Best computer setup and components

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MesaMonster

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I have an extra PC at home that I would like to setup for recording. I purchased a Lexicon Lambada with Cubebase LE 4 USB interface to record with. What you would consider the minumum requirements for the PC. Such as memory, CPU power, diskspace (RAID or Mirrored), ports (connections). Any additional hardware that is recommended? Thank you for your input.

Don
 
get atleast 3gb of ram. use a second hard drive for storing your music, preferably a SATA2 3gbs drive. running 2 drives in a striped RAID 0 set will increase performance if used for the OS, but dont use RAID 0 for storing important data. if you have room in the case to not have the drives crammed right next to eachother then running 2 SATA2 drives in raid 0 for the OS and 2 SATA2 drives in raid 1 would be best. but remember that the more drives in teh case will increase the heat, and hard drives hate heat, and unfortunately recording environments hate noisy fans.
 
RAM is what allows you to have plugins like synths and samplers open. HArd drive speed is what limits how many tracks you can run at once. Processor speed limits FX plugins. Check out tiger direct for their kits. There's an ASUS quad core kit now for $250. I have always had good luck with asus motherboards and very bad luck with all the cheap ones.
 
mgunstudios, that is rediculous. they the speed and capacity of every component will have an effect of how much you can have open and simultainously running. according to your way of looking at it their is alot missing, like how many cores your cpu should have, or was front side bus speed or the size of the cache on the cpu, or even the clock speed of your ram, or if the ram is ddr2 or ddr3. also youre forgetting things like how you have your page file set, and what OS your running, how big the cache on the hard drive is, or if you use AMD or Intel based systems, or if video is borrowing system ram, etc etc etc.

bottomline is that the computer will only be as good as its weakest link, its about how all the components work TOGETHER. and yes ASUS boards are good, so are MSI and Gigabyte from my experience.
 
+1 on Asus mobos. MSI is good (I use one), but stick to their high end stuff as their low end stuff is crap.

I do agree with hard disk speed, since that's where it's getting dumped to and they're typically the bottleneck (relatively low datarates), but yea everything else in the pipeline will matter too.
 
and the real answer to hard drive speed is solid state drives, but they arent as high capacity as normal hard drives and theyre really expensive. but yes, the hard drive is a bottleneck, which is why things like pagefile settings can make a difference. but with a relatively modern computer these days if its a half way decent system then it should be able to handle most basic recording functions fine.
 
RJ2213 said:
and the real answer to hard drive speed is solid state drives, but they arent as high capacity as normal hard drives and theyre really expensive.
there ya go. been a while since I've priced them, but I just looked and found this one:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167016

if you can spare the $300 then you can get an 80gb SS drive. should have enough space for several songs. after tracking you could purge to a standard HD if you need the space.


my friend, that has a studio, is going from fostex HD recorders to a computer based system. (I've been giving him hell ; )

for whatever reason he want to avoid protools and per advice on this board I steered him to Reaper. Around $150 for a pro license. looks like a good deal. any advice on sound cards? must be balanced/XLR
 
RJ2213 said:
......front side bus speed or the size of the cache on the cpu, or even the clock speed of your ram......bottomline is that the computer will only be as good as its weakest link.......

What he said. IMO, the aspect of computer performance most overlooked by non-computer geeks is fs bus speed, followed by ram speed. More ram doesn't mean a thing if it's slow ram. Great mobo is meaningless if the bus speed is slow. These days, if you dont get at least a dual core with massive cache, a mobo bus speed at 1066, and ram speed at 800 or 1066, and sata drives, then the other stuff really isn't going to help you that much with your multi track software. All of the communication between components has to go thru the mobo bus at some point...... save extra $$$$$ and get a blazing fast mobo and lightning fast ram, or else you will, me thinks, be disappointed. I scraped and stretched dollars as much as I could and got the asus with 1066 fsb and the 800mhz ram, and it is just able to keep up with my most complicated mixes, nothing more.
 
Not to nitpick.. but AMD and the Intel i7 cpus don't have a front side bus, and PCIe is switched so there may not always be a "bus" in the system. Each of these newer cpus have a memory controller on the chip, typically 2-4 cores share the controller though. In my experience with fsb systems like the Intel duo-core, one core only isn't enough to max the memory bandwidth of the system you need several cores pounding on the fsb and then several sockets pounding the memory controller (1 fsb per cpu (socket, not core), 1 memory controller per system). That aside your best bet is to setup a raid0 (for speed) with lots of ram for buffering (but once that pipe is full it has to go to disk). Also don't forget the file system is going to ram first and then flushing to disk, but I'm guessing the ram will fill up fairly quickly (don't know the input rates involved). Unless of course you have many disks that are raided together to increase the throughput (more disks == more throughput) your disks could keep up.
 
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