How much PC Horsepower needed?

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Osbick Bird

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Oops. I signed in to add to my question and it seems the BBS ate it. No wonder I had 10 views and zero replies! Sorry about the cryptic post, everyone!

Let me try again....

I want to upgrade my current set-up and am trying to decide between a better PC or a standalone. I have worked with both so learning curves aren't a huge issue, but I haven't built a PC in 4 years so I'm a bit behind the curve on the new chips and motherboards and such.

I am trying to figure out how much PC (processor speed and type, RAM and type) I would need to be able to:

1. Record and mix 16 tracks of 16-bit 44.1 khz audio, being able to record at least 2 tracks at a time (preferably 4 or more, though), while also running a few MIDI outs through USB.

2. Same thing but at 24-bit

This is assuming an IDE hard drive and a PCI-based recording device (I currently have a 20-bit GINA but might upgrade depending on how much I can spend.)

Alternately, telling how many tracks you can get out of your current set-up and what that set-up is would help me too.

Any help is greatly appreciated.

OB
 
This is a bump because it didn't get bumped when I fixed it the first time. Sorry if it annoyed anyone. I don't know what's going on with this place today...
 
what u are asking for is a cakewalk for computers now a day. A computer thats atleast 1 ghz with a 7200rpm ata100/133 and 512 megs of ram will do that with no problem. either Pentium or Athlon...no celeron or duron
 
I get 24 tracks 16/44.1 with 1 or 2 real time effects (compression, eq type stuff) out of my ASUS A7M266, AMD XP1900+, 512 DDR266 RAM, 2X60G IBM hard drive, Matrox G450 setup. And the processor never goes above 50%. The hard drive never even gets to 15%!

Echo has really good drivers for win2000/XP so your card might be fine, but I'm not sure about the 20 bit drivers. I have a 24 bit model.

I am presently updating my rig to a P4 2.4B DDR333 system just cause my old 'family compurter' finally died.

Took all of an hour to physically put it together and I'm still working on the software end of it so I'll let ya know when I get it running but....don't be afraid of building a computer! It's a lot easier than sight reading music, that's for sure!

I had my AMD system built for me just cause it was cheap to have it done and I thought I'd save some time but in the end I reinstalled everything cause they screwed it all up!

So, build it yourself, you'll get what you want and save a little money too.
 
OB, just about anything will do if you set it up right....

I'm running a tired Gateway PII-450Mhz with 384Mb of RAM, Win98SE, 2 7200rpm drives, Midiman USB midi interface and Echo Mia and SBLive soundcards.

I'm easily running 8-16 tracks of 24bit/44.1kHz audio and have run as many as 35 tracks of 16bit/44.1kHz audio using N-Track Studio. I also use SoundForge5 for editing and FruityLoops.

I'll be updating to a new audio DAW soon also but my old PII can make a helluva lot of music.
 
if you build ANYTHING you can buy new, it will do the job. just don't skimp on ram. 512mb ought to do it-huge difference. i only have 128, but i usually also process no more than 4 mono tracks at a time, and it does alright. i bet with 256, i'd clear a hurdle or two, though, especially in processing.
 
Thanks for the excellent replies, everyone. Sounds like this shouldn't be too hard (the last PC I built was a pentium 233 in an AT case, if that puts anything in perspective) to accomplish. It looks like the PC is probably the way to go.

Another thing I'm curious about is video monitors. I have found that CRT monitors tend to cause audible interference in the recording unless you turn them off while recording, which makes watching levels a bit of a pain. What I don't know is if this is an inherent problem with CRTs or just with the sort of cheap ones I have owned up to now. Does anyone in here have or know of a particular model that doesn't cause this issue? The flat panel in my old laptop seems to do well in this regard (although the laptop itself makes too much noise to be useful in recording), so do the newer LCD monitors also share this advantage?

OB
 
Weird. It's like I'm a ghost or something. I replied on this thread, and again it didn't bump, and it still said that zer0sig was the last contributor. This is a bump in hopes of getting an answer to the monitor question.
 
Teacher said:
what u are asking for is a cakewalk for computers now a day. A computer thats atleast 1 ghz with a 7200rpm ata100/133 and 512 megs of ram will do that with no problem. either Pentium or Athlon...no celeron or duron
Click to expand...

Intel Celeron's will work just fine for audio recording. I used a overclocked celeron 300MHz for ages and it worked great. I've built machines using Celeron 1.2GHz chips, for recording machines and they work without a hitch- zero problems. AMD Duron, I can't comment on because I've never used one for recording.

I suspect they would be fine though, provided you've already worked out the potential motherboard/chipset problems that AMD based systems are notorious for.
 
What it the biggest pcs you could possibly build, would it be a dual 1.8 hz athlon xp mp with something like 2 gb of ddr ram?

its always fun to think about that stuff
 
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