Todays Computer Power..

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Mix_Trix

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I've been holding off buying a new computer for some time now.. but waiting for them to get powerful enough to do what I want it to do.. I'd like to have at least 32 tracks of audio with effects on each.. most send effects in Nuendo.. but would also like to run 2 VSTi instruments also.. just wondering how much performance I can get out of a newer 2.53GHz computer or 3 GHZ..? thanks
 
Mix_Trix said:
I've been holding off buying a new computer for some time now.. but waiting for them to get powerful enough to do what I want it to do.. I'd like to have at least 32 tracks of audio with effects on each.. most send effects in Nuendo.. but would also like to run 2 VSTi instruments also.. just wondering how much performance I can get out of a newer 2.53GHz computer or 3 GHZ..? thanks
Click to expand...

Plenty !!!
 
fast proccesor, fast ram and lots of it, high end mother board, fast hard drives, good audio card, good softwear with good plugins. IF its all good, then it should do you find. I have songs now with 20-30 tracks, with each of them having at least 1 plugin on, some up to 3. (most of which are the waves plugins) And im just noticing slowdowns now with all of that. I think because i need to reformat. But i only have a 1.2 gig thunderbird, 512 megs of pc133 ram (Not even DDR!) and some fast hard drives (IDE no SCSI).

I think you'd be good. They have that new hyper threading pentium 4 out, maybe that would make a difference.
 
I have only a 1ghz thunderbird 512 DDR and IDE 7200 rpm drives. It kills me to see people going for the latest computer hardware. I've had one real crash and it was a screwey plugin. I stack endless tracks just because I can. I've never even seen a problem or slow down no matter how many plugins I use. I'm convinced it's because since I built this DAW computer I haven't ever installed any extraenous software on it. No internet or games, no video capture or video phone, no printshop or scanner apps.
I'm preaching the doctrine of the isolated DAW for the rest of my days.
My old 450 AMD computer still runs as many 16 bit tracks as I can throw at it. I'm gonna use it as a sampler...and nothing else.

You only need so much computer for audio recording.:)
 
Jake hit it on the nose. ONLY for audio appz, NOT for Ichabod Crane.
If you put other crap on it will slow it way down.

Only audio appz and audio app drivers.

If you only have one computer and need to use it for other stuff as well, get another hard drive, each with their own OS. So you can have a dual boot system.
 
I only have a 2.1 gig athalon with 768mb ram and a 80 gig hard drive...does me fine
 
Remember what each part of the computer is really used for.

-The processor is used intensively for running plugins. If you want to run a lot of plugins, on multiple channels, you'll need a lot of processor.

-The hard drive is written to for recording audio. If you want to record audio at a high bit depth and sample rate, you'll need a fast hard drive. No less than a 7200 rpm IDE drive. 10,000 rpm SCSI drives are better, but more expensive.

-RAM is used to buffer reads and writes. During recording and mixing, the more of the project you can load into RAM, the faster it will operate (RAM seek time is much faster than that of a hard drive). In general, the more, the better. And the faster, the better.

A good friend of mine runs a Pentium II 450Mhz, with SCSI drives, and lightpipe connections to a Yamaha O2/R. At 27 physical mono tracks, his CPU usage is only 20%. But all of his mixing, etc. are external to the CPU. As soon as he put one stereo channel of multiband compression in (a plugin), CPU usage shot up to 70%.

Bottom line, it really depends on how you intend to use the system. But if you buy top of the line, you probably won't be let down.

-mg
 
McFly,

most people wouldn't put the word "only" before that description...

:-)

"So, make like a tree... and get outta here!"

Great to see the DVD's finally out.

-mg
 
mgraffeo..I didnt mean only as in its like really fast. I meant only like its only a 2.1 and it could be a 3.1. but like I said it does great for me. I can get 30 tracks in protools with about 2-3 plugins running...some of them reverbs. Much better than my old comp...
 
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