P4, AMD, or Xeon for Recording w/ Sonar?

K

K9SaVeLLi

New member
I am about to purchase a new comp with the main focus for recording. I now use Sonar 2 and might upgrade to 3, but I also have other programs that I want to use (samplitude, soundforge, reason, fruityloops, etc.), but my comp can't handle it. (P3 600mhz 256RAM)

I have had my eye on a P4 3.0 w/ 1G of RAM. But what do these other type of processors have to offer? I don't know much about AMD's, and I know that Xeon's are good at multitasking (but are used more in office applications.) Is the P4 the way to go for what I want to do? I've had very few problems w/ the P3 except for its slow and can't handle all the plugins and multitasking I want to do.

Most of the comps in my price range w/ the stuff I want seem to be Sony Vaio's. Now i've heard a few people say that "their friends" and "their friend's friend" have had problems w/ Vaio's. I know a couple of people w/ Vaio's and they haven't have many or any problems with theirs.

What do you guys think?

Oh yeah...I use a M-Audio Delta 66 and want to upgrade to the delta 1010.
 
Xeon's are designed for servers - it won't do you any good. AMD's are just as good as Intel's chips and are cheaper. At this point in time, I would get an AMD Athlon64 system.

Don't buy a name brand system. Save money and build your own.
 
yup i'm looking to upgrade. amd 64 is what i'm looking at.
upgrade motherboards with 64's are being advertised for 300 bucks in my area. just make sure you contact the manufacturer of your soundcard and ask which amd motherboard is recommended just to be safe.
 
Regardless of whether you go amd or intel, I'd recommend getting an Asus motherboard. They have a great ability to overclock should you want to squeeze more cycles out of your cpu & ram
 
Another AMD / Asus Vote

How's your budget? I'm running an AMD XP 3000+ on an Asus board. There are always stunning deals on tech that's a year old or so. And products are generally more stable.

Here's some test specs that show the success of the AMD 64 chips:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/prescott-tests.html

Keep in mind, the 64s won't really come into their own until software catches up and RAMemory issues are ironed out. Personally, I'd wait another few months. But if money's no issue, go for it.

be warmed and filled,
Kev
 
Xeon Vote

I am spec'ing out a computer for my own personal use for recording/server/gaming/video editing/etc. and i am going with dual xeon's purely for the fact of their stability. if the xeon processor was not the most stable processor on the market in the consumer market it wouldn't be as highly used for web servers/file servers/any kind of server as it is. furthermore, as with the AMD's, overclocking is quite simple with the right motherboard.

alone in the xeon world,
J. Ford
 
jford said:
I am spec'ing out a computer for my own personal use for recording/server/gaming/video editing/etc. and i am going with dual xeon's purely for the fact of their stability. if the xeon processor was not the most stable processor on the market in the consumer market it wouldn't be as highly used for web servers/file servers/any kind of server as it is. furthermore, as with the AMD's, overclocking is quite simple with the right motherboard.

alone in the xeon world,
J. Ford
Click to expand...

:confused:

Since when is server performance an indicator of how well it can handle DAW work?

Servers are more about data throughput than anything else. What DAW apps need is FPU performace.
 
Yeah, data throughput is not a constraint these days the it might have been a few years ago.

Raw processing power is what's needed now to drive real time effects, so you want the fastest chip you can afford along with a nice overclockable mobo and get that fsb up towards 300MHz.

However I'd be interested to see how dual Xeons would perform in a DAW. Like, could they split the workload between them
 
have an FSB of 300MHz?

you might wanna look at the specs for the Zeon processors. the FSB is 533. it is conceivable to overclock a 2.66 xeon to 3.0 GHz...meaning, you have dual 3.0 GHz processors and two FSB's of 533 MHz. you must remember i am looking to use this as a multi-purpose machine, and will be running server apps as well. plz give me some translation of DAW and FPU.
 
The 300Mhz I was referring to is the raw system bus speed. The 533 or 800MHz fsb speeds you see quoted are the 'quad pumped' numbers. So a 533fsb P4 translates to a 133Mhz bus, the 800fsb P4 to a 200MHz bus etc. I have my system bus clocked to 250Mhz so my 2.8 P4 is running at 3.5GHz.

Again, that may be another reason not to go for Xeons - why restrict yourself to a 533fsb chip when you can get an 800fsb P4 pretty cheap now.

To be honest I have no idea if 2 Xeon chips running on a 133Mhz bus would be faster than a single P4 running on a 250MHz bus. Maybe you should build one and let us know....
 
Well I'm pretty happy with mine.

Asus P4P800 mobo
2.8c 800fsb P4 running @ 3.5GHz 1000fsb
1GB Hynix D43 DDR400 ram running @ DDR500
2x120GB Seatgate Barracuda SATA disks
ATI Radeon 9600 128MB graphics
Lite-On DVD burner
17" LCD monitor
M-Audio Delta 44
 
bulls hit - i'm wondering out of interest if you could do a noise reduction test on that config you have which looks great. as i'm considering upgrading.
ie: record in forge or something else a 3 minute audio track at 16bit/44.1
then do any fake noise sample and apply it to the whole 3 minute file.
and time how long it takes to NR the whole file.
before the amd 64 came out about the best i found was 15 to 18 secs.
an amd 64 user just reported to me that his system did the test in 1.75 seconds. which is a huge leap. I like the NR test as the best test of a
processors performance as its all math algorithms. ive found it the most trustworthy test.
 
jford said:
you might wanna look at the specs for the Zeon processors. the FSB is 533. it is conceivable to overclock a 2.66 xeon to 3.0 GHz...meaning, you have dual 3.0 GHz processors and two FSB's of 533 MHz. you must remember i am looking to use this as a multi-purpose machine, and will be running server apps as well. plz give me some translation of DAW and FPU.
Click to expand...

Server apps don't need dual Xeon's unless you're actually serving someone, i.e. more than 5 people.

I have the demo 6 month copy of Win2K3 Server, and it runs fine on an 800Mhz Athlon.

If you're actually serving more than just people you live with, i.e. at a business, then you shouldn't be installing audio/video/gaming apps on it.

Xeons aren't more reliable than AMD Opterons or A64's. In fact Opteron chips are better for serving as well, especially when running something like SuSe Linux 9.1, which compiles itself for 64 bit upon installation.

So if you're buying Xeon for stability, you're making a decision for the wrong reason.

If you're buying it for performance, you could get better performance cheaper elsewhere.

A recent article in Maximum PC compared a single Opteron 248 with a dual 248 set up, using common multimedia applications. The differences are there, but they aren't what you'd expect them to be. It's not worth it.
 
NR Test--Great Idea

manning1 said:
an amd 64 user just reported to me that his system did the test in 1.75 seconds. which is a huge leap. I like the NR test as the best test of a
processors performance as its all math algorithms. ive found it the most trustworthy test.
Click to expand...

That's a magnitudinal leap! I might have to take the same leap sooner than I thought. And thanks for the NR test idea. None of benchmarking programs I've used address DAW issues directly. Do you know of any?
 
manning1 said:
ie: record in forge or something else a 3 minute audio track at 16bit/44.1
then do any fake noise sample and apply it to the whole 3 minute file.
and time how long it takes to NR the whole file.
Click to expand...

manning
Yeah that would be an interesting exercise.

Is this something I could do in Cakewalk GT3? Or do I need a NR plugin?
I don't recall seeing a noise reduction function in GT3
 
bulls-it what would that price be on that computer....can i not overclock the FSB on a xeon....i guess im just mentalling thinking 2 processors are baddass
 
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