Computer guts 2

[Steve Tittle]

Well I did it and it didn't take long, tried to give advice and exhausted my knowledge in a hurry.

Building a computer from the ground up and need some advice from the guru's lurking around the corner.

To start with this is where I'm at:
ATX mid tower with 3-5 1/4" externals, 2- 3 1/2" external, and 3-3 1/2" internal bays.

Dual P 2 motherboard up to 300 mhz processors
onboard SCSI and the usual IDE connections you probably know the rest.

128 sdram installed so far along with a floppy installed just for good measure.

I understand win 2000 and nt 4 support dual procs but I would like some other thoughts as far as hardware and software that will keep me on the right path (I like to wander too many foreign substances in my youth I think).

I am all ears!!

 

[Emeric]

Why do you want dual processors, building a server or a recording machine?

 

[Steve Tittle]

Good point. I bought it more for the overall features than for the dual procs. No it won't be a server just used to finish off recordings. That's why I posted to keep myself outa trouble. Thanks

 

[Emeric]

I guess more info as to what your doing might help.

The question is, what do you want to do with this setup?

What is the goal?

[This message has been edited by Emeric (edited 02-08-2000).]

 

[Steve Tittle]

What I'm going to do is record digitally on an FD-8 dump it and possibly re-mix if need be. Burn my own cd's then probably see from there. I know it's a little foggy but alot depends on how the projects turn out. I'm really new at the net and as I go along my goals will be more well defined. I see the potential of the net but my approach to it is? I would like to try to make it as professional running as I can and be able to run as many apps as it will allow. As my wife says: only buy what you're going to buy once but I do want to be as flexible as I can to stay with technology as long as I can. Now I've started to ramble more when I can be more direct to the point.

 

[Steve Tittle]

Emeric

Like I said before I will be starting out with NT and would some ideas as far as quality hardware and software that are compatable with it.

Steve

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Yes NT and 2000 will take advantage of multiple processors. Win2000 especially.

I've read some remarks from people running dual Celeron processors and having wonderful results in recording and other multimedia applications. Hell, a PIII 300 processor isn't going to run ya more than 60 bucks so you might as well stick two in there and have some fun Also see how fast the board can go with Celerons. Even if it doesn't say "Celeron" in the manual, there will probably be an update (flash upgrade perhaps) at the manufacturer's website. You have an LX board meaning it's only going to manage a 66Mhz bus which means you can only add a PII up to 300Mhz...but you might be able to stick two 500Mhz celeron processors in there for dirt cheap!!!!

You got the memory, you got the case, and you got the floppy.

Now you need a hard drive. www.componentsdirect.com has a 20GB 7200RPM Quantum drive for $150.

Then you need a CD Burner. That same site has a Teac 4x4x32 burner for $180.

Then you need a video card. Any standard 4MB card will do for recording...$50. If you have an AGP port get an AGP card. If you want to do more than record, get a TNT2 32MB video card which can be had for around $130.

Then you need a soundcard. A pro soundcard is going to run you big bucks. A SB Live! will run ya 80 bucks or so and a SB PCI128 will run ya 30 bucks. None of those are considered pro but they'll both get the job done.

Building from scratch? Remember the little things like CPU and Case fans!

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Steve Tittle]

Slackmaster

Thanks I'll be sure to look the sites up. I've been looking at 300's and wondered how they'd go. Also what do you know about the cakewalk 8? I down loaded the demo and fiddled with it a bit. Just curious!

 

[PhilipM]

Celeron 500's only come in the PPGA (plastic pin grid array) as opposed to the Slot 1 architechture of the PII and PIII. You don't have to run dual processors though. Your board should have come with a filler card that has to go in the second processor slot in a single processor configuration. The fastest Slot 1 config Celeron is the 433Mhz I believe.

Anyway, most recommendations I've read/seen/heard say to stay away from NT when you have digital audio in mind as your main application. I would go with one processor and Windows 98 as your o/s. Spend your money to load up on memory and fast hard drives (you said you had built-in scsi). Dedicate the scsi hard drives for music recording/playback only. Slap in a cheaper IDE drive to hold your O/S and software.

 

[Steve Tittle]

Thanks but I've already ordered 2 PII's 266.
I can go with 300's but the 266 are half the price. With that I am stuck with NT because of it.

 

[sonusman]

Geez....I am glad that I am stuck with NT for my OS.

This topic on which OS to use is really getting old here. NT IS BETTER!!! 95/98 have more hardware available and will run all the crappy software, but all the great recording software will run on NT. If the software you are looking at won't run on NT, stay away from it!!! I am serious. It is no good if it can't run on NT.

Dual Processor? Nice. My next machine will be that. Double the processing speed on my PC? I like the idea. You will appriciate it when you are processing a .wav file and ZIP!!! it is done.

You will want to max out your RAM for serious production though. In the case that you are mastering a bunch of songs, you will want to hold them in RAM instead of on the hard drive while processing. It is much faster. But, you need lots and lots of RAM to do this. Fill up all your slots. You can get up to 1GB of RAM if you have a nice mobo, and it supports the 256MB RAM cards.

As far as hardware, you will need a nice sound card. Determining which one to get is a tough choice as no one card that will run on NT "has it all". Some companies offer extention cards for their base unit that expand the capabilities.

Two that you could look into are the Lynx One card ( www.lynxstudio.com ) and the Card Deluxe. Both have very stable NT drivers and are excellent sounding cards with digital I/O. I bought the Lynx card in spite of it's one limitation, that it works only up to 48kHz sampling rate, because it offered a lot more I/O options than the Card Deluxe. But both have 24 bit converters which is really where you will hear a significant difference more so than having 96kHz capabilities. Look into them. Oh, if you need midi capabilities, the Lynx has dual midi I/O's on it. It also supports AES/EBU, where the Card Deluxe offers neither.

Make sure you get a nice big monitor. I was fussing around with a 15" for a long time and it is too hard to work with it. A 17" is better, but you can't beat a 19" monitor for audio production. Plenty of room to display a nice big view of your .wav file, and still look at your opened plugins and what not. Take the plung.

Don't fall for the 98 is better crap. You talk to the pro's that build systems for recording, they will recommend NT. 2000 promises to be better, but we will see. I can't imagine that it would be any worse.

Good luck.

Ed Rei
Echo Star Studio www.echostarstudio.com

 

[Grizzly]

Hi Steve,
Hillsdale, Isn't that over near Detroit?
Your not very far from a real good pro sound card. I'm using the Aardvark 20/20 they are in Ann Arbor. Been using it for nearly 2 years and haven't had a minutes worth of problems with it. Seems to give me very accurate sound recording and play back. As far as OP systems, go for the NT, But if you don't or can't then go for the 98. If you use 98 keep in mind that 95&98 both don't mind sharing recources as long as the apps don't get greedy. Most audio apps are extremely greedy. Wave files eat a lot of memory and hard disk space. It is best if the computer you are building can be used for nothing but audio. Win98 works better for this than 95, Provided that you make that it's only job. When you start adding programs like Office 97, Adobe and the like the computer will start cross linking files. This will drive the computer to insanity and finely the blue screen of death. My recording computer uses WIN98 but recording and mixing and making CD's is it's only job. It can't get on the web, in fact it can't even print a CD label. But it doesn't crash either and every CD plays perfectly every time.

I hope this helps

Griz

 

[Steve Tittle]

Sonusman & Griz

Don't get me wrong I really meant that I was stuck with NT in a good way! Like I said in another topic, my brother uses NT in a professional environment and it is the OS of choice for that.

Yes my mobo will handle 1 gig of mem but only if I use EDO ram. To start I will have 256 meg SDRAM only because of the price factor. I can however run combination of the two and probably will as funds allow. It's like the HDD situation 8.4 gig EIDE or the biggest they make right now with a SCSI.

As far as 20/20 griz where in Ann Arbor is it? My wife go up there quite often (Love the place!) and I'd like to try to look it up next time we go. Let me know!

Steve

 

[Slackmaster2K]

Before you start throwing memory at your motherboard, you might want to do some research. While most motherboards will boast 1GB of RAM or better, many won't even work with over 128MB! Especially older boards using more than one stick.

Basically it boils down to timing issues. Your motherboard sounds like it was probably manufactured when SDRAM first started popping up in commercial systems. The leap from old 70ns SIMMs to 6-12ns DIMMs was a big one and therefore many motherboards are not able to handle large amounts of memory in multi-stick configurations. But it wasn't that big a dealat the time...when your motherboard was the shit, 64MB was still a lot of memory.

Check dejanews for info on your motherboard and check with the manufacturer. Often times a BIOS upgrade will solve many problems. Check it out before you start.

Manufacturers don't necessarily test their systems at the maximums. I was recently over at abit's site reading about the maximum hard drive size supported by thier current BIOS...."It's over 30GB, though we're not sure of the actual size because 30GB was the largest drive available at the time of testing"....or something to that effect. Course that's a hard drive and not memory, it was just an example.

If you plan on having a lot of memory, then you really must buy buffered (registered) ECC memory...e.g. the good stuff. I've got 3 sticks of the cheap shit in this computer I'm on now and it crashes more after I stuck that third stick in there than it ever used to...but the benefits of that 3rd 64MB stick outweigh the crashing (I'm running NT on it which kind of offsets the crashing which is once a week or so). (and yes I adjusted the timing)

Anyway, I hope the dual processor setup works well for you. Realize that you'll only see the benefits of the two processors if your applications are built on a mult-threaded model. That is, NT should distribute threads over multiple processors, but it won't split a single process over mulitiple processors. Of course you will without a doubt see that Windows is a little bit more responsive while working with your large applications. Other than that, it really boils down to the developers of your software.

A common falacy is that developers must write software FOR multiple processors. Not true. This was only true back in the old days of Win 3.1 where multitasking took the form of simple time slicing of processes. Today, windows has full thread support & pre-emptive multitasking and developers must only write multi-threaded applications to take advantage of multiple processors on NT. Since multi-threading offers great rewards on single processor systems, threads are used (explicitly by developers) in most software developed today.

Blah. Sorry if I no make no sense. Tired today

Slackmaster 2000

 

[Steve Tittle]

Whew!

Right now I am speechless. Listening to the
knowledge around here shows me how much I don't know!!
I appreciate the sharing of it, all of you.