I posted this in chillout, but i would appreciate people who actually KNOW about what an audio workstation computer should have seeing the thread and providing comments as well.

http://www.tranceaddict.com/forums/...threadid=134597

Please let me know your thoughts, especially on the soundcard.

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Difficult to say without more info.

Will you work a lot with audio (I'm counting hardware synths and samplers here also), or with Vsti's? Will it be the central unit (as in all the instruments are routed directly through it) or will you use an external mixer for easy patching?

For your processor, Intel or Amd, it's about equal. The newest P4's have hyperthreading, but most sequencers/audio progs still have some quirks with it. Be aware AMD's run hotter, and cooling has to be watched more closely. If you want to keep it quiet, look for a good case (Chieftec are great for noise dampening), get a decent heatsink with a quiet fan (Thermalright SLK800/900/947U with a quiet fan is one of the best combo's, Papst are best performance/noise fans).

For audio editing, lot's of ram won't really make that much difference, but it will if you use softsamplers (they eat up ram). Try to get as much as you can afford basically. Prefer single ram chips, and try to get RAM that is certified CAS2 at least.

The chipset, dunno, KT600 is pretty new and new KT revisions tend to have bugs most of the time.

CD/DVD : if you're serious about audio, Plextor is still the way to go (did you know they design their drives together with a mastering engineer to make sure it has the best possible quality for audio work?).

Motherboards : Soltek are pretty good, but like Epox, they are mainly made for people who like to overclock. If you want performance and stability, Asus and Abit are still the reference.

Video card : if you're not an hardcore gamer, a "normal" Geforce or Radeon will do, FX5200 is more than enough. If you wanna do video editing, a VIVO (video in video out) card could be useful though.

Now the soundcard... If you're serious with audio, forget the audigy right away. But here it depends what you really wanna do.
If you just want to do some stereo work (audio editing, softsynths etc), look at the M-audio Audiophile 24/96 or the Terratec DMX6fire 24/96.
But if you want to use the workstation as a real central unit (with synths connected to it and all) you might need more i/o's. On PC based systems, you can't get much better than RME. The Multiface is a good start, but it's expensive. The higher M-audio Delta ranges are worth considering too.

Having a killer system isn't all, it must be configured properly too. Get back to me if you want more info on that.

sounds good

Oh yeah, forgot, the harddrive is also important. If you can afford it, get a separate physical drive for your audio files.

What matters most is seek time but even more : sustained transfer rate. Best of the best is still a SCSI setup, but it's so expensive it's almost solely for pro setups. SATA (Serial Ata) is fastest when it comes to IDE HD's, but be aware there are much reported problems with XP not detecting such drives.

Stick with the known brands, Seagate Barracuda's are great, Maxtors are great too (but be sure to get them with fluid bearings), and Western Digital are nice too. Try to get with 8MB cache if you can.

quote:

Originally posted by Dj Thy Oh yeah, forgot, the harddrive is also important. If you can afford it, get a separate physical drive for your audio files. What matters most is seek time but even more : sustained transfer rate. Best of the best is still a SCSI setup, but it's so expensive it's almost solely for pro setups. SATA (Serial Ata) is fastest when it comes to IDE HD's, but be aware there are much reported problems with XP not detecting such drives. Stick with the known brands, Seagate Barracuda's are great, Maxtors are great too (but be sure to get them with fluid bearings), and Western Digital are nice too. Try to get with 8MB cache if you can.

RAID is also very important/nice when it comes to production. RAID 1, will allow lower seektimes (IE faster access), and will be fully redundant, so if one drive dies, the other will still have all the data. RAID and production go hand in hand!

--djway

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Yes, and no. Seek time reduction is useful, but not as important as sustained transfer rate, as that dictates the track count. And usually, consumer RAID systems (mostly controllers that are integrated on the motherboard) don't make huge difference there. An harddisk with high sustained rate (look at those badass 15k RPM scsi disks) is still faster for audio than a RAID array

But on the redundancy of data, agreed, can't be safe enough.

quote:

Originally posted by djway RAID is also very important/nice when it comes to production. RAID 1, will allow lower seektimes (IE faster access), and will be fully redundant, so if one drive dies, the other will still have all the data. RAID and production go hand in hand! --djway

Where did you get such misinformation?????? I'm assuming you're talking about hardware-based raid and only read operations. Even then, this statement is actually wrong. RAID 1 is Mirroring, which means:

a) 50% of HD space is for fault tollerance

b) Unless you're doing true HARDWARE RAID, such as with Separate RAID controller ex: Adaptec or DELL or HP (not the one on your motherboard) - performance is not improved. Even in HARDWARE RAID config, performance is as good as if you were running on a single drive. The only advantage you gain is fault tolerance. Your motherboard-based RAID actually relies on your Motherboard CPU and takes away much needed clock cycles. In best case scenario you're still running as fast as the speed of non-raid configuration. The read improvement is marginal and is offset by write operations.

Here are some facts:
http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf...ncepts/perf.htm

The best site for reliable information is www.tomshardware.com

As I am reading some of the info above, I just sit and cringe... Use google to search for subjects like "Build DAW" or "Digital Audio Workstation" - there are tons of sites with info, just keep in mind the following:

1. Don't shave costs on motherboard and CPU. While AMD is a cheaper choice, compatibility issues and obscure problems may introduce millions of anomalies. Go for Intel chipset with Intel CPU. Motherboard should be ASUS, Gigabit, or Abit. Don't buy overclocker's board - you are looking for stability, not a dubious marginal increase in performance. you want stability.


2. If you plan to use your system for every day operations, create either a multi-boot setup or use VMWare - do not use your box for things like surfing the net, playing games, etc. You want to have a pristine configuration that is free of any junk.

3. Do not have any hardware-intensive apps running while you are recording or mastering. That means disable antivirus and disk defragmentation utilities.

4. have enough ram so that you don't have to have a page file

5. Did I mention do not install games/file sharing utils/etc? The last think you want is some moron downloading stuff from your HD while you're trying to record your latest masterpiece on the same HD

6. Creating partition does not mean you are now running 2 drives. I'm amazed how many people don't understand that installing OS on partition C: and Cubase on partition D: actually reduces performance!

Check out SOS for a great article on optimizing performance on XP system:
http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/Mar...f88f7379e698815

Ok, back to flipping burgers

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