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testing the e6850 for producing.

hellouuuuu guys,

after a massive computer crash in june i finaly bought my new machine today

its an asrock mainboard with core2duo e6850 and 2 gigabyte of 800 mhz ddr2 ram.
as harddisk i use a samsung sata hd with 400 gb for the time being.
i payed 599 � for the whole system, pretty good price i think.

and.. i guess it will beat the pants off my old athlon xp 2800 system


will do some extensive tests tonight, review follows latter...

let me how good it is. im back home btw so i can start producing again.

talk soon.

Waiting a review! I am about to buy one of these soon.

looks nice^^ I'm also in a desperate need for a new producing-computer..
I've been looking at core2duo before, but now core2duo has droped ALOT in price, at least here in Sweden, and so have the slightly better core2quad (with 4 cores instead of 2 as in core2duo).. So I'm probably go for that instead.. Core2Quad @ 2,6Ghz and 4GBs of RAM, man that's gonna be a dream to produce on! xD

...on that note, has anyone heard how the quads handle the mainstream production suites and VSTs? Good idea or bad idea?

i have core2quad... is the win.

quote:

Originally posted by 3F05Q ...on that note, has anyone heard how the quads handle the mainstream production suites and VSTs? Good idea or bad idea?

not all will support multiple, and the ones that support, usually support just dual.

quote:

Originally posted by a98 not all will support multiple, and the ones that support, usually support just dual.

Yeah, that I'm aware of. Let me rephrase my question then, since it wasn't clear:

I've heard/read that some programs that don't support dual run like crap on dual, even worse than w/ single cuz they don't know how to handle it. So I suppose my question is, does a dual proc. supporting program STILL take full advantage of one set up dual core processors?

I hope that's a bit more clear.

I've been running a dual clovertown system for nearly a year now and certain applications scale much better than others.

Cubase is horrible at it. It does use all the cores, but if you have many live inputs the amount of "Baseline" CPU that gets chewed up is horrendous. If I have 32 I/O running, I'm at 1/3 CPU load.

Doesn't sound so bad until you realise that on a standard core 2 duo CPU the load is around 15% doing the same thing... To put that in perspective, I have 8 cores accross the 2 clovertown CPUs running at 2.4GHz on a 1006Mhz Bus (No, they're not "Release" parts for those trying to work out what chips I actually have), the core 2 Duo has 2 cores running at 1.86 GHz!

Bad bad bad Steinberg!

Pro Tools on the otherhand is awesome. Very very well handled multi threading. I can run flat out with no problems and the amount of plugins I can have running is insane.

So now I write & sequence on the core2duo, and record and mix on the clovertown machine..

I don't know about other apps as I don't use them.. Your Milage may Vary..

Reaper has really good multi core utilisation. Probably the best of all of them. For the rest, I would stick to dual cores. FL and Ableton are absolutely crap at multithreading and you're best off with a SINGLE core.

Don't expect multi-core performance of programs to improve either. Chances are it is as good as it will ever be, due to limitations in the engine.

I don't really know about that man, the future is multicored isn't it? Seems a bit like the devs at these software companies are just going to have to bite the bullet one day and recode their wares.. unless they already are.

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm Don't expect multi-core performance of programs to improve either. Chances are it is as good as it will ever be, due to limitations in the engine.

The problem is, when you look at it in a business-like (cost vs. benefit) way, it makes little sense for them to rewrite the engines.

I've heard rumours that Gol from Image-Line won't ever be doing it, because FL can't support it without a MAJOR rewrite. Now, lets consider that the average FL user is a complete nublet (it's true, everyone starts on FL, including me) and wouldn't know the difference. Clearly the benefit is minimal, and the cost is a lot. With the free lifetime updates, there is even less incentive. This is why IL are devoting their time to making bullshit plugins and DJ programs rather than fixing FL.

I'm basically heaps pissed off at them. Pretty glad I didn't end up buying FL! Suckers.

Ableton et al. I can't speak for. Live does have much better multi-core support than FL, but it is still not great. Cubase and Sonar are pretty decent on quads, but again, nowhere near as good as Reaper. Reaper had the benefit of being developed right when multi-core started to be introduced.

It makes some sense for them to rewrite the engines, because otherwise people like us start talking about using reaper/sonar, the programs which DO have some decent support.

As to ableton, I can say from experience that it supports at least dual core quite well, I used to use a sngle core centrino 2.26 Ghz, the track count would be aboutut 8 tracks of synths and 70% CPU usage, if I tried to get more the CPU would really flake...

Now I'm using a core 2 duo 2.26 and I can get 15 or so tracks @ about 30% usage; I actually haven't ever maxed out this CPU. That proves pretty well that something has changed, probably the new architecture helps a little too... But the main difference has to be the dual cores. So ableton seems to support dual core well, but quad core isn't something I've exprienced.

I cheated and my home brew is running OSX. Waiting for Logic 8.. :-)

quote:

Originally posted by kitphillips It makes some sense for them to rewrite the engines, because otherwise people like us start talking about using reaper/sonar, the programs which DO have some decent support. As to ableton, I can say from experience that it supports at least dual core quite well, I used to use a sngle core centrino 2.26 Ghz, the track count would be aboutut 8 tracks of synths and 70% CPU usage, if I tried to get more the CPU would really flake... Now I'm using a core 2 duo 2.26 and I can get 15 or so tracks @ about 30% usage; I actually haven't ever maxed out this CPU. That proves pretty well that something has changed, probably the new architecture helps a little too... But the main difference has to be the dual cores. So ableton seems to support dual core well, but quad core isn't something I've exprienced.

did you check the actual utilisation of each core? check in task manager, you can see how much of each core is being used. i gave ableton a bash, one core was about 30%, other was 5% (which i doubt was even ableton).

Thats not consistent at all with what I have.... I'm getting equal graphs between the two cores, with the only difference is that one core is maybe 5 percent lower. Exactly the same spikes and troughs though, and really almost no difference between the two levels.

I think we must have different setups... I assume we're both talking about live 6?

quote:

Originally posted by kitphillips Thats not consistent at all with what I have.... I'm getting equal graphs between the two cores, with the only difference is that one core is maybe 5 percent lower. Exactly the same spikes and troughs though, and really almost no difference between the two levels. I think we must have different setups... I assume we're both talking about live 6?

yeah, i was just using the demo + inbuilt stuff though. maybe 3rd party plugins are handled better?

quote:

Originally posted by echosystm yeah, i was just using the demo + inbuilt stuff though. maybe 3rd party plugins are handled better?

Could it be the fact that it was the demo? Maybe they disabled multi core in the demo version

Also, I was basing that off a session with a fair few audio tracks and effects, as well as 3rd party plugin (basically a standard session) so maybe that has something to do with it.

fl7 has this on it's new features:

"Multi-core safe generators can now be threaded for performance gain on multi-core CPUs."

anyone care to explain what that really means..

quote:

Originally posted by a98 anyone care to explain what that really means..

multi-core safe vst INSTRUMENTS will run on other cores. so, most vst instruments will load themselves onto your second core, but not all. no vst effects ever will. considering that vst effects take up 75% of your cpu usage, it's a massive issue. problem is, Gol can't easily fix this, because the fl studio engine was never designed to support multiple audio threads.

as it is, most of my projects result in one core sitting on 70%, while the other sits on ~10-20%.

thanks for the answer! well that's still better than no support at all..

hey! it seems my that my thread and this one are very similar!
any help?!

http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...7&forumid=48&s=

thx

So if I had to choose between the E6850 or the Q6600, which one would you suggest I buy for a DAW?

On a side note, anyone seen XP DAW edition and tried it? Thoughts?

What's XP DAW edition about, Magnus? I recently got a copy of tinyxp which is like a 200mb install of XP and cuts out all the unnecessary bullcrap, frees up like an additional 100 meg ram that xp used to use, and i'm pretty sure is easier on the CPU too.. I'm considering installing that when I build my next machine.

quote:

Originally posted by Magnus So if I had to choose between the E6850 or the Q6600, which one would you suggest I buy for a DAW? On a side note, anyone seen XP DAW edition and tried it? Thoughts?

Depending upon what audio program you use, it's probably safest to go with a dual core.

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