setup advice?

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cobaltblue

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Hey all, I'm moving my home studio into a small premises soon

I've dicthed the old Mac and Logic setup infavour of Neuendo/PC (I grew up on Cubase VST)

I'm a bit out of touch with PC technology because I havnt had one for years but here's what i've got lined up (unfortunately not going to be able to test till I move into premesis)

IBM Intellestation Dual 2ghz XEON processors
1.5gb RD RAM (im guessing i'll need more)
4x 34gb
2x Terratec EWS88MT (giving 16in/out) - I had one of these cards when they first came out 6 ish years ago and I swear by them - best second hand buy 8in8out card IMO

I'm going to be mainly recording 8-16 tracks with mostly Ezdrummer drum tracks, The Grand piano tracks and the rest audio ( I have some Waves Platinum + Antares filters and Autotune in the plugs department)

Thoughts? I think my main downfall is memory, Im not sure how RD RAM performs. I only had 768mb sd ram in my Mac and it started to stuggle
 
I´d say that a downfall would be that the terratec has RCA inputs which means you can't use balanced signals AFAIK.

1,5 GB RAM is not that bad.
 
yeah but i'm only running short cables from the card to preamps so the fact thats unbalanced isnt going to affect audio quality ?
 
also my two processors show up in XP as four processors, hyperthreading right?

I read here from some old posts that the xeon server processors were awful and pointless for pro audio >?
 
cobaltblue said:
also my two processors show up in XP as four processors, hyperthreading right?

I read here from some old posts that the xeon server processors were awful and pointless for pro audio >?
Click to expand...


They could be dual core processors.. What xeons?
 
If you're using VSTi (virtual instruments) like EZDrummer (which itself takes up almost 300MB of RAM) and also other ones like a Piano, then definitely stock up on RAM.

I'd get 2GB minimum. But you may want to get as much as possible. I think that's like 4GB but I could be wrong.

I don't know about RCA being unbalanced, but with short cable runs it shouldn't matter. My Audiophile 24/96 has RCA jacks and I just got a cheap Y-cable from Radio Shack. No noticeable noise or degradation of sound quality or anything like that.
 
Yeah I can put up to 4gb of ram in it, only problem is IBM RD RAM is WAY exspensive!

So the cpu's, theyre good to go? just cant get any authoritive opinion on the old Xeon cpus and me in my thinking just though "hey two 2ghz cpu's should be grand!"
 
When it comes to content creation (meaning: 3D, 2D, Video, or Audio). Your biggest concerns are RAM, Processor, and Drive space. That goes for any of them.

Recording multi-track audio requires the most out of all, 3D coming second. While the PCI interface may be doing some neat stuff. Fact of the matter is your processor is dealing with all of your VST's, instruments, and effects. So you really want to make sure your Processor and RAM are as fast as you can buy. Over all you want your computer to be able to eat floating point calculations like it's Cpt'n Crunch.

Personally I went for an AMD 64x2 running at 3.01Ghz. and 4GB of ram. My PCI interface is an E-mu 0404. I have been running on Vista Ultimate x64 for over 8months now, and my latency stays between 4-8 depending uppon the song. I use Reason, and the RDK2.0 Re-Fill for my drum tracks. over I'm very happy with how it performs.

As far as the Xeon processor goes there is nothing wrong with it, but over all when it comes to audio you want more Bandwidth so, more Ghz is what you really want to look for. Name, and type of processor only starts to matter when you get into different core names like Aliceton, Beckton, or what ever. Because, usually things like Cache size, and cache levels are changing. and RDRAM looks to be almost a waste. As DDR2 can operate at about an equal level, is cheaper, and more common making it easier to obtain.

Newegg.com is your friend. My advice is to build the machine your self. Over all you get more bang for you buck. I hadn't built a box in 5 years and after a day of reading, and shopping on line I was set.

good luck
 
Cheers for the advice, I figured my money was best spent elsewhere as I was given the IBM free and 4ghz dual processing power for free would be enough, although I'll spend a bit on an upgrade

Surely 2x 2ghz xeon processors and 4gb of ram is going to handle pretty much anything I throw at it ?
 
Well you can't beat free no matter how hard you try, and yes the dual 2 Ghz should take every thing pretty nicely. As well if you can go for that 4GB of ram I definetly reccomend it as it will allow the computer to keep more information in RAM, and have to do less swapping form the disk. Its verry helpful when you are dealing with a ton of samples or entire instrument recordings all at once.
 
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