See any problems with this audio PC

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MikeA

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I've been spec'ing out a PC to do recording at my church. I'm pretty sure that I will be using the Aardvark Q10 for the sound card and W98 for the operating system unless Aardvark gets the problems that I seen posted here with the XP drivers fixed. Then I will may consider going with XP.
Here's the layout I have at this point in time:

Abit KG7 SOCKET-A DDR ATA/100 AGP ATX Supports XP (4GB Memory Max)
ATHLON XP 1800+ 266FSB BOX
12X/40X/48X CDW540E EIDE BLACK
512MB PC2100 DDR C2.5
32MB Matrox G550 DualHead DDR 4X/PRO W/B
Maxtor 40GB 6L040J2 7200 ATA/133 (system drive)
Maxtor 80GB 6L080L4 7200 ATA/133 (media drive)
Windows 98 Full OEM Version 2ND EDITION
1.44MB Floppy Drive
APCBack-UPS Pro 500 USB

Below are items that were not available at the site where I was putting together my shopping list but knew specifically that I wanted:

ComputeAid Inc. 4U Standard Size ATX Rackmount Chassis
Enermax 350W Power Supply: EG 365 P - VE (FCA)

Now my questions:
1. Does anyone know of any problems with using the Abit KG7
motherboard for audio? (Yes, I will be talking to Aardvark about this whole package before I order but I just wanted the opinions of those on this board as well.)
2. I had someone suggest that I use a single 120GB hard drive with an 8 MB buffer. The drives spec'd above each have 2MB buffers. Is there any need for an 8MB buffer in audio work?

Sorry for being long; I appreciate the opinions of you guys on this site. I've learned a lot in the last few weeks of reading these threads.

Mike
 
Should be good to go..

Greetings,

1. Havn't used the board, and yeah good idea to talk to their tech guys before putting down the cash

2. Most modern 7200 RPM drives do not bottleneck pc systems these days, and most of them have 2mb buffer. There was a review of a 120 gig western digital drive a little while back at www.storagereview.com with a 8 meg buffer that performed exceptionally well for a 7200 drive. But most drives can give you 25-50 megs/sec transfer anyways (depending on which part of the hard drive you are transferring from, inside or outside). Its usually the processor that gives out first when dealing with so much data. Especially when you have lots of effects going. I have heard many people around here say they get 30+ tracks from PIII's with a standard 7200 RPM drive so you will probobly be fine with 2 meg buffer.

all in all, i personally don't think the 8meg buffer will play a role in recording performance of the computer.

my god, there are alot of church groups recording digitally these days...is this the next wave for the independant music scene?

Goodluck
SirRiff
 
Next wave?

IMO, A lot of it just has to do with the fact that churches are becoming more media savvy. They want any way possible to get the word out there about the Lord and with prices plummeting the way they have on not only audio but video stuff as well, they are just jumping on in. My reasons though are, I am just plain tired of duplicating cassettes. For instance, right now I've had a series of 9 tapes that had to be condensed onto 5 so I could package them in as few tapes as possible. So, I had to sit ther and rerecord them at real time to make my Duping Masters and then dupe 'em. If it was on HD I could've just burned a CD of what they wanted and moved on. I've had enough requests to do things on CD that I'm going to make the switch. Even little old ladies are coming up to me and saying "I got a new car last week and I don't have a cassette player in it. Can you give this to me on CD?"

Mike
 
I use the KG-7. Do yourself a favor and spend the extra $30 or so, and get the KG-7 RAID option. It gives you 2 IDE RAID ports, plus the regular IDE ports. It supports all levels of RAID operation.
 
RAID setup?

I've seen conflicting information here and other places about using a RAID setup for audio. Granted, the arguments against it are from what would now be considered an older article (Roll Your Own 2 on ProRec) and maybe things have changed since that was written.
What is the advantage of having the 2 IDE RAID ports? I just read "The BIG IDE/DISK Speed question" by PapillonIrl and was momentarily confused but I think I got a handle on that. If I were going to do a RAID setup would this be the config?

IDE 0 MASTER - System drive
IDE 0 SLAVE - CDRW
IDE 1 MASTER - Audio drive
RAID IDE 0 MASTER - Audio backup drive

Also, if I understand correctly, the need for RAID is to prevent potential loss of data because the same audio is being written to both HD at the same time redudantly. Right? I want to do this right but I do have a budget.

Thanks guys...
 
Your Refering to RAID Mirroring (or RAID 0). RAID can also read 2 hardrives as 1 volume as well, this is called Striping (RAID 1). Example:

IDE 0=Program Drive (Master)
IDE 1=CD-RW (Master) + 2nd CD-ROM (Slave)

IDE 2 RAID=Audio Drive
IDE 3 RAID=Audio Drive

The RAID controller can tell the processor that everything hooked to IDE RAID 2 and 3 are actually 1 Harddrive eventhough, it is actually 2 harddrives. End Result: Close to (but probably not actually) 200MB transfer rate using standard IDE ATA100 hard drives. Oh and you don't have to use the RAID ports in a RAID array, you can use them as normal IDE ports as well, and spending the $30 more now is cheaper than spending $50 or more for a standard IDE controller card. Even if you don't plan to use the RAID functions it is nice to have the extra IDE ports.

And heck if you just happen to have 4 extra hard drives lying around, the KG-7 supports RAID 0+1, where the system stripes the master drives on each channel and mirrors all of the information to the slaves as striped backups. You say overkill, I say not if you ever plan to do some multimedia projects, such as your own home grown video production for the new hit single song you might have just written.
 
I'm afraid I've got to correct you, Atterion.

Raid 0 = striping, Raid 1 = mirroring

Raid 0 uses 2 drives as one. Pro: up to double the sustained transferrate of a single drive. Con: If one drive fails, the data on the other drive is lost as well, therefore twice the chance of losing data (but you do back up anyway, don't you ;) )

Raid 1 uses 2 drives. Both drives contain exactly the same data. Pro: You have an instant backup when one drive fails. Con: you can store only half the amount of data.

200MB transferrate on a ATA 100 channel? Sorry, wrong again. The maximum theoretical transferrate remains 100 megabytes/sec. There is no way you can push more than 100 megabytes/sec through a ATA 100 channel.
Secondly: A really fast IDE drive nowadays may be able to do 30 megabytes (sustained, and that's very important for hd recording) per second. Double that and you're still not even close to 100 megabytes.

cache bursts that can peak well over the sustained data rate aren't very important for hd recording.
 
Thanks for the RAID designation correction. My bad. But you too are mistaken. I am looking at the IDE RAID benchmarks from PCPlus magazine (Autumn 2001 issue). Indeed in a striped array the theoretical transfer rate is 200MB a second, 100mb per IDE controller X 2 controllers. PCPlus was not able to reach these speeds but were able to achieve 150MB/sec sustained, which is still twice as fast as you are going to get out of a single drive. You are correct in that, if one drive goes down, the other is useless (hence the RAID 0+1 option, which=even more$$$). But all said and done (I won't defend RAID until I'm blue in the face), having four seperate Master IDE channels to work with is a beautiful thing. Sorry for any confusion, hope this clarifies what I was trying to say earlier.
 
4 Notes:

1. The KG-7 RAID uses the HighPoint HPT 370A RAID Controller

2. The KG-7 will only recognize 4GB of memory if it is all Registered Ram. However I have read several benchmarks on this board which actually performed better with unregistered memory (4GB of unregistered Ram will read as 2GB).

3. This is one of the most Overclockable boards around (I don't recommend of course), and all voltage settings, bus speeds, etc. are all configured within Award Bios. And Abit has thrown in some nice Hardware Monitoring software as well.

4. WRITE THIS ONE DOWN!!!
The only problem I encountered assembling mine is the BIOS recognized my AMD XP 1900+ as a Duron 1200 at 100mhz bus. Everytime I manually set it to Athlon XP (or any 133mhz bus processor for that matter), the system would freeze. If this does happen go into Advanced Chipset-Chipset Driving Control, and the top option is Control CPU P/N Value which is set to Auto. Change this to Manual and the 3 settings below it become available. The first option here is SlewRate Control which is set to 3 (default). Change this value to the maximum setting (I believe that was a 7 value-maybe 9). Do not change anything else here. Then all you have to do is go back into the SoftMenuIII screen to pick your processor. Pick AMD XP 2000+ 133mhz (266mhz RAM still uses a 133mhz bus speed). Voila, you should be good to go.
 
OK I'm rambling!!! 2 Last thoughts. If you have issues with the whole slew thing mentioned above, your system should work no problems as a "Duron 1200". And by no means do I wish to start an OS war here...BUT. I just built this sytem and I Installed a fresh version of Windows 98 SE (Which was and still is my current operating system on an AMD K6-2 500Mhz-now a poor old file server). Despite having a brand new full version of Windows XP, I wanted to A/B the performance of the 2 systems with identical OS, and then A/B 98SE with XP. Hands down, XP is the best thing since sliced bread (For PC Home users anyways). Rock solid stability. But check to see if there are XP (or even Win 2000) drivers available for your hardware (The XP CD includes like 10,000 drivers though). And many software titles won't work properly under XP (even though XP allows you to emulate the older Windows OS's 95-98-ME-NT). I haven't had a problem with any audio programs yet, and most all Hardware and Software companies are releasing patches, updates, and drivers for XP. Even some of my Archaic devices (Lexmark 1000 Printer), were upgradeable. Microsoft has a downloadable upgrade advisor program at their website, which advises of any conflicts, you may run into, and then you can research those problems to see if the manufacturers have fixed them. Sorry I'm Done Now.
 
THANKS!!

Uhhh, gee guys, thanks! I had a guy at work explaining this whole RAID thing to me but a lot of it went over my head. Having it here to read & reread makes it much easier to pound into my brain. So, which configuration are you guys using? RAID 0 or RAID 1?
Changing my shopping cart to contain the KG7 RAID MOBO and 2 80GB 7200 drives for audio and a 40GB 7200 program drive notches it up to (gulp) about $1250. That's just a guage though for me to use to get an idea of how much I'll be spending. When I get ready to buy I'll shop prices agressively. It's probably going to be the second week in July after I get back from vacation. Maybe by that time the AMD Hammer CPU will be out and the XP processor prices will start to fall even more. Thanks again guys. This is great information.

Mike
 
hmm

i was going to have 2 hard drives in raid for games, and one not in raid for music

cause games need more performance, and i didn't think the increased speed would be noticed with music applications.
Do you think its worth it using the raid for music?
 
I have yet to come up with a situation yet were my ATA100 7200rpm 40GB can't keep up for audio. But the RAID is excellent for its graphic abilities. But keeping the hard drive pipelines free in audio apps, will keep everything else a little happier.
 
hmm

yea, could i have say, 2 40 gigs in raid for music, and 2 40 gigs in raid for games n shit?
 
Atterion said:
Sorry for any confusion, hope this clarifies what I was trying to say earlier.
Click to expand...

Ah well, ok. I see what you meant. Giving each drive its own controller (all drives as master) would give a theoretical 200MB/s. I was mentally stuck in a more affordable $$$ range. :)

However hardly any consumer PC on the market is equipped to handle transferrates of (theoretically) more than 133MB/s. That's the limit of the standard 32bits/33mhz PCI bus and it would have to share those 133MB/s with all the other PCI devices like LAN and USB controllers. You'd need a (>$$$) 64bits and/or 66mhz PCI to reach beyond that.

But all things considered... There rates are WAY more than any home/project studio would need. So in a sense this discussion is getting to a point that it's just for argument's sake. But it's fun though :)
 
You are absolutely correct. I myself am looking into a second computer to network with this one (this one being my Audio computer). I am looking at a Dual Athlon MP with Full 64bit PCI slots, to run Lightwave 7, Adobe Photoshop 6.0 Adobe Priemere 6.00, and Adobe After Effects 5.5. They all run formidabley on my system know for strictly graphics purposes. But add audio to the Equation and forget it. 64 Bits would rock. But we are talking $$$$$$$$$$. The processors are cheap enough (comparitively), but a motherboard with 64 bits are PRICEY. Speaking of pricey, has anyone here for giggles priced out 4 GB of memory. At a Crucial (Only the best..too me anyways), we're only talking about.....Wait For IT.....$2000. OUCH!!!
 
You really don't want to use Win98 man...trust me.

I was using it with my Q10...Win98se even....98 is a nightmare....

the 2k drivers work perfectly now...don't know about XP...but, 2k is better anyways.
 
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