Building a PC!

[Merlot]

I am a mac user for the time being, but am interested in building a PC for a dedicated DAW running SX3.
I havent been on a PC DAW in about 2 or 3 years, so I am a little behind. What do you suggest going with, excluding soundcard. Dont necessaarily have to have the best of the best, so think economically and practical.

Thanks

[Nigel Harkness]

I have built 2 DAW's (one for me and one for a friend) and have gone two seperate routes. You can get your motherboard and processor from a store (Comp USA is where I bought my stuff) and build it or you can get you stuff online where you can compare prices and get the best deal. The best website IMO for this is http://www.priceline.com. I personally liked just getting it from the store directly because I could talk to someone getting advice, i'm also very impatient and had a bunch of money to spend to thought.

Hope this helps :wink:

[Merlot]

The best website IMO for this is http://www.priceline.com.

Good GOd man! I am not lookiing for airline tickets! I am looking for computer equipment! :lol: :wink: :wink:

J/K

Dont know if I am going to do it, or just save up for a G5. Anybody around here using SX3 on a mac? How stable is it? Procesor hungry?

[Nigel Harkness]

Sorry I mean't this website:

Http://www.pricewatch.com

[cm0s]

Yeah, I have a Q regarding PC DAW's.

S-ATA HDD's is the way to go, right?

Should I get 7200 rpm HDD's or 10 000 ?

And also, what kind of RAM should I go for? I'm aiming at 2 GB but what kind of? DDR ? DDR2 ?

[saba]

Should I get 7200 rpm HDD's or 10 000 ?

The harddrive is the slowest part of your computer. It makes sense to spend a bit more extra money here to get them going as quick as you can.

(Which is why I went a little overboard and RAIDed a pair of 15k rpms)
________
RHODE ISLAND MARIJUANA DISPENSARIES (http://rhodeisland.dispensaries.org/)

[Merlot]

Yeah, I have a Q regarding PC DAW's.

S-ATA HDD's is the way to go, right?

Should I get 7200 rpm HDD's or 10 000 ?

And also, what kind of RAM should I go for? I'm aiming at 2 GB but what kind of? DDR ? DDR2 ?

Post your own thread you hijacker!!!!!!! :x :wink: :wink:

J/K
(not really)

[cm0s]

Post your own thread you hijacker!!!!!!! :x :wink: :wink:

J/K
(not really)

Mm, sorry, I thought you would be interested in this as well since you are also setting up a DAW and needed advice :?

[ten]

TBH sata drivers are hardly any faster than ide ones of the same speed/spec (very minimal). Raptors are faster but still nothing on high end scsi drives.

What you may want to look for is the ability on your motherboard for NCQ (native command queing) to the sata ports. NCQ means a drive can internally optimize the execution of workloads. Reordering of command ques improves performance by minimizing mechanical positioning latencies in the drive. Bascially this will make it shit hot fast :) (The drive itself also has to be NCQ compatible.)

I have 2x Diamondmax plus10 300gb 16mb cache NCQ sata drives and they are lush (very quiet to)

This kind of drive is perfectly acceptable for DAW use as a program drive or a audio samples drive. The only real time you may want to consider having something faster is if you're going to have a dedicated OS drive which will need low seek times.

As for DDR2. At the moment you can only get DDR2 for intel boards. AMD are waiting to see if DDR2 latencies will infact fall as at the moment DDR2 chips are performing slower than DDR1 stuff because of high latencies. Rumour has it AMD will skip DDR2 altogether and go DDR3 for dual-core at the mid/end 05.

ten

[Merlot]

Mm, sorry, I thought you would be interested in this as well since you are also setting up a DAW and needed advice :?

Its no problem, I really was joking for the most part. :lol:

[Onkel Dunkel]

Watch out for RAID systems. I have an on-board RAID controller and it chopped my sound to pieces when i recorded. After fighting with this problem for a month or two i disabled my RAID-controller and put my hard-disks on the normal ATA133 bus instead. Now everything works fine. I also heard about people having trouble with SATA-systems but i don?t have any experience with this. If you dicide to build a system yourself check this page first: http://www.pcmus.com/. I found it very usefull when having trouble with my sound...

[Juho L]

About thore 10k Raptor drives someone mentioned: they are about the same speed as 7200rpm SATA Maxtors. Overhyped drives I say.

The new Maxtor drives Ten mentioned are very good and bloody fast, especially on RAID. There is no such recording and sampling task that could get that RAID setup down. The bandwidth is insane.

[Juho L]

Watch out for RAID systems. I have an on-board RAID controller and it chopped my sound to pieces when i recorded. After fighting with this problem for a month or two i disabled my RAID-controller and put my hard-disks on the normal ATA133 bus instead. Now everything works fine.

This is why getting a good motherboard is cruicial. Crappy motherboard surely will cause this kind of trouble. Don't spare in motherboard. Abit motherboards have worked very well.

[hatembr]

i have built my new pc 2 monts ago and i am really happy with it.
i have :
- Asus A7N8x-E DeluxeWiFi Edition which really rocks for the price
- AMD Athlon XP 3000+ Barton
- 512Mo Kingston RAM
- 120Go Maxtor HD
- my old Audiophile 2496 sound card

i hesitated between SATA and classic ATA hard drives, and finally i bought a normal ATA! actually, the bus frequency is only 15Mo higher than normal drives and i don't think that is a real big difference! SATA is quite new and i didn't want to bother myself with it, knowing that i will certainly move my hard drive to different PCs, not necessarly equiped with SATA ports.
And what discouraged me too is that SATA drives warm very quickly, the Maxtor Diamond 9 had that problem according to a friend of mine, and that's one of the fixes they released in the Diamond 10.
Anyway, the choice of SATA or ATA is a personal opinion i think, as far as i was concerned, for only few Mo of difference, i chose to use a classic drive.
The machine is until now stable, i didn't get any blue screen of death and crossed fingers!! ;)

[Juho L]

i hesitated between SATA and classic ATA hard drives, and finally i bought a normal ATA! actually, the bus frequency is only 15Mo higher than normal drives and i don't think that is a real big difference!

SATA drives have more than that 17 megas extra badwidth. For example that NCQ boosts performance nicely. SATA is the best choice around.

[hatembr]

how much bandwidth does an affordable disk have ?

[Juho L]

how much bandwidth does an affordable disk have ?

The bandwidth is that 150MB/s, but the IO functions are better which boost performance.

[cm0s]

I'm getting two of these:
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B250S0 250Gb 7200rpm 16Mb S-ATA

Do they support NCQ

Are they good, or should I get something else?

Oh, and does ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe MOBO support NCQ ?

[ten]

Yea they are very good drives and support NCQ. Make sure your motherboard sata controller supports NCQ, or PCI sata controller supports NCQ though or they will not run in NCQ mode.

ten

[harrystainer]

Be warned about SATA drives.

I once had a SATA drive fail on me and I lost all data which was annoying to say the least. This also happened to a friend of mine who knows his stuff about computers. So just that you know, SATA gives better performance but I am cautious to use them after the failure i encountered. If you want reliabililty, stick with IDE.

[ten]

Thats the same with any drive, I wouldnt say SATA are statistically worse for any reason. HDs are the most likley to be DOA, fail very soon after purchase component of a PC.

Just treat them very carefully. Dont wave them about. Install them so they are perfectly level with al 4 screws. Never move them or the PC when its on and running.

I have 4 sata drives here blazing away fine, not one problem.....Of course the best bit of advice I can give you is to back up ANYTHING important or valuble regularly to cd/dvd or whatever because any drive can fail at any time.

ten

[Juho L]

And remember folks: Make sure you have cooling for the HD. If the disk is on fire all the time no wonder if there are problems. Get a heatpipe cooling for the HD's. Costs only about 20 euros per piece and in addition to cooling makes the HD even more silent (rubber shock absorbtion). Only negative thing is that you'll have to fit it into 5?" slot, which could be problematic if you have a small case.

[Juho L]

I'm getting two of these:
Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B250S0 250Gb 7200rpm 16Mb S-ATA

Do they support NCQ

Are they good, or should I get something else?

Oh, and does ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe MOBO support NCQ ?

Check out their websites for specs.

www.maxtor.com
www.asus.com

[Juho L]

By the way is anyone here aware of the current chipset situation? NVidia or VIA?

Edit: Googling... http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/nforce4-ultra/index.x?pg=1

[Juho L]

I studied this SATA & NCQ issue and found out that the NCQ drives are even about 30% faster than their corresponding non-NCQ counterparts. This means quite a nice boost compared to "traditional" PATA133 drives.

I also found out that SATA 2 drives and chipsets are released soon, which means 300MB/s transfer bus per disk, so SATA2 in RAID0 will be fast as hell making the top notch SCSI drives obsolete. Although I'm not sure how high those new SATA 2 drives will be priced.

[harrystainer]

By the way is anyone here aware of the current chipset situation? NVidia or VIA?

I'd say nforce is the one to go for. I currently have an nforce 2 board and its very good. I don't know much about the chipsets themselves but I'd personally go for the nforce.

[Juho L]

I'd say nforce is the one to go for. I currently have an nforce 2 board and its very good. I don't know much about the chipsets themselves but I'd personally go for the nforce.

Nforce4 and Via K8T890 are the first chipsets that support NCQ SATA, so it's very much choosing between those two. On few reviews I noticed that the Nforce4 produces a lot of heat, so it requires good fan cooling which causes extra noise.

I couldn't find any Nfroce4 vs. K8T890 benchmark tests yet, but I think we'll get some when the K8T890 equipped mobos hit the stores with full force.

[cm0s]

Check out their websites for specs.

www.maxtor.com
www.asus.com

I did but I couldn't find any info.

It seems like all the new mobos that have NCQ have PCIe graphics.
I'm getting a new comp. but also an UAD-1 card, and on the UAD-1 webstite, they say that AGP is required (PCI graphics are not recomended).

Does this mean that I have to buy an old MOBO without NCQ to run the UAD-1 card?

[Smag]

Try to get a silent fan for your PC. If you're making tunes you want any external noise at a minimun. The fan on my PC sounds like a chainsaw every time I start it up and it seriously p****s me off.

[Smag]

By the way is anyone here aware of the current chipset situation? NVidia or VIA?

Edit: Googling... http://techreport.com/reviews/2004q4/nforce4-ultra/index.x?pg=1

I'd be inclined to go for NVidia as I have a Via chipset and when I got my Audiophile 2496 I was told there could be issues with the Via. As it happens - it works fine but apparently some users of Via chipsets experience problems when they get new soundcards.

[Juho L]

I'd be inclined to go for NVidia as I have a Via chipset and when I got my Audiophile 2496 I was told there could be issues with the Via. As it happens - it works fine but apparently some users of Via chipsets experience problems when they get new soundcards.

This VA business is from the old VIA chipsets thaht actually were pieces of crap. I haven't heard any compatibility issues with the ne K8T chipsets...

Speaking of that issue cm0s mentioned, is it only a problem when you're runnin UAD1 in PCI-e slot in normal PCI mode (correct me if I'm wrong, but PCI-e slots can "eat" normal PCI devices...), or even if it's run in normal PCI slot with graphics in PCI-e? Is there any PCI-e related problems with PoCo Element?

[Juho L]

Try to get a silent fan for your PC. If you're making tunes you want any external noise at a minimun. The fan on my PC sounds like a chainsaw every time I start it up and it seriously p****s me off.

-Antec One P160 case
-Acoustic foam coating for the case
-Be-quiet 450W power
-Zalman passive chipset north bridge cooler
-Zalman heatpipe cooling with shock absorbtion for hard drives
-Rubber foam floorpads for the case
-2x Noiseblocker 120x120 fans for the case
-Aerocool High Tower HT-101 + 80x80 Noiseblocker fan for processor
-In addition to that fan speed cotnrols in the front panel.

Should be totally silent case with good cooling (probably won't even notice is the computer running or not). For heavy CPU loads turn up the fan speeds and slow down the fans for the recording.

[Onkel Dunkel]

Watch out for RAID systems. I have an on-board RAID controller and it chopped my sound to pieces when i recorded. After fighting with this problem for a month or two i disabled my RAID-controller and put my hard-disks on the normal ATA133 bus instead. Now everything works fine.

This is why getting a good motherboard is cruicial. Crappy motherboard surely will cause this kind of trouble. Don't spare in motherboard. Abit motherboards have worked very well.

It actually IS an Abit motherboard (KX333R) with built in highpoint RAID-controller :?

[Onkel Dunkel]

I read on a page (the link i posted earlier) that some RAID-controllers (especially built-in ones) eats up the PCI bandwith and therefore can cause sound-recording to make pops and cracks witch must have been the problem in my case since disabling it solved the problem. Can?t remember if the same thing goes for SATA. As for speed; i havent noticed any speed-decrease after going back to ATA133. Actually my computer start up quicker now since the RAID-controller isn?t using time to search for disks on the RAID anymore :D