Building new dedicated DAW. Are my specs ok?

  • Thread starter Thread starter LemonTree
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Bulls Hit said:
James is there any particular reason for getting the new BIOS?
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Yeah, James, howcum?

I'm running the same MoBo and have not upgraded the BIOS. What does it fix?
 
You need the new BIOS because there are certain hardware that won't be recognized properly.

I had an issue with some hardware that wasn't working right (don't recall specifics, too long ago), but it was fine after I d/l and flashed the BIOS.
 
RAID can make a small difference but it certainly doesn't double the speed. I would advise against them for music anyway, because if one drive goes you lose the lot ... not great if your income relies on the contents of that drive!
 
sounds legit, i suppose the harddrive would be your slowest factor, unless you have a real slow front side bus, so mabe go for the "skuzi" hd (scsi) and get 15,000 rpm (if you can afford it), btw does anyone know how many megabytes per sec that a scsi drive is? (versus the 150 mbps in most sata drives)
 
There are a few different SCSI standards, I'm not sure what the various numbers are off the top of my head. But the figures are usually bull anyway - there's no way you'll ever get 133mbps from a single IDE drive, in fact it's very very rare it even bursts above 33! Much more depends on the physical speed of the drive, i.e. its response time, and then maybe the cache on it.
 
The RAID you guys are talking about is only one kind of RAID, RAID 0. There's also RAID 1 which is mirrored redundancy.

It'll make it slower though, if anything. Certainly not faster.
 
Ok thanks, the responce has been great...even the asda/wallmart bit ;)

Anyone using the P4P800 or Deluxe...what brand memory are you using?

I read somewhere the P4 3Ghz fans are quite noisy, can anyone recomend a good silent one?

What about a DVD writer? Most of my song projects are 18-22 tracks and I've been recording as 16/44.1 I want to move up to 24/48 now so a whole song project won't be able to be stored on a CDR. Any recomendations?

Thanks all for your input

Alec
 
Polaris20 said:
So what is the excuse for the Prescotts, which run hotter and are even less efficient that the Canterwoods?
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Huh? The Canterwood refers to the 875 chipset, nothing to do with the cpu.

The Prescott is just a P4 with more on-chip cache.


I use the Hynix D43 ram on my mobo. I can't really say how good or bad it is, as I've nothing to compare it with. It was on the Asus recommended list
 
mpthreer said:
sounds legit, i suppose the harddrive would be your slowest factor, unless you have a real slow front side bus, so mabe go for the "skuzi" hd (scsi) and get 15,000 rpm (if you can afford it), btw does anyone know how many megabytes per sec that a scsi drive is? (versus the 150 mbps in most sata drives)
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  • The hard drive is hardly ever your slowest factor.
  • Why do I get the feeling you wouldn't know a front side bus from a greyhound bus? :-)
  • There is no such thing as a "150 mbps" sata drive, although there is a 150 MBps SATA bus.
To repeat one of the more astute posters in this thread, RAID 0 is a very bad idea because it doubles your risk of a hard drive failure, and if either hard drive fails you lose 100% of your data.

A WD Raptor will be at least as fast at sequential transfers as an enterprise-class SCSI drive. And for desktop use will probably be faster at the things that matter.
 
rfarris thanks for showing us your ability to use vocaublary, who cares and the only relevant thing youve said to this guys issues is that you might lose all your data, and thats already been said.... anyways wtf am i even wasting my time lol, later

ps- but his raptor idea might be a good one, you can get it on newegg for 200 bucks, but they only have a seventy five gig one on there (approx.) which is why i was thinkin it might work better with a raid (for a total of 150 gigs), but then again like i said ive never used a raid, so your better off listening to thoes guys hehe :)
 
hey man im just the drummer!! ~lol

hey man please let me know what good raids are then?
mabe more efficient with a dual processor system?
hell im just looking to learn :)
 
The best one (or most useful IMO) is mirroring - simultaneously writing to two drives. You get a full backup of everything you do, instantaneously. Of course, if you want to roll back or get rid of a virus you then have to do it twice ....

I think the most sensible routine is that of a regular hard disk backup to a drive not connected or enabled in the BIOS the rest of the time. Don't back up to CDs though ... they only last a few years!!

Hey, I'm a drummer too, and now a geek! Damn, that's versatility right there.
 
hehe makes sense, so if you mirror, then hard drive failure would be already planned for (raid one)..... that is an obvoius advantage for business situations, ok now for raid 0..... what is the advantage?
 
A slight potential increase in data throughput, because you have the bandwidth (in theory) of two drives (depending on how they're connected anyway). I think it's a bit of a fraud though, it barely improves speed and certainly doubles your chances of complete data loss.
 
sad to hear hehe, i wish the theory was true, so indeed the bottleneck is in the so called "fsb" ( i have to watch which terms i use now with rfarris around haha :) i wish a processor that could execute two threads (or a dual processor system) using the right operating system could adequatly use both of their busses (400 mhz x 2 lets say) simotaniously and each write to a seperate hard disk creating a write time of half of what it would be, damn you microsoft get on the #%$Kin ball hahah :D
 
Hmmm, I'm not sure the FSB is a bottleneck ... although a higher clockrate seems to make some difference ... for I would guess that your processor is still the slowest thing a lot of the time, but only because of the inefficiencies of the software it has to run :)
 
i have been drinking a lot, but (lol) if you can overclock the fsb and get better results it seems that the fsb would be where the bottleneck (strain on dataflow) is created....
allthough that would overclock the processor as well on most motherboards, it seems if the processor was the bottle neck you could just up the multiple of what the cpu runs, instead of the fsb clockrate, and you would get better results.................
hell im just brainstorming, it sure is fun though haha - :) peace
 
Bulls Hit said:
Huh? The Canterwood refers to the 875 chipset, nothing to do with the cpu.

The Prescott is just a P4 with more on-chip cache.


I use the Hynix D43 ram on my mobo. I can't really say how good or bad it is, as I've nothing to compare it with. It was on the Asus recommended list
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Sorry, whatever the "C" series was called then. The Prescott is not just a P4 with more cache. Some still have only 512KB L2, some have the 1MB L2, and they all have a longer pipeline (longer instruction set) therefore making them less efficient and slower than the "C" series P4's.
 
apparently there is a chart at cakewalk i'm told showing that amd dual opterons processors are blowing everything else away.
including macs. just for everyones interest.
imho as a computer engineer i wouldnt touch raid. i believe the more complexities one brings to the table the more possibilty of problems.
i used to see this on mainframes years ago that we worked on.
people pushing for more untill it breaks down.
my advice - keep it simple. an amd barton system will do 60 tracks.
easy. who needs more ? want back up ? - just put an extra 70 dollar drive into a pc and copy the song folder across from the working drive.
nice and simple. thats what i do.
 
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