Computer specs - can I do this???

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noisedude

noisedude

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Right I need experience from people who have actually tried this .... basically I want to know what the capabilities of a Celeron M (1.4?) with 256mb of RAM are. Now I don't need some muppet telling me I need a dual-core Pentium with 4 gigs of RAM, because I don't. I'll tell you what I want to be able to do:

- Firewire interface recording 8, maybe even 12 inputs at once, with only a few, maybe four, playing back at the same time
- Minimal real-time processing, perhaps the odd vocal monitoring reverb but that's not essential
- Playback of up to 24 tracks at the most, again with not much real time stuff happening.

I have a well-specced desktop PC and I am looking at a cheap laptop for other purposes. However, I want to know if I can use it for some location recording, particularly drums.

Who is using firewire interfaces with Celeron Ms and 256mb memory and what are its limitations? No hearsay please guys, I'm not going to buy a Vaio just cos you say so. ;)
 
buy another 256mb or 512mb of ram, and you'll probably be ok. 24 tracks would be pushin you're limit i'd say, but i dont know.

i think you'll def. need some ram though, and streamline your system for recording, unlses you want it to run choppy.

but can it be done decently? yeah i'd say so.
 
Noise,

I am running a Pentium M with 512K. Seems to hold up for what I am doing, but then again, I am not as ambitious as you. Can't speak to the Celeron. :(
 
My wife's laptop is a Celeron M 1.4 with 256 Mb of RAM. It had trouble running Adobe Photoshop. Seriously. I stuck another gig of RAM in it and it works better now. I would honestly be afraid to do recording on it, but a streamlined system and few tracks might work out.

I would at least get a Pentium M instead of a Celeron.
 
You might be fine as long as you don't run any effects during playback. Your 1.4 Celeron will be taxed with raw 24 track playback. Make sure you have a fast HD (including the bus).
 
The Celeron M is the same as the Pentium just with a smaller cache ... i.e. shouldn't make much difference to audio as you can't hold much audio in cache anyway ...
 
I don't like Celerons at all, but if you are stuck with one, so be it.

The nForce3 + AMD/64 or Intel 875 + P4 are the ideal platforms for DAW. These offer the highest bus performances and stability.

The WinXP tweaks will do a whole lot toward making a Celeron a more tolerable processor. Removing all the eye candy, unnecessary apps and services, anti-virus, web server, ad nauseum, will provide a huge number of additional free cpu cycles for recording efforts.

Memory: more is always better. 256mb is marginal, 512mb is workable.

Unless you do all the WinXP tweaks, your OS will gobble up 120+mb of your RAM just to load itself. Using the WinXP tweaks guide, I reduced my foot print to 53mb RAM down from 128mb. WinXP/SP1 (I own Aardvark Q10), 512mb DDR333.

Here is a summary of what I did for tweaking XP:

WinXP Tweaks as text file
 
So, I am just interested. I have seen post after post of guys saying "Get more RAM".

For recording tracks and playing them back, what do you think RAM is actually doing for you?
 
I will never operate a WinXP machine with less than 512MB of RAM, 768 minimum if doing some audio or video- this should do most people well. See how that works out to determine if you need more.

But 256, ouch. Deffinately bump up to 512- it's not something to think about or consider it is something you should just do by default.
 
I have seen MANY computers run XP just fine at 256!

I wouldn't go a lick lower than that though.

Increasing RAM is NOT going to help with recording/playback of more tracks! Simply, it won't.

Every even half way decent soundcard and hard drive controller will handle doing transfers using DMA.

Even if running processing on the tracks, RAM STILL won't assist.

The only time more RAM in a DAW is going to help is when you are running software synth's, or Drumagog, or any other plugin deal that needs to load up .wav files into memory for very fast access.

Some older applications loaded audio up into RAM, but that is for the most part a thing of the past.
 
Nik, dunno if this is any help but before I built the DAW I'm using now I had an Athlon 1800XP with 256M of ram. I only recorded a track at a time so that was no issue. I could easily stream back 24 tracks to an outboard mixer.

No I know Ford Van and myself have had issues but hey....... His ram theory is skewed. From first hand experience your daw will run more plug ins with more ram. I noticed a 30% cpu load drop when I doubled my ram. Before I doubled I used to export each track with the plugin rendered and export it back in, slow way of getting there but it worked. More ram is never a bad thing. Also the AMD 1800 ran at 1153Mhz or there abouts. That 1.4G should be just fine. If it's a sole DAW do the tweaks, they make a huge difference.


Ford, peace man...just talking from experience.
 
Cheers guys this is really interesting ... as I say I won't be buying a laptop to perform miracles because they're so much less economical that desktops (my desktop is a P4 3Ghz 1024mb RAM) but it sounds like I might be alright..... hmmmmmmmmmm............
 
LemonTree said:
Nik, dunno if this is any help but before I built the DAW I'm using now I had an Athlon 1800XP with 256M of ram. I only recorded a track at a time so that was no issue. I could easily stream back 24 tracks to an outboard mixer.

No I know Ford Van and myself have had issues but hey....... His ram theory is skewed. From first hand experience your daw will run more plug ins with more ram. I noticed a 30% cpu load drop when I doubled my ram. Before I doubled I used to export each track with the plugin rendered and export it back in, slow way of getting there but it worked. More ram is never a bad thing. Also the AMD 1800 ran at 1153Mhz or there abouts. That 1.4G should be just fine. If it's a sole DAW do the tweaks, they make a huge difference.


Ford, peace man...just talking from experience.
Click to expand...

Well, this post might not be good for the "peace" LemonTree. Sorry.

I have 512 of RAM (kingston, pc 3200) on my AMD XP 2600 box.

Just for the fun of it (and the waste of my time to prove my point), I went ahead, checked my cpu meters in Sonar 5 on a rather heavy duty cpu project I worked on. I noted an average cpu usage of 82% throughout the song. It peaked at 87%, and went as low as 72%.

After that, I shut down, and removed one of the 256mb sticks of RAM. I am now at 256mb of RAM.

Booted back up. Started the Sonar session back up.

Guess what LemonTree?

The cpu usage was EXACTLY as it was with 512. 72% lowest, 82% average, 87% peak.

Not a bit of difference. NONE. ZILCH.

This project has 26x 24/44.1 tracks with goobs of edits, some volume automation. I have a RoomVerb2 on the project, a PSP PCM 42 delay, about 12 Sonitus multiband compressors, about 6 other compressors from either Sonitus or digitalfishphones, even a couple eq's running.

Anyway, SAME EXACT CPU USAGE WITH HALF THE RAM!!!

That was the result I expected, based upon test's I did about 4 years ago on the same subject.

Some old app's used to store some audio in RAM. Most of the good app's now just don't do that, and I came across one that did, I would ditch it in a hurry!

Again, hard drive specs and cpu are what will effect your ability to record, playback, and process tracks, NOT RAM. If you are going to be using plugin's that have to store .wav files (soft synths, drumagog, etc...) then you will benefit from more RAM as these plugin's use RAM to store the audio for quick use.
 
Now excuse me while I go shut down again and install my bit of RAM I am missing.
 
I will admit that the project took longer to load, as did Sonar.

Clicking between windows didn't go as fast either.

So, more RAM might help you navigate between windows more, and make your project load up faster. Not sure how important all that is when working on a budget. ;)
 
You kinda have to look at it in a big picture sort of way with RAM. The less ram you have, the more XP will be accessing the swap file using up clock cycles and access your HD needlessly and slowing down overall system performance.
 
Ok. So, while I am recording and playing back a project, and doing DSP, what does the swap file do?

NOTHING!
 
Not to be an ass, but this subject would be best served by those that have actually done some testing on their DAW.

So many people just have "heard" that adding RAM somehow increases the ability of their DAW, but have never actually TESTED that theory.
 
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