Cheap, but robust audio pc build?

[henrygr]

Ultra,

Had a similar problem some years back. I think it is one of these two three things-

a Clock speed settings for your RAM in the bios

b While you are there, check that the system isn't set to shut down if the CPU hits a rediculously low temperature

c remove all CD/DVD roms. Faulty ones will reak havvoc on a system.

:)

[DrBunsen]

amd athlon xp 2200 with 1 gb ... will record 8 tracks of audio live with out glitching and also run some effects.

Wow.  I got the same results out of a 1995 Powermac.

If you go the second machine route, you might want to check out the price of a Mac Mini or an iMac, with an external Firewire HD and a Firewire or USB audio/MIDI interface.  Dual Intel Core2 CPUs for less than you might think, and they'll run Windows, Linux and OS X.

[ultra]

thank you, i will try these things.  what would be a good temperature to set the threshold at?

[DavidBanner]

depends on your cpu

check the manufacturer's website they will have temps on there

[stryd_one]

Wow.  I got the same results out of a 1995 Powermac.

I missed that... Yeh I used to more than double that on a P3 1GHz. Mind you I tuned the living &*^t outta that thing, my mates' 2GHz P4's couldn't beat it :) ... Oh and they were all server-grade parts...

I'll sign off by pointing out the oxymoron in the topic: "robust audio pc". hah.  ;D

[Jidis]

Most of that track count crap should be "drive throughput related". I remember being pissed when I had a PII with no decent audio card, playing something ridiculous like 50 or 60 tracks, and my 8100 Mac with it's wonderful Digi card would start screwing up after 12 or something. :'(

The PII had an ATA100 or something in it. Anything set at ATA33 or above will usually get me at least in the high 20M/sec sustained transfer rate (according to HDTach). I'd guess write speeds may be lower, but I'm not sure by how much. They're all sort of ridiculous numbers when you think about it (the number of tracks that is). FWIW, I think the old Macs with narrow SCSI topped out under 5M/s (by one of FWB's tests IIRC). Mine had an Ultrawide card in it, and I could still only get up to around 12 or 15M (a NubusPPC limitation I believe).

Now, the effects are another story..... :o

George

Speaking of CHEAP secondary machines. I've been reinstalling and fine tuning a rackmount P3 (actually a CeleronII/1100) with a Lexicon Core2 (yes, a Core2) for the past few days. I finished last night. It's got the Core2, a decent TNT4x AGP card, a USB2/FW card, and a 10/100 NIC running smoothly on an ASUS CusL2-C with a DVD burner, and the Powerstrip TSR feeding a giant fixed frequency monitor. I've fed it 8-24bit ADAT channels of tones to see that it records clean, and it does fine (knock on wood). It can also play full screen DVD,MPG,etc. smoothly. Had to turn off the Core's "low latency" option for that, but it's not really a tracking machine, plus there's analog cue capability.

[DragonMaster]

OK, if you want a cheap but good machine, it's quite easy, you just don't need to get a $500 video card, highly overclockable RAM and a motherboard that supports 3 video cards. It's not a gaming machine, so it's almost impossible to make it expensive. If you want any extra safety features(Mirrored HDDs), it will cost something.

First, the CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon 64 X2. Leave the BS arguments Intel and AMD guys give. There isn't one that is crap and the other is good. A new AMD X2 and Core2Duo passed enough revisions to be stable. What makes a system unstable is standard RAM and/or a cheap motherboard.

Get an Intel or an AMD(Socket AM2), it's as you want. Performance users tend to prefer the Core 2 Duo because it's easier to overclock and the architecture is newer/more performant than the X2, but they don't trust the stock Intel heatsink and compound. Get a dual core, or a quad core(Expensive tho) it will keep latency low if a background program decides to do something.

If you live in the US, buy from ZipZoomFly or NewEgg.

About everyone here forgot about the PSU, it's one of the most crirical components. Get a good Enermax, Corsair or Cooler Master. They pretty much have the same features. There are a few Enermax PSUs that provide maniac power filtering, which is preferable.

For a motherboard, watch before buying, EVERY companies have lemons(It's often the chipset's fault), but some make more reliable stuff. Look for DFI Expert, DFI-ACP, Asus, and cheaper but decent stuff like MSI, Foxconn and Gigabyte.

RAM : OCZ, Corsair, Mushkin, Crucial are great. Try to find RAM with low latency, and at least DDR2-667. Especially if running an AMD, since the memory controller is on the CPU rather than the motherboard, it's affected a lot more by the RAM size. You will probably run WinXP 32-bit, so get 2GB of RAM. XP 32-bit can't take 4GB, and 2GB is now the RAM size standard. RAM will be one of the most expensive part of your computer.

HDD : Get Seagate 320GB or + SATA2 Perpendicular-heads drives. They perform very well and perpendicular recording stores the data more safely. You can get multiple drives and run them in parallel, or mirrored, some options are safe, some not. Putting drives in parallel is faster, but you have more than twice the chances to lose your data. Mirrored, if one drive fails, there's still a backup. Both at the same time, well it's faster AND safe.

Video card: To prevent your comptuer from slowing down, don't get a motherboard with intergrated video, it's stealing the main RAM. If you just want to run 2D and maybe watch or encode video, an AMD/ATi X1650Pro will work great.

Sound card: There's onboard sound in EVERY computers now, it's crap. You should look for M-Audio and a couple other good companies, you might want to take a look at a Gadget Labs external box, these are pretty good apparently, but the company doesn't exist anymore. There are XP drivers, but note it will NOT work in Vista. Get an external card.

Case: You might want a silent one, there's Silverstone, Antec, CoolerMaster, Thermaltake, etc. you might want to look at. Antec has pretty cheap and silent stuff, the Sonata series. It comes with a low-end but decent PSU.

Optical drives : LiteON, NEC, LG.

About dual boot, you need either : two HDDs, or to resize your current partitions and leave space for the new system. Progs may get screwed with two same-OS installs tho.

This is pretty vague I know, if you need more details let us know.

[DragonMaster]

Just one little more thing, a Core 2 Duo might be interesting with the 30% and up price cuts Intel just announced.

[mikeb]

Just one little more thing, a Core 2 Duo might be interesting with the 30% and up price cuts Intel just announced.

Thanks Dragon, I wish I would've had those recommendations when I built my first pc. :) When are those Intel cuts due to take place?

Would someone mind telling explain a the pros or cons of setting up hard drives in Raid configuration as it relates to audio?

[DrBunsen]

There are lots of different kinds of RAID.  The wikipedia article is a good starting point.

The main ones you'll be interested in are RAID 0 (striped) and RAID 1 (mirrored). Mirrored RAID is basically making a real-time backup of one drive onto another ie all writes are done to both disks at once.  If one drive fails, you have all your data safe.

Striped RAID improves read and write speeds by splitting the data across two disks.  Basically it writes alternating blocks to each disk, treating them as one volume.  In theory this doubles your throughput, although there are overheads.  Problem is, if one disk goes down, your volume is toast, so you want ultra-reliable disks (Seagates) and regular backup. 

You can also do a combined 0+1 for speed and security if you have four disks.

You can do RAID on any kind of disk, SCSI, ATA, SATA, Firewire, even flash drives and floppies. It's probably best to use a hardware RAID PCI card if you can afford one, as this will take load off the CPU. You can also get server motherboards with hardware RAID onboard.  These will often also have two CPU sockets :D

[stryd_one]

Seeing as the word has been mentioned a couple of times, I just gotta say:

Don't overclock DAW's.

[DragonMaster]

Striped RAID improves read and write speeds by splitting the data across two disks.  Basically it writes alternating blocks to each disk, treating them as one volume.  In theory this doubles your throughput, although there are overheads.  Problem is, if one disk goes down, your volume is toast, so you want ultra-reliable disks (Seagates) and regular backup.

If they get out of sync as well, your HDDs can be good, and you can lose your data because of the mobo or something like that.

Don't overclock DAW's.

Should not be a problem if the chipset can lock the PCI bus, etc.

Recent computers shouldn't cause any problems, lots of motherboards are designed for overclocking.

[stryd_one]

Good RAID controllers can read the configuration of the array from the drives when the controller has lost it's array configuration, or never had the configuration because it's new, so a dead mobo shouldn't cause any data loss, and in all my years of server support I've only twice seen a controller go nuts and write corrupt data to a good array, so you're pretty safe there, just as safe as standard config.

And as for OC, It's not the mobo that's a worry, it's the soundcard. You won't hear it if you lose one or two of the 44100 or more samples taken every second (unless you're superman) but that doesn't mean it's OK ;) I'll leave it up to the individual, but don't say you weren't warned  ;D

[DavidBanner]

Stryd,

You won't hear it if you lose one or two of the 44100 or more samples taken every second

do you know of any way of testing for that ?

[Jidis]

You can "phase flip" files, if you've properly aligned the start points. Take the original and the copy on two different tracks, tweak the start points (spread the wave display way out and align them), then phase invert one of them and combine the two tracks. Ideally, they should cancel out, but anything left over should show as noise, spikes, etc. Of course, that's only good for digital transfers, but I've used it to check multi-track throughput via ADAT. My current testing is usually only inserting eight tone generators in a Nuendo session on one machine and sending them to the tracking machine via ADAT for a decent amount of time, then later skimming over it for noises. Not the most scientific thing in the world but my tracking demands are usually modest.

BTW- Haven't overclocked a studio machine in ages, but when I have, I've figured if I could run the stability test type of things, for lengthy amounts of time with no errors and decent temperatures, I was OK (usually tried to find the max, then went a notch slower). I wouldn't mess with any of those "weird" bus frequencies either for that though. This has all been on stuff that holds the cards and built-ins to the normal speeds.

George

Also-> DragonMaster, thanks for the recommendations earlier. I'm wishing for a better place to work in my tracking room right now, and the secondary machine in there doesn't quite cut it. I'll likely be doing the shift/rotate thing with my machines soon and maybe upgrading the main one and moving that one's board to the secondary. I was given a nice Dell P4, who's board was killed by lightning, so I may try to get that CPU in there somewhere, but there are machines everywhere here (home and studio).

[DrBunsen]

a Core 2 Duo might be interesting with the 30% and up price cuts Intel just announced.

And they're the CPUs in Macs now.

Gee, I wonder if this means Apple will drop their prices *cough*notbloodylikely*cough*

Still when you compare against similar speed and spec PCs, the Apples usually work out as the same price or cheaper.

[Jidis]

Still when you compare against similar speed and spec PCs, the Apples usually work out as the same price or cheaper.

Yeah, but very few people (especially not DIY'ers) will usually end up replacing full computers on each PC upgrade. With the Mac, you sort of have to. It was something I always dreaded and it never really got all that easy to swallow. My PCs tend to upgrade in sort of a "chunk" at a time, usually with MB/CPU combos being the biggie.

George

PS- Not meant as a "Mac vs. PC" comment, just pointing out an often overlooked detail. :)

[DrBunsen]

very few people ... will usually end up replacing full computers... With the Mac, you sort of have to.

Yeah, and software, don't forget the software.  If you pay for it that is *cough*  Except you can boot into Win with Bootcamp, or VM it with Parallels.

RAM and HDs at least are transferable, most pro and semi pro audio cards, and some video cards (with a ROM flash).  Finding a spanking new Mac with less of the above than you already have could be a challenge.

I really should get that cough seen to