What is overkill?

[illuminationexcursion]

What in you guys' opinions is overkill for a recording computer?

I'm thinking of building the following comp for recording.

Asus P5Q or variant
E8400 Core2 Duo 3.0ghz
8GB DDR2/800 (dirt cheap)
160GB for OS + 1TB for recording
Creative 1212M or 1616M
Gefore GT9400 (any cheap graphic card with dual monitor output, recommendations?)

Got a few questions:

1. How does Core2 Quad change the equation? Are DAWs designed to exploit multi core? Most bench mark tests you see around are gamer/graphic biased. Anyone has bench mark tests done with DAWs say Cubase, Pro-Tools etc...?

2. Does it really make a difference "scratching" your tracks on a separate drive as opposed to the drive your OS is running on?

3. Also, what kinda case and PSU are really quiet. This is important to avoid a spinning fan sound in the background of all your recordings. Lian Li has some sexy looking cases that are designed to be dead quiet, but its quite expensive. Any recommendations?

4. Which DAWs are 64-bit compatible? Definitely gonna run a 64bit platform to milk the 8gb ram.

 

[gutturalpiss]

1. No. Quad ish no good for DAW.

2. Yes. Your OS ish scratching the butt of active primary disk and you if also same time scratch how can?

3. Ish good. Antec and CoolerMaster also ish can try. Plus remember there ish quiet fans for GPU and CPU. They ish call "Silent HSF".

4. Get Linux or Ask Cheez.com

 

[illuminationexcursion]

1. No. Quad ish no good for DAW.

Is this result derived from personal experience or did you obtain it from certain benchmark tests that are published over the internet? Could you also be more specific as to why Quad core is not good for DAW?

2. Yes. Your OS ish scratching the butt of active primary disk and you if also same time scratch how can?

The syntax of this sentence simply confounds me. Perhaps you could rephrase it?

4. Get Linux or Ask Cheez.com

Which particular distribution of Linux are you referring to? What particular program would you recommend?

 

[Cheez]

Quiet fans can make quite a difference. I use Sythe S-Flex. It's a trade off between speed (rpm) and noise. Look for brands that give you the best rpm/noise ratio. And don't put in more fans than you need.

For 64-bit DAW, Sonar and Cubase 5 are 64-bit compliant. Sonar has been 64-bit complaint for 2 versions (7 and 8 ) and therefore more stable in 64-bit environment. I heard reports of instability with Cubase 5 in 64-bit environment (they just joined the 64-bit wagon in their latest version 5).

There's a trade off when using 64-bit DAW. Not all software/plugins are 64-bit compliant. This can be an issue. So you need to decide on your software/plugins of choice before selecting your OS and DAW. Most 32-bit plugins may work in 64-bit DAW via a bridge that the DAW software provides. Sonar 32-64bit bridge is quite stable. Cubase 5 bridge, I heard, isn't as stable...yet. I'm sure their update patches will resolve that eventually. However, 32-bit plugins within a bridge will not benefit from the extra RAM limit 64-bit provides. So...if all the plugins you use are going to be 32-bit, there's no point going for a 64-bit system. The whole point about 64-bit is using up to 8GM RAM, and the main usage for RAM are the plugins.

Protools is not 64-bit compatible...yet.

 

[gutturalpiss]

OK. Since you didn't understand my short and simple solutions (I surmise the humour isn't local to you), let me expand them:

1. How does Core2 Quad change the equation? Are DAWs designed to exploit multi core? Most bench mark tests you see around are gamer/graphic biased. Anyone has bench mark tests done with DAWs say Cubase, Pro-Tools etc...?

I can see you know that a program needs to take advantage of the technology for any performance to be gained. This is the primary issue and by now, I would guess that most vendors already have multi-threaded code in their DAW offerings. The question is whether this code is optimised, whether you're even getting 80% of the theoretical advantages divided by the summed costs.

I haven't seen any benchmarks done by a qualified body. It's all fragmented between various blog posts and forum topics. In summary, people seem to be taken in by the hype and believe that they're getting four times the performance. From personal experience, though, I've seen that the Law of Inverse Returns takes effect.

For a big studio, the investment can be justified. Otherwise, I advise against it. There are plenty of factors to take into consideration besides just the DAW, for eg. plug-ins. If a certain plug-in is badly coded or not even designed to multi-thread, there goes your investment.

2. Does it really make a difference "scratching" your tracks on a separate drive as opposed to the drive your OS is running on?

In a computer, a program's executable is read from the disk, transferred to RAM, where the program itself reads/writes from/back to the disk. As such, especially when you run a DAW (which is by itself I/O intensive), your hard disk will most probably be kept busy by the OS.

An operating system always has its own processes running. Sometimes these processes continue to stay in RAM and never call the disk until told to do so, or saved to disk (cached) and never read until required. Other times, and often times, a lot of mandatory processes/tasks will be accessing the disk as long as the system is not idle. I believe it's not difficult to understand now why "scratching the same butt" is cause for certain delays in processing as the disk then becomes a bottleneck. With a separate disk, your OS will never interfere since it'll have its own butt.

4. Which DAWs are 64-bit compatible? Definitely gonna run a 64bit platform to milk the 8gb ram.

This I have no solution to. Why I mentioned Linux is because it's got superior 64-bit capability and I have nothing else to say because like I said, Cheez would drop by :mrgreen:

I do have one advice, though. Aside from RAM, hybrid processing is never a good thing. If your platform is having to constantly call upon a bridge to translate registers, I see no reason why you shouldn't downgrade to x86. At least that way the processing is pure. If you really want 64-bit, make sure it's pure x86_64 all the way - and that includes your DAW software, plug-ins and everything else.

Even with Linux, if one needs VST (or any other plug-in architecture not available for x86_64), one can't benefit from a 64-bit platform as there's a peformance hit when the processing is interrupted to handle 32-bit code.

I believe Mac handles all this well enough and the user won't even notice a performance hit when it actually hits. Apple likes to keep their fans distracted.