Motherboard Upgrade Questions

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DDev

DDev

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I'm about to shell out a little bit of money for a new motherboard and accessories to upgrade my current PC. I need a little advice on what to look for and what to avoid. I currently have a P2/400 with a couple of hard drives, CDRW, floppy, 1394 interface, and 17" monitor that I'll be carrying over. I'll probably get a new case/power supply as well.

What are the downsides of using, say, a 2.4 GHz Celeron vs. an Athlon 2200 or a 2.0 GHz P4 (I'm trying to match fairly equivalent prices)?

Any motherboard manufacturers better/worse for DAW use?

Is 512 Mb RAM enough for 24-30 tracks (with a few FX but not tons) in Sonar or Cubase (the jury is out for which software I'll get; it'll either be Sonar Studio or Cubase SL).

Thanks,
Darryl.....
 
Your best bet will be a bare bones kit. That is, case, PS, Mobo, Ram and CPU bundled.
I've had the best of luck with ASUS boards and Intel P4's.
512 ram should be ok but a gig would be much better.

Check here as an example

http://www.vitalitycomputer.com/barcom.html
 
DDev said:
What are the downsides of using, say, a 2.4 GHz Celeron vs. an Athlon 2200 or a 2.0 GHz P4 (I'm trying to match fairly equivalent prices)?
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Well, it's a crap shoot. Generally speaking Intel is less likely to cause high blood pressure. If you're using Digi products avoid SATA drives for the time being. And for budget reasons, avoid them altogether. With the exception of the WD Raptor, they don't spin faster or have larger buffers. The Ultra-IDE are much more reasonable.

DDev said:
Any motherboard manufacturers better/worse for DAW use?
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Roll the dice again. I haven't heard of anybody badmouthing ASUS motherboards and I have always had good luck with them.

DDev said:
Is 512 Mb RAM enough for 24-30 tracks (with a few FX but not tons) in Sonar or Cubase (the jury is out for which software I'll get; it'll either be Sonar Studio or Cubase SL).
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You bet.

Note that you can get a motherboard that will support 400mhz, 533mhz, and 800mhz FSB; start with a cheap Celeron and upgrade to a 800mhz FSB P4 when the prices come down (as they always do) without having to pop for a new mobo.
 
And I find the clocked speed of a P4 is the same as an athlon and I have had no problems with any of the athlon processors I have had.

And since Celeron does not have a co processors (speed up intricate processes like tracking) I would lean towards the Athlon.

But thats my opinion since I have never had a problem with athlon in the past, and noticed no real upgrade into a P4:).
 
ella said:
...Celeron does not have a co processors (speed up intricate processes like tracking) I would lean towards the Athlon.
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I'm sure that Ella is correct, but I honestly have no idea how much math processing takes place in music recording. Does anyone have any idea?
 
"And since Celeron does not have a co processors (speed up intricate processes like tracking) I would lean towards the Athlon."

Sorry, but that is patently false. What the Celeron doesn't have is a fast enough front-side bus or enough cache to be worth purchasing.

As for a budget box, I generally lean toward Athlons. You definitely get better bang for the buck with them. An Athlon XP 2500+ Barton is ~$90 at NewEgg. You'd have to spend almost twice that for a P4 with the same level of performance.

Of course, certain apps and soundcards don't seem to get along with Athlons for some reason. Some of that seems to have involved VIA chipsets in particular, and I'd avoid them these days anyway even if their PCI implmentation didn't suck. Go with an NForce2-based M/B. My recommendation would be either an Abit NF7/NF7-S or an Asus A7N8X/A7N8X Deluxe.

But also make sure that the software and hardware you plan to use with it doesn't have any known significant issues with AMD's.
 
Thanks for the comments, folks. I'm leaning in the Athlon direction, but still haven't bitten the bullet and made a buy yet.

I have a Mackie MDR recorder that I use for my tracking currently (mostly live stuff) and am wanting to add more flexibility to my mixing options. The problem is that quite often I'll have a full 24 tracks @ 24/48 that could be as much as 45-60 minutes long. My current process is to mix the whole thing in a single shot down to my PC as a 2-track, then cut up the songs prior to burning to CD. I've been playing around with the demos of Sonar 2.2, Cubase SX, Cool Edit Pro, and N-Tracks, but I've run into issues that I think are related to the demo versions (and my limited P2/400 machine). What I don't know is how well any PC configuration can handle those massive files. So now my brain is going through spasms trying to decide to bite the bullet and build a PC and hope the software will work, or to just add the equivalent $$ in more outboard processing gear.

I'm open to any and all suggestions at this point. My current budget for gear/software is about $700 if that means anything to anyone.

Thanks,
Darryl.....
 
I would stay away from Celeron processors. They're not very great for doing audio stuff. The celerons are just pentiums that drop on the floor at the IBM plant.
 
"The celerons are just pentiums that drop on the floor at the IBM plant."

IBM doesn't do ANY fab work for Intel.

But you're right about Celerons being bad for audio, and quite frankly just about anything else. The P4-style architecture (deep pipelines, reliance on high core clock) is much more sensitive to small caches than shorter pipeline CPUs (which is why the Celeron 300A wasn't a terrible performer once overclocked).
 
I wouldn't consider Celerons.

Performance wise it's a tossup between P4s and Athlons. On paper, Athlons will outperform P4s on GHz to GHz basis as they have a larger ALU thus perform more integer calculations per clock cycle than P4s. FPUs don't have much say in audio processing.

If you go the Athlon route, as mentioned before avoid Mobos with VIA chipsets. Even the current ones have issues that crop up as pops and cracks in audio.

As for other stuff, if you wanna dump 24 tracks all at once onto the PC, you might also want to consider Ultra SCSI hard drives as they have faster data troughput so you won't have a problem recording all those tracks all at once. I'd go with at least 512MB of RAM, but 1GB should really be your target.

Look for motherboards with fast Front Side Bus and buy matching RAM.

As far as workstation software, Logic, Cubase, Nuendo and such would do. If you intend to record a lot of tracks all at once, then a MOTU 24 i/o probably would be the way to go.
 
Thanks for all the follow up.

I won't be recording large quantities of tracks at once on the PC (that will be left to my Mackie MDR), but I do want the flexibility of transferring my tracks into the PC for mixing or editing.

Anyways, now tis time to begin pricing out what I think I want and see how it fits the budget.

Darryl.....
 
I guess I should clarify that with my MDR's removable drives, I have a firewire dock that I use to dump tracks directly into the PC, so I don't have to go through any kind of recording process to transfer tracks, just a data dump.

Darryl.....
 
I've been building PC's for a quite a while, and I've experienced many different situations. For DAWs, Vidio editing machines and 3d rendering machines...I use Intel. Mostly because I find that a lot of top end hardware doesn't always work properly with Athlon processors, and I see many people having headaches with VIA chipsets. Stick with Intel and your sure to have much better luck. I'd rather spend a little more cash than spend more time trouble shooting my PC.
 
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