DUAL CORE or QUAD - CLOCK SPEED???

BigBouncyBall

good spec. good price. get them to double the RAM for another £50 and you'll be onto a winner!

fwor

Or you could double the memory yourself at 7dayshop.com for £20!

They currently sell 1Gb sticks of this spec for £9.99 and 2Gb sticks for £17.99. Ok, they are non-name brands, but so in all probability are the ones the local shop use.

totalsolutions

I built a fast pc last month the processor was £650 on its own. If you want fast its gonna cost I also used a 32Gb ssd (solid state disk) for another £250 plus 4gig memory.

The client is very pleased this the total cost well under £2K and very,very fast for video and audio. However we hit a problem with the video card a mid price card from Saphire (ATI) stables, would not display the cad program and have to replace with a GeForce card.

Bamber19

paying £650 for the processor alone (QX6950, I'm guessing?) is silly, when £170 or so would get you a Q6600 that you could overclock the hell out of(or at least surpass the QX6950's clock speed)

OP, Clock speed isn't so important these days, for example one of the lower priced Core 2 Duo's with a 2ghz speed will quite comfortably outperform intel's other dual core Pentium D's clocked at upto 3ghz.

masterthief

I can't really speak about clock speeds in any gret depth, but I have done music production for several years, most recently on the Mac G5 dual 2GH model. I've used a quad core and didn't find it at all faster/better for the software I run (Nuendo 3, now 4, with various plug-ins, often a lot of plug-ins, Virtual DJ, Sibelius, etc), nor was there any real difference in latency using the same outboard gear. I wouldn't recommend buying the Quad because I've yet to need it with any of the top-end (i.e. one stop short of Pro Tools) software or hardware that I've used, and I do like to try to max-out computers as a test - there wasn't any significant difference in operation and certainly none to justify the price increase over the dual core (I've also used PC dual core, not justthe G5).


Also, I've read a lot recently in Sound on Sound, Music Tech, etc (looking to rough budget for the next couple of years), and the review there were pretty much (i.e. 90% at least) conclusive in saying that the software simply doesn't exist at the moment to require Quad Core processing - given that Nuendo 4 has just been released and these mags tested the Quad on that as well as the latest other offerings in DAWs and video processing/editing, there just doesn't seem to be any need to buy a Quad at all for at least a couple of years (unless Steinberg suddenly release Nuendo 5 in 6 months time, but this is about as likely as England winning Euro 2008).

Based on software release dates and average time-spans before updates, you shouldn't need the extra processors for a couple of years minimum. The mags also said that a big downfall of the Qauds is that current software simply isn't coded in a way to utilisie the 'extra' processing power.

Hope this is of some use for ya.

masterthief

either get a dual core pc or a mac dual core - my experience has been that macs are way more stable if you can afford them and you're less likely to lose data mid-session from crashes, hangs, etc., but I've mainly used the G5 dual cores and G4 laptops so I can't really speak for the newer intel ones (you could try certified apple resellers for a 2nd hand G5 tho).

but the problem with macs is getting cheap software which works well (even if you go in for downloading stuff for free off fileshare sites or buying crack copies locally, which I don't have to do). there is a much better lower-end range of decent audio processing software available for PCs, so make sure you factor this in when choosing which way to go. if you need any more advice, feel free to pm me.

masterthief

epz wrote: »

sounds like you are doing lots of realtime stuff, in that case a quad core will be better since your system will be able to run more stuff at the same time.

also make sure you get fast ram, its so cheap these days you are better getting the low latency ram.

have you checked you dont have anything daft running in the background like a virus scanner or mailware, music aint exactly a cpu intensive app, i could manipulate it in realtime on a P11 266mhz we i say i, i mean my musical mate i just played quake 2 on it.

most (if not all) VSTs aren't coded to get the maximum benefits of the quad.. my own experience with lots of plug ins is that there's no real difference in operation between quad and dual processors - go for a dual prcessor and get as much RAM as possible because that's where you'll notice improvements on general performance and latency issues.

Blacksheep1979

BigBouncyBall wrote: »

good spec. good price. get them to double the RAM for another £50 and you'll be onto a winner!

xp (non 64bit) won't be able to address the full 4gb so is a bit of a waste, most you'll see is about 3.5gb out of the 4.