Latest EQ Mag - Build Ultimate Dual AMD DAW

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DigitalDon

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Anyone read this article yet? This is the latest EQ Magazine. The article is called "Build the Ultimate Music/Recording PC designed by Pete Leoni. It caught my eye because on the front cover is the same rackmount case I bought off eBay for $98.

He uses a Tyan S2460 (dual CPU) motherboard, two AMD MP 2000 processors, two 512MB DDR ECC Registered memory sticks, MSI Geforce 4 MX440 Dual Head video card, Maxtor 40GB and 80GB hard drives and Enermax 430W Whisper Quiet power supply. The motherboard uses AMD 760 series chipset. My soundboard (Aardvark Q10) can't work with the AMD 750 series but their support site says the 760 chipset will work.

He also uses Windows XP.

I know the dual processor horse has been beat a few times already but this is an interesting article. Kinda struck me strange though. He advises putting both the OS drive and audio drive on the same controller as master/slave. Says the CD burner should be on the other controller because it can cause slower access to your hard drive. Seems like if you had a lot of tracks going, plugins active, etc you wouldn't want the drives switching back and forth sharing controller time. I might be completely in left field here.

It's not a bad article since he goes step by step in building the whole thing. Good for you guys who are a little leary about building a DAW.

Opinions anyone?

DD
 
Wow, that's almost exactly the spec for my machine, and I've never seen that article.

MSI K7D mobo (with AMD 760 chipset)
2x AMD MP2000+ cpu
4x 512 Mb Kingston registered RAM
1x 60 Gb 7200 rpm HD
Matrox G550 videocard (driving 2x Iiyama 19inch diamondtron monitors)
M-audio Audiophile 2496
Enermax 430W power supply
WinXP Pro

The current harddisk is for OS and applications (incuding sample-packs and such). I'm going to fit two 80 Gb 7200 rpm drives with a RAID-0 board for audio later.

I'm very happy with my system ;)

Peter.
 
yeah you want to keep your harddrives seperate from the cdrom.

cdrom runs at ata33 while the hardrives 66,100,133

the hardrive will reduce its speed to the lowest speed on the chain. So if a cdrom is on it...it will only transfer 33mb/sec as opposed to the 133 mb/sec if you have ata133 drives...or 100 or 66.

The only reason you want 2 harrdrives is to keep seek times to a min. the operating system randomly accesses the harddrive for information so you dont want it accessing the same harrdrive while its trying to record audio data....it may cause a drop out with multiple tracks.

put the audio on a second drive and the comp is only looking at one drive for audio and one for the OS
 
According to "SCSI Vs. IDE Bus Mastering For DAWs" by D. Glen Cardenas and Jose M. Catena, probably the most comprehensive text I've ever seen on this subject(not that I've seen much):


"The first PIIX imposed this limitation even across channels. The PIIX3 removed this limitation across channels, but not across devices in the same channel. The latest controllers with UDMA support(PIIX4 adn PIIX4E) have removed these limits completely, and the mode can be configered independently for each device. This should not be an issue any longer. However, the software drivers may not all be taking advantage of the hardware improvenment(We can't confirm if the drivers shipping with Win98se take advantage of this improvement in channel mode selection, but Win2K does for sure). Even though this may be a dead issue, it doesn't hurt to avoid connecting a hard drive and a CD ROM on the same IDE channel unless the CD ROM does support UDMA (has a checkbox in Device Manager like the hard drive) and it is enabled."

When my computer boots up, there's quick screen that comes up with various system data. It tells the UDMA mode of all my drives, including CDROM. I assume that's good enough assurance. There's also a program that came with my CUSL-C mobo that tells me the mode of all my drives. I think mode 4 is 66MB/s and 5 is 100MB/s.

I guess AMD may have other issues.



I think it'd be fun if Intel and AMD guys hated each other like the Apple DumbPentium gang.
 
This is almost the exact spec of my home machine (the one I used for audio before I built a DAW for the studio). The benefits of the Tyan S2460 (dual CPU) Mobo for me were the onboard extras. My version (ung) has onboard dual SCSI Ultra 160, Raid, and LAN. I used a Delta 1010 and Sonar with Win2K and SCSI drives and had no problems at all with it (this machine screams). I didn't notice a consiberable difference when I switched over to a P4 1.8 single though, making me question the benefits of dual processors. And the Tyan Thunder K7 it's not the cheapest Mobo for those with tight budgets. :)
 
ap said:
I think it'd be fun if Intel and AMD guys hated each other like the Apple DumbPentium gang. [/B]
Click to expand...

there are a lot of us amd advocates who hate intel, i am not one of them.

I'm going to check into this issue about having the two on the same channel. I didn't know (/realise) of any improvments in that direction.
 
Barometer said:
This is almost the exact spec of my home machine (the one I used for audio before I built a DAW for the studio). The benefits of the Tyan S2460 (dual CPU) Mobo for me were the onboard extras. My version (ung) has onboard dual SCSI Ultra 160, Raid, and LAN. I used a Delta 1010 and Sonar with Win2K and SCSI drives and had no problems at all with it (this machine screams). I didn't notice a consiberable difference when I switched over to a P4 1.8 single though, making me question the benefits of dual processors. And the Tyan Thunder K7 it's not the cheapest Mobo for those with tight budgets. :)
Click to expand...


you should notice the difference when ur doing about a billion things at once but each app is running like only 1 or 2 were open thats where dual processors shine. also when running alot of plug-ins the long vertical line won't seem to skip from the 4th bar to the 15th bar, while u heard the music inbetween the bars but didn't see the line move just jump from bar to bar
 
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