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[T-51]

Any thoughts or information, re: audio recording, on...

1. Intel 1.3 - 1.5 gig processors
2. RDRAM vs. SDRAM
3. Turtle Beach Santa Cruz Soundcard (for entry level)
2. New Echo "MIA" Soundcard

 

[trashcan-man]

Re:
Any thoughts or information, re: audio recording, on...

1. Intel 1.3 - 1.5 gig processors

I am assuming you are referring to Pentium 4 here.
The general consensus is stay away. Stick with 1 GHz
P3 (if you must stay with Intel). The benchmarks are
about the same, and you don't pay the huge premium.
In P4, I believe they reduced the L2 cache to less than
that of the P3. I am guessing here, but this probably
would have a serious performance impact on audio processing
since cache misses can cause the processor to stall for a many clock cycles. For software synths and audio processing cache misses can do no good. In additon, the hardware improvements on the P4 requires compilers that optimize for P4 code. No compilers yet exist that optimize for P4 - hence existing software, and future releases for some time to come do not out perform on a P4.

check Toms harware for more details.http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/00q4/001206/

2. RDRAM vs. SDRAM

Once again the high premium for RDRAM hardly justifies its
cost. Bad idea. Motherboard manufacturers will be going to DDRAM soon. This will surely blow RDRAM out of the water.
Unfortunately, P4 will only operate with RDRAM - another serious blunder by Intel.

See Tom's agains for the shortcomings of RDRAM

http://www6.tomshardware.com/blurb/00q2/000525/

 

[ola]

If nothing else, price suggests sticking to PIII. You get a dual PIII 850MHz machine with a gig of SDRAM at the price of a P4 with a 128MB RDRAM stick. No question about which is the better performer with today's software.

[Edited by ola on 01-30-2001 at 00:08]