computer power

[7LightWithOutHeat7]

i'm thinking of building me a new system how mutch power do you need i was thinking of an amd 2800+ or an intel 2.4 with hyperthreding

[AndrewTodd]

Buy the best you can afford.

FYI my CPU is a measily Duron 800, but it'll run Sonar with 8 tracks of audio and a load of plugins no problem whatsoever.

[Ibateur]

AMD (price/performance), DDR, RAID (0), good soundcard.

[JESTER700]

Wat exactly are you gonna DO with it? There are pros & cons to everything - CPU brand, RAID or no, etc., so tailor it to your needs.

er, what are your needs?

[7LightWithOutHeat7]

record audio i'm running cubase. what about the pentium 4 800mhz front side bus dose that make that mutch of a difrence ?

[GuyCool]

I would have thought that pretty much any Pentium 4 or equivalent with more than 512Mb Ram will have the power to do what you want to do with a ton of headroom. It's soft synths and high end reverbs that are going to chew up power.
Probably more important is to make sure the chipset appropriate, and the USB(?2)/Firewire interfaces aren't going to drop out if you do audio stuff through them.
My 3 yrold PIII 800 still does all I want, with M audio interfaces-no problem.

Guy

[hexa-db]

I'd make sure to get a decent soundcard too (nothing by Creative!). Having a decent soundcard with good, stable drivers will make a huge difference. In fact, I think a good soundcard is more important than getting the quickest processor.

[Polaris20]

I just built a computer for my wife:

AMD 2200+
WD 80gig, 7200rpm
256MB DDR RAM
52x CDRW

$405. Will do 24 tracks, I'm sure, seeing as how my 1800+ comes close to that.

[7LightWithOutHeat7]

thanx to all

[hexa-db]

I posted some stuff on a similar topic yesterday that might help:

http://www.jemsite.com/phpbb/viewtop...asc&highlight=

[BeastofLove]

The specs you listed should be fine.
I was using a 1GHz Intel PIII w/ 512MB RAM and it did the recording job with no problems.
However, you'll notice a big difference in wav editing / processing time if you get a faster CPU and more RAM. Wav editing is much faster on my P4 3.0GHz with 1024MB RAM.

-Ben

[Anton]

Originally Posted by 7LightWithOutHeat7

i'm thinking of building me a new system how mutch power do you need i was thinking of an amd 2800+ or an intel 2.4 with hyperthreding

Should be good enough yeah , make sure you have a good sound card and you'll be fine , plenty of memory too

[Kev Brigden]

Originally Posted by hexa-db

I'd make sure to get a decent soundcard too (nothing by Creative!). Having a decent soundcard with good, stable drivers will make a huge difference. In fact, I think a good soundcard is more important than getting the quickest processor.

hehe I'm using a Sound Blaster Audigy, and I've had no problems with it...

[track7]

Obviously more is more, so if you've got the cash go for it. And by that i mean mac and pro-tools

However if you wanna stick with PC's and then i'd recomend any of the new athlonxp or pIV will give a LOT of tracks.

These days multiple tracks next to NO processing power or hard disk speed (providing its 7200 min which all are i reckon now). The drain on CPU is FX and even more so Virtual Instruments.

Put it this way i can get 40 mono tracks of audio running smoothly on a PIV 1.6 ghz with 256 RAM and a 7200 60 gig drive. PROVIDIng there is no procesing added.

Keep in mind my system specs above and i'll give you a typical project of mine and what i sensibly run.

HALion virtual sampler - triggering wizoo 24bit stereo yamaha acoustic drum samples and Claude Bessue(sp?) String Samples.

2-4 tracks of acoustic guitar
4-8 tracks of electric guitar
Either 1-2 tracks of bass guitar OR midi track of bass(s) off my yamaha synth on the soundcard

1-4 tracks of drum loops, sound fx

2 main vocal tracks
2 harmony tracks

Virtual Instruments soft synths NI B4 organ, Absynth, FM7

I put compression and softclip and gating on nearly every audio track and i'll have reverb, chorus and delay in the send returns as standard.

This lot puts the CPU load at 45-55 percent and will run smoothly. IF and this is a nice big IF!!!! you are careful with the disk space on the drive.

This is something i've discovered over the past couple of setups i've had. Say you have a 60 gig drive then never fill it past 30 gig, and keep it de-fragmented as possible. The more full the drive gets the harder the disk hs to work to pre-load the audio data into memory and if your arrangement suddenly kicks in from a couple of tracks to say 15 then its gonna mess up. By keeping the drive under half full and de-fragmented you get the best performance from it and far less mess ups.

David

[mike2nyc]

if you can spring the coule extra $'s it would be best to allocate and record all of your audio files to an external hard drive at least 7600 with an oxford chipset.