best bang for buck DAW?

  • Thread starter Thread starter travelin travis
  • Start date Start date
T

travelin travis

New member
what would you consider to be the "current best bang for the buck" cpu, mobo, ram combo for daw use? overclocking included.
 
!/$ (bang per buck)

Whatever is the most bang per buck for normal computers, really. :)

I'm using a computer that by now is three years old, not specially made for DAW, and I am hard pressed to use up anything more than a couple of percentages of CPU, and the harddisk is full of episodes of South Park, Time Team and Monthy Python, while the songs I have recorded barely register. ;)

I'd say the most important part is to make sure it's dead silent.
 
hard pressed to use a small percentage of your cpu? i definately want to know what you're running :D .

anyone think high system bandwidth improves daw performance?
 
TravisinFlorida said:
hard pressed to use a small percentage of your cpu? i definately want to know what you're running :D .
Well, first of all I run external reverbs. :D Second of all I run a AMD Athlon 2400+, some bog standard ASUS motherboard, don't remember what graphics card I have, a measly 512 MB of memory (I need more) and an M-Audio 1010LT soundcard.

Some 5-7 tracks of audio, with maybe a compressor or two, and maybe 4 tracks of MIDI typically ticks well below 10% CPU load.

Reverb takes more processor power of course. And so does soft-synths, but those you can render to audio tracks to save processing power if you need to.

I'm sure that you can improve performance in various ways, and there are other threads for that, but for !/$ any standard lower midrange cheap system it most likly the way to go. Performance improvements are expensive.
 
regebro said:
Well, first of all I run external reverbs. :D Second of all I run a AMD Athlon 2400+, some bog standard ASUS motherboard, don't remember what graphics card I have, a measly 512 MB of memory (I need more) and an M-Audio 1010LT soundcard.

Some 5-7 tracks of audio, with maybe a compressor or two, and maybe 4 tracks of MIDI typically ticks well below 10% CPU load.

Reverb takes more processor power of course. And so does soft-synths, but those you can render to audio tracks to save processing power if you need to.

I'm sure that you can improve performance in various ways, and there are other threads for that, but for !/$ any standard lower midrange cheap system it most likly the way to go. Performance improvements are expensive.

Sounds about like My setup, 2400 overclocked to 2700, 1010, 1gig ram,
It will do fine when mixing audio tracks (24 is the most I've done, could do more,, with a pretty good dose of wave plug-ins) but if your going to be recording a lot of tracks with low latancy or using some of the more powerfull soft synths you might want to go for the most power you can get, I know I want to upgrade as soon as possible.
 
my machine seems to get the job done. bfd scarfs down alot of cpu and ram though. something I can't figure out though is how those little stand alone multitrack recorders can handle so many simultaneous audio tracks and effects at once. from what i understand, most of those boxes don't have impressive hardware compared to the average desktop pc.
 
Back
Top