ATHLON 64 system/prices for those wanting a fast daw.

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manning1

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this is primarily for system builders .
i came across some interesting prices on athlon 64 systems.
i dont know these vendors but if your looking for a new pc daw these might be of interest. its up to you to decide if they will be good for you.
1.monarchcomputer.com
2.shuttle small form factor athlon 64. barebones. google for them.
3.in addition various retailers have sempron systems starting at 300 bucks.
sempron 2200 for example. these should do a lot of tracks.
way more than a 24 track 2 inch tape machine for starters.
and i see quite a few 64 systems around 600 bucks.
just trying to help.
 
Thanks for the tip. I'm gonna check it out. I'm really thinking about building something rack-mountable, though. Make it somewhat portable.
 
i believe there ARE racks around you can get. but never really looked,
ive often considered building my own out of wood. nice glazed finish. could look rather nice.
if you can, consider drives with 8mb cache. dma enabled of course.
 
Yeah,

I've seen the rackmount cases. I think most people have them under thier server cases. I just went to NewEgg.com and put together a system for fun, and to see what it would cost me.

Here's what I came up with:
Part Description
Case Rackmount Case $92
CPU Athlon64 3.5G $339
Motherboard Asus A8V Deluxe $120
Power Source 480 Watt Silent Power Source $55
Hard Drive 200 Gig Hard Drive (WD) $106
Memory (2) 512 Chips - $70 each
Video Card GeForce MX440 64MB $56
CD/DVD Burner Lite-On CD/DVD Burner $65

I know I'm leaving some stuff out (like a heat sink/fan for the processor, firewire card, etc.). The whole thing comes in at just under 1000. I think it's a good combo of budget and power. The thing I'm wondering about is how quiet it would be. My current computer is getting older and it sounds like a jet engine (most of the sound coming from the fan on the processor). I've got a couple monitors so I'd probably want to go with a cheaper dual monitor vid. card. I've also got the OS. I also think I would probably be better off with 2 hard drives instead of 1 big one. Maybe a 40 gig for the OS and a 150 gig for the audio files. The power source says "silet" but who knows if it is. It's fun to mess around with play money, and I think I did OK for around a grand.
 
I just upgraded my system to an Athlon64...I got the A64 3000+ chip which i think is down to around 160 on newegg for the retail version...the 3200 is still around 200. This chip is a steal!

It's fast as hell, though if you saw my last post you would know the damn hypertransport doesn't work with my MOTU card...i guess you take the good with the bad. just an excuse to upgrade the soundcard :-)
 
BJW said:
The thing I'm wondering about is how quiet it would be. My current computer is getting older and it sounds like a jet engine (most of the sound coming from the fan on the processor).
Click to expand...

Just so you'll know, one trademark characteristic of rackmount servers and rackmount cases is that they are damned loud. Machines in a rackmount environment generally don't have as much cooling space to work with as desktops. Consequently, they make up for it with a crapload of very fast moving fans. Just a heads up...
 
just a heads up folks. if your going amd64 , ensure you get the new socket 939 i think its called. amd went to this new one recently i believe.
trogdor. i'd be curious how many tracks and plug ins you get.
i bet its amazing. post when you can.
i'm no expert in noise abatement but random surfing the net pulls up all sorts of silencing gizmos.
 
One of the big drawbacks to many of the rackmount cases is the lack of availability as far as slots for holding hard drives etc. When I was looking to go rackmount I had a hard time finding a case that would hold 2 burners, 2 removable hard drives and two internals. Most towers will hold that easily.

Also, my 64 bit system is cruising. It only has 512 megs of RAM, but I have done mixes with 32 trakcs (24/44), 6 aux sends (2 or 3 with high quality convolution reverbs....i.e.... power hogs), 4 busses, and maybe a total of 36 insert plugins + a couple vsti's and a bunch of UAD plugs. A mix like that has been costing me about 60% of my CPU. Also, thats with antivirus still running, firewall still running, Direct CD running, my weather applet running, and an RTA running.
 
what sound card or solution are you
using with that.??
i'm pondering right now whether to upgrade to amd 64 in a tower or maybe one of the new laptops. i was sort of semi retired from engineering
and doing my daw studio thing/songwriting . but maybe i'll do a few more months to buy my amd 64.
frankly i think a lot of people are going to go 64 bit that dont necessarily need it. obviously you do. but for a lot of people that just want to emulate
on their daw an old stephens 2 inch 32 track (remember those ?) ie;
straight multitrack emulation i think the new amd sempron processor with 8mb cache hard drives could be another alternative. but i bet a lot of folks
forget to investigate it. the processor is mighty cheap here, and quite powerfull from what i hear.
 
manning1 said:
just a heads up folks. if your going amd64 , ensure you get the new socket 939 i think its called. amd went to this new one recently i believe.
trogdor. i'd be curious how many tracks and plug ins you get.
Click to expand...


Haven't been able to test much yet, since my MOTU card is out of commission for a while. I'll let you know as soon as i figure something out here with a new soundcard. As far as the socket 939 goes, I went with the slightly less recent socket 754...which is being called "the poor man's 64". The main advantage you gain with the socket 939 is the option of dual channel memory. I'm not sure that theres much more of a performance gain on top of that, aside from being able to upgrade to a more advanced chip later on (i.e. the FX chips, which admittedly are badass, but still in the 700 dollar range), since they will be coming out with 939 chips for longer into the future. the whole 64-bit thing is kind of moot at this point, since windows xp is still only 32bit and wont be able to take advantage of 64bit architecture until longhorn is released. regardless, my 3000+ chip screams for only 150 bucks and im happy :-)
 
trogdor. yeh - i see your thinking. good logic.
what a lot of folks dont realise is that even though win itself is 32 bit,
an application should run much faster on a 64.
for example i'm sure lots of multitrack software developers will or have been getting amd64 purely because their programming code will compile much faster. there are tens of thousands(or much more) lines of code in multitrack applications.
(as an aside if you ever want to learn programming and get your hands dirty for fun or profit try ibasic from pyxia.com. unlike visualbasic from MS
that a lot of programmers use its very easy to learn and you dont have to distribute MS's big run time dll"s. or learn FASM. an assembler compiler.
could be nice for programming some low level audio routines. or try delphi.
some multitrack software i believe is programmed using delphi for speed.)
and with good drives (depending on the way the programmers coded the application) you should notice improvements probably with latency,
track counts,plug ins and even probably simple tasks like the time to mix down to stereo from many single tracks.
from one user of a64 that contacted me just the simple task of noise reducing a track improved markedly.
a few years back i noticed a big change going from sub 1ghz to 1 to 2 ghz processors. on a friends system didnt notice much change going from 1.3 to 2ghz. but above 2ghz i noticed a marked difference again.
you should run diskbench from prorec.com on your system.
it will tell you how many tracks you should get. i bet its some crazy number.
did you get 8 mb cache drives ?
 
xstatic said:
Also, my 64 bit system is cruising. It only has 512 megs of RAM, but I have done mixes with 32 trakcs (24/44), 6 aux sends (2 or 3 with high quality convolution reverbs....i.e.... power hogs), 4 busses, and maybe a total of 36 insert plugins + a couple vsti's and a bunch of UAD plugs. A mix like that has been costing me about 60% of my CPU. Also, thats with antivirus still running, firewall still running, Direct CD running, my weather applet running, and an RTA running.
Click to expand...

Same story.

I upgraded a month ago to a AMD 64 3000+ system with 1GB RAM. It's a screamer.

I run SONAR 3.0.

FOR SONAR users, there is a benchmark test you can run on your machine. Go to the Cakewalk SONAR fourms to download the file.
 
phyl. what sound card solution are you using ?
whats your configuration ? it might help others on here
to configure successfull DAW's.
 
I am using a RME Hammerfall 96/52 in conjunction with a 24 track hard disc recorder. I have the xp3000+ processor, and an MSI KT8 motherboard, with 512 megs of RAM. I am using an ATI 256 meg video card, A PCI Raid card, Thermaltake power supply and case. I am running 1 DVD burner and 1 CD burner, I removable hard drive (160 gig 8mb cache) for programs, 1 of the same for back-ups and portability, and a Mirrored 120 gig RAID array for audio data.
 
manning1 said:
you should run diskbench from prorec.com on your system.
it will tell you how many tracks you should get. i bet its some crazy number.
did you get 8 mb cache drives ?
Click to expand...

Just tried diskbench...it gave me 290 tracks with the biggest block size, and then it kept increasing up to 360 tracks for the smallest block size lol. Not sure if i'll ever need that many, but good to know the horsepower is there if i need it! The 64bit definitely helps even though windows is not...speaking of which, my motherboard came with a "Windows XP 64-bit Beta Version"...has anybody heard of or tried that out yet?

I do indeed have 2 WD 7200 80gig 8mb cache drives, but REALLY want to upgrade to WD 10k raptors at least to run windows off of, since my new motherboard has 4 SATA channels. I hear that if you RAID 0 two raptors WinXP boots in like 4 seconds...

On another note, has anybody tried the Layla3g yet? I'm thinking about selling the MOTU for one of those, or at least a used Layla 24.
 
holy jeepers. shiver me timbers.
it proves what ive been saying to some mac types/friends of mine.
(i feel the macs are like an average woman with some fancy makeup on).
your going to have a helluva fine time with that.
it will do you for years and years. well until quantum computers come out.
how do you find the overall system noise level trogdor ?
peace.
 
Quieter than my last setup which was an Athlon XP 2500+...maybe because I just have the stock AMD fan on the chip instead of a big aftermarket one. I have one case fan for exhaust on the back, a cpu fan, and a small fan on my graphics card since i game every once in a while, and i'd say the noise is pretty average, maybe even a little lower than average.
 
way to go trogdor !!
keep us posted how you get on.
and have lots of FUN !!
 
manning1 said:
phyl. what sound card solution are you using ?
whats your configuration ? it might help others on here
to configure successfull DAW's.
Click to expand...

Oops, should have mentioned I'm using an Aardvark Q10. My computer uses the SiS755 chipset.
 
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I wouldn't place a lot of stock in being able to get a track count over 200. Quite possibly not even over 100. maybe if you had a really long latency and absolutely no plug ins running. However, 36 tracks? Should be smooth sailing.

I would also use EXTREME caution if you put anything of any importance on a raid stripe. Mirroring is a great idea, but striping is really scary. If you have a drive error on a striped drive, you may lose all data on both drives.
 
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