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

[Merlot]

Originally Posted by Nigel Harkness

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!

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]

Originally Posted by cm0s

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

[Merlot]

Originally Posted by 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 ?

Post your own thread you hijacker!!!!!!!

J/K
(not really)

[cm0s]

Originally Posted by Merlot

Post your own thread you hijacker!!!!!!!

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]

Originally Posted by cm0s

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.