that I have read quite a lot of people complaining about audio performance with nforce4 chipsets. Read yourself:
http://www.rme-audio.de/techinfo/nforce4_tests.htm
 
Polaris20 said:
Also keep in mind that RAID 0 is less reliable than a single drive. If either drive crashes, you've lost all your data. Make sure you have a way of backing things up if you do this.
Click to expand...


I guess you still don't see the error of your statement. A single drive is no more reliable than a raid 0 array because both will be screwed if a single drive fails. That's what I was getting at.
 
Hey guys, I'm looking at a new compaq with a 1.72 AMD Turion 64, Gig of ram, 60 gig 4200rpg hard drive (I'v got a 160 gig external as well), cd/rw-dvd, firewire, and widescreen. I'm running a Firepod with Cubase. Should this be enough power to allow me to record effectively? Thanks guys!

Ryan
 
HangDawg said:
I guess you still don't see the error of your statement. A single drive is no more reliable than a raid 0 array because both will be screwed if a single drive fails. That's what I was getting at.
Click to expand...

I guess you still don't understand basic math. 2 drives striped is less reliable, because having a second mechanical device sharing data with another device makes the odds of failure twice as high.

1 drive has data. You add another drive that effectively shares that data via striping. You're adding another device to worry about failure, instead of just one. This increases odds of failure over a single drive.

Apple.com said:
RAID 0: Striping. RAID 0 distributes data evenly in horizontal stripes across an array of drives. While RAID 0 offers substantial speed enhancements, it provides no data protection: If one drive fails, all data is lost and all drives must be reformatted.
Click to expand...

http://data-recovery.lsoft.net/concept_raid.html
Data Recovery Concepts said:
RAID 0 (Stripe)

Used for speed and size: two or more hard disk drives are connected in such a way that all information is divided into logical blocks and saved on different hard disk drives simultaneously. This provides the ability to save and load the data much faster. In some cases the resulting speed can be the sum of all the hard disk drives speeds. The total size of this RAID is the size of the smallest hard disk drive multiplied by the number of the hard disk drives. A benefit of this RAID type is larger size and faster speed. A deficiency with this RAID type is that if one hard disk drive becomes damaged then you loose information on all the hard disk drives connected to this RAID.
Click to expand...

http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index2.html
Digt-life.com said:
RAID 0 (Parallel discs)

This strategy is aimed at performance increase. Some discs store the disc structures, which are collected in one part only when all discs are available.

The simple realization of RAID 0 (two discs): each first sector of the volume is situated on the physical disc A, and each second one is on the disc B. The speed of reading/writing increases proportionally the number of discs.

* The performance of operations with the data depends on whether disc is free and whether it's ready to fulfill your requirements. I.e., RAID 0 includes 2 discs. The first disc is occupied, there comes a new command; the probability of our applying to the free disc constitutes 50%. This corresponds to the performance increase in 1.5 times.
* The sequential operations (reading/writing) is N times faster than on a separate physical disc (N is the number of discs). It is so, because the probability, that the next operation gets on the free disc, constitutes 100%.

RAID 0 tremendously increases the performance of the linear operations and random data with the number of discs increasing. For an effective work with disc system there required a multitask mode of one or several controllers. Bus-Mastering driver is a mandatory requirement for working with IDE interface. Windows 2000 includes these drivers. NT4 might have needed additional drivers.

RAID 0 reliability is quite low. A fatal failure of one disc will lead to another failure. The more discs you are using, the higher is the probability of any disc failure.
Click to expand...

I don't know how else to explain it to you. The reason I sound snotty and irritated, is that in your initial post you were rude to me, yet provided nothing to back up your statement.

Have you ever seen a hard drive fail? I have. A ton of them. Can I retrieve data off of a single hard drive, after it's crashed. Sometimes, and it takes all day in some cases (bad sectors, etc.)

Can I retrieve data off of a RAID 0 array with one crashed drive using the same tools? Nope. Some disk specialists can, but most home recording enthusiasts don't want to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to do that when they could have bought an external FW HD for a couple hundred and backed up their data there.

So here's something to back up my statement, besides just my experience with it.

Again, RAID 0 is fine......so long as you have a rigid back up routine that you follow.
 
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rcarden2 said:
Hey guys, I'm looking at a new compaq with a 1.72 AMD Turion 64, Gig of ram, 60 gig 4200rpg hard drive (I'v got a 160 gig external as well), cd/rw-dvd, firewire, and widescreen. I'm running a Firepod with Cubase. Should this be enough power to allow me to record effectively? Thanks guys!

Ryan
Click to expand...

I would be cautious of using ATI chipsets for Presonus gear. Their website states issues with a previous ATI chipset. You might want to contact Presonus first, and ask about the 200M chipset being used in the Compaq.
 
Polaris20 said:
I guess you still don't understand basic math. 2 drives striped is less reliable, because having a second mechanical device sharing data with another device makes the odds of failure twice as high.

1 drive has data. You add another drive that effectively shares that data via striping. You're adding another device to worry about failure, instead of just one. This increases odds of failure over a single drive.



http://data-recovery.lsoft.net/concept_raid.html


http://www.digit-life.com/articles/ntfs/index2.html


I don't know how else to explain it to you. The reason I sound snotty and irritated, is that in your initial post you were rude to me, yet provided nothing to back up your statement.

Have you ever seen a hard drive fail? I have. A ton of them. Can I retrieve data off of a single hard drive, after it's crashed. Sometimes, and it takes all day in some cases (bad sectors, etc.)

Can I retrieve data off of a RAID 0 array with one crashed drive using the same tools? Nope. Some disk specialists can, but most home recording enthusiasts don't want to spend hundreds to thousands of dollars to do that when they could have bought an external FW HD for a couple hundred and backed up their data there.

So here's something to back up my statement, besides just my experience with it.

Again, RAID 0 is fine......so long as you have a rigid back up routine that you follow.
Click to expand...



Being that you brought probability into it, you are correct. Never thought of it that way.
 
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