calling all geeks! (computer shopping)

[plonkersaurus]

Cooler and less noise if of course great, but I don't feel that Pent. M would provide super processing power for a DAW. There are effective and "virtually" silent cooling solutions by Zalman (to name one) and many others. I'm using an Athlon XP3000+ with a Barton core and a cool wide spread fin heat sink with a really quiet, varible speed fan for cooling. I've had zero problems and although the processor isn't running at 10c, it does it for me at about 40-45c.

I thought audio processing is something the Pentium M is very good at, seems that way in benchmarks ive seen anyway. Its also more powerful than the A64 at the same clock speed. You are paying a premium for it using 28 watts instead of around 90W, but i think its worth it in a DAW?

Also its all well the processor fan being quiet, but with more drain from the processor, it would also ask for more from the power supply, making that heat up and causing another heat issue and therefore noise issue.

But if we ignore the heat issue, then surely the processor to get would be a pentium 4 as it has hyperthreading which almost guarantees it wont be freezing up etc like a straight single processor would. obviously beyond this there is the dual cores, but they eat power and arent cheap.

Most modern day graphics card support dual monitors. Just get a passive one as alot of the newer graphics cards have noisy fans

 

[JazzMang]

I thought audio processing is something the Pentium M is very good at, seems that way in benchmarks ive seen anyway. Its also more powerful than the A64 at the same clock speed. You are paying a premium for it using 28 watts instead of around 90W, but i think its worth it in a DAW?

I would like to point out that a similarly clocked A64 and Pentium M have several hundred dollars between them. The pentium M is a poor multimedia CPU due to its short pipeline that is not optimized for multimedia, only for efficient work cycles and long battery life (or low power consumption on the desktop). This makes it ideal for laptops where long battery life is needed, but laptops that are geared towards multimedia/gaming/productivity rarely feature low clock speed Pentium Ms. They either go all the way with a 2.1+ GHz Pentium M (mucho expensivo), a full fledged P4 (read: room heater), or an Athlon 64.