KVR Audio

kritikon · Post by **kritikon** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:02 am

So I just bought my VST5.1->SX upgrade before the deadline. (by the time I got to the dealer there was only one left in the country

phew!)

And it seems SX is not too stable on Win98SE. So I need to finally upgrade to XP. As I'm about to get into a new host and new OS, I may as well jump off the bridge totally and get the new PC as well.

When I bought my last one, Athlons were noticeably quicker than the equivalent Pentium, and they were noticeably cheaper. And mine has done good stable service so I'm happy with AMD.
But from reading around a little, it seems there may not be too much difference between CPU speeds nowadays, and denormals are mostly a thing of the past, and prices for Pentiums seem to have evened out a bit nearer towards AMD.

My trusty old Thunderbird needed a hefty fan though, and unless they've improved that side of things, then I would imagine a 3.4GHz or whatever the latest AMD is would need a fearsome fan to keep it cooled, so that is a consideration. Plus the odd plugin such as PolyIblit not liking Athlon processors has tilted me just a little more towards a Pentium this time around. Bear in mind that I rarely use mic recordings, so fan noise is not a huge issue, but I wouldn't like a new PC to be any noisier than the one I've already got - it's at the limit of what's comfortable for long periods.

Anyone have experience of both AMD and Pentiums recently (or are they up to Hexiums yet?). Is there anything else I've missed that I should know about? Price is not a major issue - if it's only $100 or even $200 or so, then that won't bother me. Fan noise and heat do bother me. Compatability does bother me (although it's a while now since Steinberg officially optimised Cubase for AMD as well as Pentiums, so there should be no host instability). 64bit seems to be around the corner, but I don't think Cubase can handle 64bit yet anyway, can it?
This next PC will be here to stay for a few years, so any info is much invited before I take the plunge

whyterabbyt · Post by **whyterabbyt** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:38 am

The main difference is that AMD's main processor line is all 64-bit. They will run a 32-bit OS, sucha s Windows, and 32-bit apps, such as Cubase, without problems.

Also note that the AMD-64's support SSE2, so if thats the issue with PolyiBlit, it may be that that fixes it.

bluedad · Post by **bluedad** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:45 am

So I just bought my VST5.1->SX upgrade before the deadline.

what deadline?

griels · Post by **griels** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:54 am

Seldom did a test for us the other night with his new (and very low priced) AMD 64. He was getting 90+ notes of polyphony with the 'Flutterfly' patch for Polyiblit at 2ms on his M-Audio Audiophile and FL Studio. No crackling, 92% load.

Interested to see how the Pentium 4 Extremely Expensive edition measures up in comparison

Paulie Phonick · Post by **Paulie Phonick** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 11:21 am

That is awesome performance! And I'm getting an AMD 64 3.4+ based notebook next week!

Can't wait to mess with those 90 note 'Flutterfly' chords

seldom · Post by **seldom** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 12:09 pm

kritikon wrote: ...

My trusty old Thunderbird needed a hefty fan though, and unless they've improved that side of things, then I would imagine a 3.4GHz or whatever the latest AMD is would need a fearsome fan to keep it cooled, so that is a consideration.

...

as griels mentioned, i made the plunge recently to an athlon64 for a very cheap price (admittedly on socket754 which is being phased out and so will probably soon be even cheaper) and let's just say i have no complaints about the performance. 1ms latency, if that's your thing, and a stunning amount of VST headroom.

as for noise levels, the athlon64s are very cool and the default fan is remarkably quiet. much, much quieter than my so-called "quiet" athlonXP heatsink and fan that cost me $70 back in the day.

if someone could reproduce my flutterfly test on a P4 EE i'd be very interested in the results to make a vague price/performance comparison.

Meffy · Post by **Meffy** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 12:10 pm

bluedad wrote:
So I just bought my VST5.1->SX upgrade before the deadline.
what deadline?

The deadline is coming very soon (July 31st? I'm not sure) for upgrading from VST to SX. After that it costs the same as if you're a new customer. Nice. :-(

Meffy
not a Cubase user, read it in another thread

Psyclapse · Post by **Psyclapse** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 12:19 pm

Meffy wrote: The deadline is coming very soon (July 31st?) ... read it in another thread

Its here:
http://www.kvr-vst.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=51121

and yes July 31 - tomorrow - but you can order after that for as long as they have any left in stock. Ordered mine - phew - thanks for the heads up all.

bluedad · Post by **bluedad** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 12:53 pm

thanks for the info.

Durk · Post by **Durk** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 4:45 pm

Just upgraded too.

I've got an Athlon 64 3000+ with an E-MU 1212M. And yes, it's remarkably cool. I didn't test ASIO latency below 2 ms, but on 2 ms (96 kHz), it's all fine!

I did some overclocking as well. Processor's running at 2450 MHz in stead of the default 2000 MHz. How sweet!

To add:

AMD versus Intel. I think AMD wins the price/power consumption/performance ratio nowadays.

Price

AMD processors are lower priced than their Intel equivalents. Just check some pricewatches.

Performance

As always, some applications will just run better on Intel and some better on AMD. In general, AMD has the highest performance when comparing their fastest chips.

Power consumption

AMD wins clearly in this area. The lastest Pentium 4E (Prescott) consumes considerably more power than the Athlon 64. This means that Pentium 4E-based systems need more cooling which results in more noise.

Entheogen · Post by **Entheogen** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 4:58 pm

Beauty durk, thats a pretty hefty overclock!

I just got an influx of cash so I'm shooting for a socket 939 3500+, the reason being that socket 754 is (supposedly) on the way out, and 940 is a dead end. so I decided to get the 'crappiest' socket 939 processor with the hopes of having a good upgrade path for another year and a half. Plus, AMD just slashed their price of the 3500+ from US$500 to $364!!

Durk · Post by **Durk** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 5:08 pm

Entheogen wrote:Beauty durk, thats a pretty hefty overclock!
I just got an influx of cash so I'm shooting for a socket 939 3500+, the reason being that socket 754 is (supposedly) on the way out, and 940 is a dead end. so I decided to get the 'crappiest' socket 939 processor with the hopes of having a good upgrade path for another year and a half. Plus, AMD just slashed their price of the 3500+ from US$500 to $364!!

Isn't it incredible these price drops?!

Yeah the overclock was very neat indeed... Just running on default voltage... it was a very easy overclock! And completely stable in Prime95 torture test. Very important to test this!

You might want to take the MSI K8N Neo2 as socket 939 board. Anandtech liked it very much.

By the way, I've edited my previous post!

HoTRocK · Post by **HoTRocK** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 5:39 pm

Ive used steinberg products in my studio since the pro12 in the earlly 80s. In that time Ive used atari, mac, amd and pentium pc's.
Iv'e been building pc's for 20years so I am no novice. However, I still experience problems just like the next guy.
I recently won a contract that my hardware couldn't cope with, so I was forced to upgrade. Macs were out of my immediate budget so I decided to buy amd 64bit. All good stuff, worked like a charm, self overclocking, great, on demand power, faster than anything Iv'e ever worked on...until I tried to use cubase sx2. It crashed regularly. Bench tests proved the machine was fine. So I tested my terratec ews88mt on another machine, even spoke to one of their technitions in Germany. It proved ok. Meanwhile, my contract isn't being fulfilled, deadline looming and I seriosly thought it might be the lack of driver support for the 64bit cpu so I bought an AMD 32bit setup.Guess what? Same bloody problem! So I phoned Steinberg! After an hour on hold, I got to speak to a technition. (Yes it is possible) He told me it sounded like a dead dongle. I sent it back, received a new one. Same problem. The 'dead' dongle was tested and found to be ok.So I sent over the full specs of both systems and was told that SX does NOT like SIS,VIA or Nvidia chipsets. He advised me to go for the Intel (even though SX is optimised for AMD) I now have a stable machine and can't afford a holiday but at least I finished the contract.I now have two, brand new, redundent m/b and cpu's cluttering the place up that I won't sell to an SX user.
Other folk will tell you that they have had no probs with these chipsets and they probably haven't, I'm just telling you what happened to me in case it helps.
Good luck.

Durk · Post by **Durk** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 5:48 pm

HoTRocK wrote:....some stuff...

That's freaking sad man! What kind of Athlon 64 chipset did you use? Even better: what kind of motherboard did you buy?

tynt · Post by **tynt** » Fri Jul 30, 2004 10:39 pm

HoTRocK wrote:...and was told that SX does NOT like SIS,VIA or Nvidia chipsets.

nice coders @ steinberg

well, we have AMD (for opteron) chipsets... i don't think they have something nice to say about these

Any major differences between Pentium/AMD nowadays?