Design my new DAW, please.

[DevonB]

With the Barton, are you overclocking?

(one question!)

Meaning?

(One question back! )

Devon

[whyterabbyt]

DevonB quoth

From what I've read, the 64 bit procs run 32 bit code faster than the 32 bit procs, so it's not a bad idea, it's just you need an OS to support it, and that'll either be Linux or Windows 2003 64 bit Edition, which the audio market doesn't exactly 'support' right now in high numbers.



The 64-bit Athlons will run in 32-bit 'mode' faster than a same-clockspeed 32-bit Athlon, (from what I understand, 10-20% faster depending on task et.c.) and they can run a 32-bit OS just fine, so no, you dont actually need a 64-bit OS to get that advantage.
They also support SSE2, which Athlon XP's dont, so any plugins with the right optimisations get a gain there.

However, 64-bit Athlons should run faster still under a proper 64-bit OS.

[iDavid]

With the Barton, are you overclocking?

(one question!)

Meaning?

(One question back! )

Devon

I don't know, I don't get half or this stuff.

I just remember something about barton and overclocking

[DevonB]

DevonB quoth

From what I've read, the 64 bit procs run 32 bit code faster than the 32 bit procs, so it's not a bad idea, it's just you need an OS to support it, and that'll either be Linux or Windows 2003 64 bit Edition, which the audio market doesn't exactly 'support' right now in high numbers.



The 64-bit Athlons will run in 32-bit 'mode' faster than a same-clockspeed 32-bit Athlon, (from what I understand, 10-20% faster depending on task et.c.) and they can run a 32-bit OS just fine, so no, you dont actually need a 64-bit OS to get that advantage.
They also support SSE2, which Athlon XP's dont, so any plugins with the right optimisations get a gain there.

However, 64-bit Athlons should run faster still under a proper 64-bit OS.

Ack! I didn't make myself very clear, did I? To take advantage of the AMD 64 bit-i-ness, you need a 64 bit OS. The AMD 64 bit chips do work fine on a 32 bit OS, but just won't take advantage of the 64 bits. That better?

Devon

[DevonB]

With the Barton, are you overclocking?

(one question!)

Meaning?

(One question back! )

Devon

I don't know, I don't get half or this stuff.

I just remember something about barton and overclocking

You can pretty easily overclock a Barton to a higher speed if you like, and people have had it work for them, at least for the 2500+ I believe? Again, I'm not an overclocking fanatic, and tend to avoid it, and have since the Pentium II days in fact.

Devon

[nuffink]

With the Barton, are you overclocking?

(one question!)

Meaning?

(One question back! )

Devon

I don't know, I don't get half or this stuff.

I just remember something about barton and overclocking

You can pretty easily overclock a Barton to a higher speed if you like, and people have had it work for them, at least for the 2500+ I believe? Again, I'm not an overclocking fanatic, and tend to avoid it, and have since the Pentium II days in fact.

Devon

Very easy and stable overclock. I run mine at 166 fsb and bump it to 200 when necessary. With a 200 fsb it performs as a 3200+

[daizo]

Go for the fastest you can get - Athlon 64 or Opteron. Who said that nonsense about 2gb of ram being worse than a smaller amount? bah. If you can afford it, get more than the minumum 2 hard drives. Im going all out myself with a Dual Opteron system, 4 hard drives, DVD burner, lian li quiet case myself. You'll regret getting something slower when you have software that needs the extra cpu power.

[Lunch Money]

Whyterabbyt-- I wasn't implying that his specs are the utmost in modernity. I was questioning the others who were recommending double-processors, etc. ANY time you make a purchase, you should always compare your needs to what's available, and make sure the gain in performance is worth the exponentially increased price.

For example, I might want a 100W Marshall head, but I'll never be able to drive it properly at high volumes because I'll never be in the situation to do so.

daizo-- It's called "addressing", and if your system has to do it too much, you will see a performance hit. Unless you actually load a lot into RAM, it's not needed. In this case, and now that I know what he'll be running, I think the 2GB could end up being handy; however, the concept of "too much RAM" is anything but nonsense. I still maintain that if the price of a 1GB stick is that prohibitive, he could easily make do with half.

I've seen these circular arguments before-- everyone's so busy making their points (myself included, usually) that they lose sight of what the original question was, and forget how to meet ALL goals.

Goals: highest performing DAW machine possible for $2000 which can handle disk-streaming audio plugs well.

The way to achieve that goal is to get balanced performance from ALL components, or else you'll get a bottleneck and your money will be wasted. If you blow your cash on an Athlon 64FX, your DAW will suffer. If you spend money on RAM at the expense of your hard drives, your main goal will be compromised.

If you can get ALL of these things, then you're laughing... but don't just take every computer nerd's fantasy list as gospel.

Greg

[edited to spell WR's name properly]

[DevonB]

Just don't go over 2 gigs as Chagzuki discovered. He got 3 gigs and couldn't use it until Jules was nice enough to recompile Tracktion to take advantage of over 2 gigs of RAM (you can only use up to 3 gigs, even with the compiler flag set). I doubt any of the big names would be willing to recompile their code and release it within a day, like he did.

Devon

[whyterabbyt]

Lunch Money quoth I wasn't implying that his specs are the utmost in modernity. I was questioning the others who were recommending double-processors, etc. ANY time you make a purchase, you should always compare your needs to what's available, and make sure the gain in performance is worth the exponentially increased price.

Fair enough, and I certainly agree.

The way to achieve that goal is to get balanced performance from ALL components, or else you'll get a bottleneck and your money will be wasted. If you blow your cash on an Athlon 64FX, your DAW will suffer. If you spend money on RAM at the expense of your hard drives, your main goal will be compromised.

Id mostly agree, but I'd also point out that most 'consumer level' stuff is shitloads better than its ever been...

If you can get ALL of these things, then you're laughing... but don't just take every computer nerd's fantasy list as gospel.

Thats true.