Build your own custom DAW: A tutorial by AE
- Thread starter A_Eberts
- Start date
Tech experience offer and a question
Ok, so although I'm still pretty much a newbie on the board, I would like to offer whatever I can on the tech side. I'm coming from 10 years in the IT field, in server engineering, workstation deployment, and all kinds of other tech support roles. I can't speak to ASUS vs. Gigabyte (or any other brand comparison, for that matter), but I can answer questions on general configuration, as well as my best educated guess on configuring specifically for the DAW world. I can give a significant amount of help on XP/Vista/Win7, as well as Linux. I do not have much background yet on the various DAW software packages, so I won't be able to help you on things like compatibility (will Reason work on Win7 64bit etc).
For example, XP is now over a decade old, and though it runs pretty clean, it's time to let go. The 64-bit operating system is here to stay, and Win7 is everything Vista should have been. Combine that with "always install as much RAM as you can", and this means your machines are probably going to have a minimum of 6Gb of RAM now, maybe 8 or 12. 4GB probably won't cut it anymore, as Windows (king of bloat) continues to expand its appetite for RAM. Plus, the more RAM you buy, the more "real estate" is available to load data into RAM, rather than paging it off to disk, and less paging=less latency. Also, DDR3 represents a significant speed improvement over DDR2, not a small one, so again, this is a game of latency. The more you can reduce bottlenecks and possible sources of latency, the cleaner your recordings and sequence sessions are going to be.
With the new 64-bit operating systems, the true worth of DDR3 is now apparent (the OS and processor can now take full advantage of the wider memory bandwidth). Another area is disk: the new SSDs (solid-state disks) are a tremendous boon for any computing task that requires minimal latency. SSDs allow for random data access, rather than the sequential access mandated by how a rotating hard drive works. So with an old-style drive, if you needed data block "A", and it wasn't immediately under the disk read head, you had to wait for the head to traverse and the platter to rotate until block "A" was in position to be read. With a SSD, block "A" can be accessed immediately. SSDs also run far cooler because they don't have that motor generating heat, which is important for those of you who want quiet DAWs, since heat needs to be removed, which means fans which add noise.
So, you run the OS and your DAW software of the SSD for performance, and then you can put in a big, fat 1 or 2TB drive that turns at 5400rpm (nice and quiet, and cool) to store your tracks on. Actually, you should put two of those drives in, and mirror them in a RAID. This means the two disks are identical to each other. If one fails, or if a piece of data becomes corrupted, the other disk can still provide that (and repair the corruption). This will protect you when the power fails just as you go to load up that track you've spent the last 3 months of 80-hour weeks mixing down.
Lastly, video cards: You probably need a dual-head, so you can run dual monitors. Make sure it's a card with dual DVI outputs (the white/pink ones with all the little square holes). VGA is not worth it now. You probably ought to have at least 512MB or even 1GB of video memory on the card (this way your video won't chew into the system RAM, taking valuable space away from your DAW software). You don't need a monster gaming card though. DAW graphics are generally static, or have very small, steady movements, so huge framerates and giant polygon rendering numbers are kind of meaningless. This also means you won't need a card with a fan, which adds noise and draws power and has the potential to dump more heat into your machine or your rack (depending on if your machine is rackmounted).
That brings up another point: rackmounting a PC is a nice touch. You can get much better cable management, keep your workspace cleaner, and probably get better integration with the other rack appliances in your setup. But, the vast majority of PC motherboards are not designed for a horizontal, rackmount case. Usually, you see things like the RAM slots being positioned perpendicular to the direction of airflow for a rackmount box, and often things like the power supply and some cards have cooling elements positioned on the assumption that air will be flowing "up" the box, rather than through. In a tight rackmount, that can be important, as heat always rises, and in the absence of proper airflow to carry it away, you might end up toasting that expensive effects box mounted above the PC. Remember, your average PC processor puts out approximately as much heat as a 100W incandescent light bulb, running well above 130F especially under load, and with DAW being a CPU-intensive task, you're going to be putting load on the processor.
Now, I also have a question on DAWs: I've seen a lot about ensuring that your DAW is as quiet as possible. My question is: if your studio is all electronic, with no microphone recording going on, is it really necessary to make your machine as silent as possible? Yes, I understand wanting it to be fairly quiet so you don't have to listen over a bunch of 10k rpm cooling fans screaming, but is absolute silence really necessary?
Ok, so although I'm still pretty much a newbie on the board, I would like to offer whatever I can on the tech side. I'm coming from 10 years in the IT field, in server engineering, workstation deployment, and all kinds of other tech support roles. I can't speak to ASUS vs. Gigabyte (or any other brand comparison, for that matter), but I can answer questions on general configuration, as well as my best educated guess on configuring specifically for the DAW world. I can give a significant amount of help on XP/Vista/Win7, as well as Linux. I do not have much background yet on the various DAW software packages, so I won't be able to help you on things like compatibility (will Reason work on Win7 64bit etc).
For example, XP is now over a decade old, and though it runs pretty clean, it's time to let go. The 64-bit operating system is here to stay, and Win7 is everything Vista should have been. Combine that with "always install as much RAM as you can", and this means your machines are probably going to have a minimum of 6Gb of RAM now, maybe 8 or 12. 4GB probably won't cut it anymore, as Windows (king of bloat) continues to expand its appetite for RAM. Plus, the more RAM you buy, the more "real estate" is available to load data into RAM, rather than paging it off to disk, and less paging=less latency. Also, DDR3 represents a significant speed improvement over DDR2, not a small one, so again, this is a game of latency. The more you can reduce bottlenecks and possible sources of latency, the cleaner your recordings and sequence sessions are going to be.
With the new 64-bit operating systems, the true worth of DDR3 is now apparent (the OS and processor can now take full advantage of the wider memory bandwidth). Another area is disk: the new SSDs (solid-state disks) are a tremendous boon for any computing task that requires minimal latency. SSDs allow for random data access, rather than the sequential access mandated by how a rotating hard drive works. So with an old-style drive, if you needed data block "A", and it wasn't immediately under the disk read head, you had to wait for the head to traverse and the platter to rotate until block "A" was in position to be read. With a SSD, block "A" can be accessed immediately. SSDs also run far cooler because they don't have that motor generating heat, which is important for those of you who want quiet DAWs, since heat needs to be removed, which means fans which add noise.
So, you run the OS and your DAW software of the SSD for performance, and then you can put in a big, fat 1 or 2TB drive that turns at 5400rpm (nice and quiet, and cool) to store your tracks on. Actually, you should put two of those drives in, and mirror them in a RAID. This means the two disks are identical to each other. If one fails, or if a piece of data becomes corrupted, the other disk can still provide that (and repair the corruption). This will protect you when the power fails just as you go to load up that track you've spent the last 3 months of 80-hour weeks mixing down.
Lastly, video cards: You probably need a dual-head, so you can run dual monitors. Make sure it's a card with dual DVI outputs (the white/pink ones with all the little square holes). VGA is not worth it now. You probably ought to have at least 512MB or even 1GB of video memory on the card (this way your video won't chew into the system RAM, taking valuable space away from your DAW software). You don't need a monster gaming card though. DAW graphics are generally static, or have very small, steady movements, so huge framerates and giant polygon rendering numbers are kind of meaningless. This also means you won't need a card with a fan, which adds noise and draws power and has the potential to dump more heat into your machine or your rack (depending on if your machine is rackmounted).
That brings up another point: rackmounting a PC is a nice touch. You can get much better cable management, keep your workspace cleaner, and probably get better integration with the other rack appliances in your setup. But, the vast majority of PC motherboards are not designed for a horizontal, rackmount case. Usually, you see things like the RAM slots being positioned perpendicular to the direction of airflow for a rackmount box, and often things like the power supply and some cards have cooling elements positioned on the assumption that air will be flowing "up" the box, rather than through. In a tight rackmount, that can be important, as heat always rises, and in the absence of proper airflow to carry it away, you might end up toasting that expensive effects box mounted above the PC. Remember, your average PC processor puts out approximately as much heat as a 100W incandescent light bulb, running well above 130F especially under load, and with DAW being a CPU-intensive task, you're going to be putting load on the processor.
Now, I also have a question on DAWs: I've seen a lot about ensuring that your DAW is as quiet as possible. My question is: if your studio is all electronic, with no microphone recording going on, is it really necessary to make your machine as silent as possible? Yes, I understand wanting it to be fairly quiet so you don't have to listen over a bunch of 10k rpm cooling fans screaming, but is absolute silence really necessary?
logic7
old school
being real bruh... you got a lot of misinformation in this reply... an awful lot.
noblewordz
sexing your mother
lolz I has 4GB of RAM, I dnt even use 2GB most of the time. Numsayin.
logic7
old school
I have 2GB, I don't think I've ever seen over 1GB in use.
logic7
old school
ok...
XP is under a decade old. And... old or not, it's still a viable platform to use for a DAW.
"Install as much RAM as you can" sounds typical of the ill informed IT guys in poorly run shops that I've come across in my many years in IT and engineering. You don't throw RAM at everything unless you simply have money to waste. The typical person can do quite well with 2GB, a person like myself can get away with far less (I've run XP w/FL7 on 320MB RAM on my old P3-500MHz laptop). Unless you're running something like Omnisphere, 4GB simply won't do much for you whether you're running 64bit or not.
Latency and RAM/paging are almost completely unrelated. I've proven on this site that an old Celeron 466MHz box with 512MB of RAM could run 13ms in Cubase/8ms in FL Studio without clicks or pops with 3-4 synth plugins active. What matters more is the audio interface you're using, and whether or not the plugins (typically synths) are taxing the CPU's ability to process and push the audio data through the pipeline quickly.
Consider this, if you will: DAW's have been streaming 24+ tracks of CD quality audio with extremely low latencies for well over a decade. SSD's are going to do what? I mean... endless hits, multi-platinum singles and albums, Grammy and Oscar winners have recorded with current and older hard drive technology... What, exactly, are SSD's going to do that cannot be done right now??? (as a point of reference... Digital Underground was recording in a tapeless studio back in 1993 or so.)
What you're talking about is RAID 1, and while RAID 1 can have increased read performance, it DOES have slower write performance. Aside from that, you also need a dedicated RAID controller because even though Windows can set up a software RAID implementation, the performance of it sucks when compared to a dedicated controller (like my Adaptec 3410S Ultra160 SCSI RAID controller). All of this is MEANINGLESS if you're using ProTools. Digidesign doesn't support RAID of any type for use with ProTools.
and... 5400RPM drives??? I think pretty much everyone on this site runs 7200RPM drives. 5400RPM drives are RARE these days. Nearly every off-the-shelf drive you find in any store is 7200RPM. Hell... I just check over at Newegg to see what they have... Nine 5400RPM vs 196 7200RPM joints...
Nearly every card on the market today is dual-head. They're also almost universally DVI. There are some with VGA ports, but those are few and far between.
A 2D video display at 1600x1200x32bit (which is the resolution I run at when working in FL or Cubase) requires a frame buffer of just over 7MB of RAM, about 15MB for double buffered video. The vast majority of the RAM on video cards today is for 3D texture storage. It has NOTHING to do with displaying 2D images on a screen (like your DAW's workspace). Being truthful, DAW's were running fine on 8MB cards back in the day. Hell, I still have an old 32MB Matrox G450 Dual Head joint at the crib that would work just fine.
First of all, since this is a tutorial on building a custom DAW, not hacking together something from your little sister's old PC from college, I figured people would probably be building new machines, and therefore would choose to install a newer, more advanced operating system. Admiring the classics is all well and good, but honestly, we're not talking about old violins or single-malt scotch. Operating systems don't age well. If you really want to pick nits, yes, XP is a few months short of actually being a decade old, but the point still stands. It's 32-bit, which means unless you're running a CPU you bought at a garage sale, you're not going to be getting all you can out of your hardware. Sure, there was a 64-bit "version" of XP, but there aren't exactly racks and racks of software built for it. XP is also moving out of mainstream support, and is no longer available for purchase. This means third-party vendors aren't going to carry support for their XP software much longer either. I for one don't see the point in building a valuable, expensive tool that will be the center of my music production studio based on obsolete software.
Regarding your assertion on RAM, yes, on the outdated 32-bit XP, 2GB is at least adequate, so long as you have external graphics, disable numerous services and startup applications (which may be beyond the skill level of some folks here), and don't leave your system running for many days in a row. It is possible to run more recent versions of Windows on lower amounts of RAM as well, but as I alluded to in my original post, the more RAM you give Windows, the better it will run, and the less likely it will be to interfere with what you're doing. 2GB is pretty much the *minimum* for Win7 to run smoothly. Adding a couple more GB at that point is only going to add performance. And the whole point of 64-bit is that it can address more memory at a time in the CPU, though it does also allow for a larger memory capacity too. Adding enough RAM would also allow someone to create a RAM disk as a temporary workspace as well, greatly speeding up response time. For that matter, it's *possible* to play a guitar solo on one string, but for some reason, most guitarists prefer 6.
RAM is *not* expensive, compared to the headache resulting from having your system start paging to disk in the middle of something important, even if that paging is totally system-related. Sure, the really large capacity RAM is going to be expensive, but not many people here are going to be buying 24GB DIMMs. It's not a waste of money to build your system right the first time, instead of discovering after the fact that you didn't add enough capacity. Neither you nor I can predict what software in the future will require, but I can be pretty confident in saying that memory requirements aren't going to decrease. Newegg shows that 6Gb of DDR3 RAM from Corsair is only $134, not exactly a bank-breaking amount for the second-most important component on your motherboard.
Regarding your point on running that old Celeron box: again, just because you *can* do it, doesn't make it the best solution. To hear you talk, one would think we should have stuck with wax-cylinder recording because, hey, it works, right? And yet, there doesn't seem to be much demand for that technology these days. You need to look forward and try to anticipate possible future needs, and to see what the newer, faster technology might enable you to accomplish. Since this thread is on building a custom DAW, why shouldn't people build something that has the potential to expand the possibilities of what can be done?
Regarding SSDs, my point was not really their speed, though again, why not try for even lower latencies, and why not give the underlying operating system as much extra overhead as you can to keep it out of your way? A lot of famous recordings were made on the old 35mm tape, but again, how many studios still use it? My point on using SSDs is really the lower heat and noise.
My point on RAID was *not* about speed. If I had wanted to recommend speed, I would have suggested a stripeset, or, god forbid, RAID 10. My point was that, by mirroring the drives, you get data *protection*. The last thing anyone wants is to lose a session, as I noted, due to a power failure at the wrong time, or a failed disk. There are many motherboards available now that can do RAID at the hardware level, which means the disk will appear as a single volume at the OS level. Can protools really tell if it's being run against a hardware-RAID system? And if the RAID is the storage drive only, does it matter?
I suggested 5400rpm drives again for the noise, and maybe there aren't many drives out there at that speed, but there are some, which are quieter and run cooler, and that was the point of my suggestion on the rpm, since some people might not think to look for the slower drives given the volume of 7200rpm drives out there. This is the *storage* volume we're talking about, not the working drive. You don't need high speed on a storage system.
I note that you have to qualify your statements on video cards. Which is why I made the suggestion. Not everyone on this board is a computer expert. As you pointed out, there are still cards out there that are single-head, and there are dual-head cards where the second output is VGA. Hence, my recommendation for ensuring that people get a dual-DVI card. Also, since we agree that huge amounts of memory are pointless on a graphics card, there's no reason to look at the high-powered gaming cards. So, we look at the lower end of the price spectrum, and on NewEgg, lo and behold, there are pages and pages of dual-head cards that have that second output being a VGA, with considerable numbers of single-out DVI and still a lot of dual and even single VGA sprinkled in. They also have at a minimum 128MB of memory, and the better-quality ones all have 512MB, hence my recommendation for a 512 or 1GB card: decent quality, but no extra power draw and no fan (though no fan seems to be a bit harder to find, really). In fact, the cheapest dual-DVI port card I found, at $58, has 512MB.
So basically, your strongest objections and claims of misleading information are due to my post not agreeing with your *opinion*, rather than any technical discrepancies. In a couple of cases, you missed my point, and went after things that are irrelevant. You mention a lot of "back in the day"-type references, yet this is a thread on building a custom DAW, which is more or less a blank-slate project looking at new technology. I'm half expecting you to tell me to get off your lawn, or "turn that godawful noise down" and grumble about "kids these days" or something.
Sure, back in the day, people made award-winning albums using all-analog technology, but yet here we are discussing all-in-one digital studios. Back in the day, computers came with 64k of memory, and that was *huge*, but those old memory modules are awful hard to find nowadays. Back in the day, it was Atari vs Intellivision vs Colecovision, but there's not much demand for games on those platforms today. And back in the day, the Pentium 4 with a whopping 256MB of memory was the bomb, but for those of us living in the 21st century, it's old news. Come, join us in the new century! We have cookies!
Last edited:
logic7
old school
64 bit still isn't fully supported by MANY pieces of software. Since many people on this board and on many others have large libraries of plugins, this is quite relevant and will force their hand to stick with 32 bit windows vs 64 bit.
ProTools only has beta releases for 64bit windows, Digidesign/Avid won't support you if you use 64 bit windows.
Again, Sonar is the leader on the PC platform with exceptional native 64 bit support. Steinberg has released a 64 bit native version of Cubase 5 as well. FL Studio and Reason are both still 32 bit apps, so neither one can take advantage of a 64 bit platform.
None of this means anything to the person that is already in possession of a suite of recording and composition tools. The person that shelled out their last dime for ProTools 7.3 cannot upgrade to Vista or Win7 as NEITHER is a supported platform for that version of PT to run on. There's plenty of plugins that won't run in a 64 bit OS unless you're using Sonar's Bit Bridge. Some people DON'T have the luxury of having money to throw at upgrades and have to work with what they have. This may mean sticking to a 32 bit OS for a while and for the vast majority of the planet, 32 bit is just fine. There are very few apps right now that take full advantage of Win64, and movement to it is still very slow.
Dude, you don't have to disable services with 1GB. In fact, you don't need to with 512MB.
I have Win7 x64 running rather smoothly on 1GB right now in a lab. Granted, the machine it's in is running 15K RPM SAS drives and has dual 4 core Xeon E5640's, but it's running smoothly with custom RF sim software running 24x7 (dedicated an entire processor to it, all 4 cores are slammed at 100%).
no one's thrashing their disk by paging all the time, those days are LONG gone... Hasn't been a problem since 512MB became standard issue on PC's.
As a general rule: The average consumer is fine with 1GB, musicians can be too, but 2-3GB is good. You only need to exceed that when you're using Omnisphere, which requires 4GB minimum and it's the ONLY plugin out there that has this mandate.
What's funny to me is that it looks like you read a how-to on building a DAW dated in 2004 or something like that and are throwing a couple of recent tidbits in to make it look like you really know what you're talking about.
Nothing you're saying here hasn't already been debunked as myth.
"Possibilities" are things that have yet to materialize and may NEVER materialize. In REALITY, guys on this board need to be able to work with whatever will get them going RIGHT NOW. Not dream about stuff that "could possibly" happen, they need to deal with today in order to make a tomorrow for themselves.
There's guys that come on here with a hand-me-down machine, $200 to their name, and a dream in their head that they can make music. Let you tell it, they'll never be able to realize that dream with such "outdated" equipment and so little money. When I kick it with 'em, I'll give them the tools they can use RIGHT NOW with whatever they have and they can get going. There's plenty of guys like you on this board that like to throw around "you need the latest greatest and 231784387GB of RAM to do anything", and everyone of you has fallen to the information that I and several others on this board present. I kick facts and give real world examples, nothing more, nothing less. Everything I state here is verifiable fact and rooted in nearly 30 years of computing.
Lower latency does not come from hard drives.
If you're just storing stuff, then RAID is an option for people that have the money to set it up PROPERLY and your examples of losing a session is moot.
Can Protools tell? Don't know, but I DO know that if you call up Avid with a PT problem, the moment you even mention RAID, they'll stop speaking to you because you're running on an unsupported configuration. They will NOT help you at all.
Storage or not, as I said before there's very few 5400 RPM drives even available anymore. If you walk into Best Buy, Fry's, or even Staples, all you're going to see are 7200 RPM drives. There's no sense in even recommending a 5400RPM drive for any reason.
most monitors come with a VGA-DVI adapter as do many video cards with a VGA port on it. If you know as much as you try to come across as knowing, then you know this just like I do. Making sure you have dual DVI doesn't even make a difference... Especially since most displays you can buy still have a VGA port on them (negating the need for a DVI-VGA adapter in the first place).
So basically, your strongest objections and claims of misleading information are due to my post not agreeing with your *opinion*, rather than any technical discrepancies. In a couple of cases, you missed my point, and went after things that are irrelevant. You mention a lot of "back in the day"-type references, yet this is a thread on building a custom DAW, which is more or less a blank-slate project looking at new technology. I'm half expecting you to tell me to get off your lawn, or "turn that godawful noise down" and grumble about "kids these days" or something.
Sure, back in the day, people made award-winning albums using all-analog technology, but yet here we are discussing all-in-one digital studios. Back in the day, computers came with 64k of memory, and that was *huge*, but those old memory modules are awful hard to find nowadays. Back in the day, it was Atari vs Intellivision vs Colecovision, but there's not much demand for games on those platforms today. And back in the day, the Pentium 4 with a whopping 256MB of memory was the bomb, but for those of us living in the 21st century, it's old news. Come, join us in the new century! We have cookies!
you're still misinforming people, like it or not. To say that it's necessary to have the things you claim simply isn't true. I've put together system specs for guys on this board in the past, one in particular running under $500, but with 2GB of RAM. Just about anyone here would be happy with it and could do quite a bit with it. All of the parts are current, up to date stuff. The only time I recommend older equipment is if that's what a particular poster has and they don't have the money to build new. In those cases, I look at what their machine is fully capable of and build from there.
... For the record, a P4 with 256MB of RAM IS 21st century tech (the P4 wasn't released until Q4 2000).
... The last P4 was released in Q2 2006... I know this 'cause one of my 64 bit platform test machines was ordered with that processor in May of 2006 (Dell Precision 380 w/P4 661) and Intel didn't roll out any more after that.
Even the Socket 478 P4 I use (3.4GHz Pentium 4 HT, Prescott core) was a Q1 2004 part.
sounds like 21st century tech to me... smart@ss.
Last edited:
64-bit is supported in enough software that someone who was building a greenfields custom DAW, which is what this thread is about, might choose to go that route, rather than stay at 32-bit which is rapidly becoming obsolete. Tools like JBridge, which supports pretty much every major environment besides Ableton, allow pretty much all of your 32-bit plugins to work in the 64-bit versions. Some won't, and that's a consequence of the switch to 64-bit which applies to every industry, not just music. You can hide your head in the sand, stick your fingers in your ears and shout LALALAICAN'THEARYOU all you want, but 64-bit is the future, and like I said before, though more politely last time, it's stupid and short-sighted to build a new system, particularly an expensive custom, that won't be compatible with anything in a couple of years. Additionally, it's really poor practice not to design for scalability or "future-proofing", especially in a thread on greenfields building. Sure, if you're trying to make the best of what you have, you don't worry about it and focus on what gets you up and running right now, but that's not what we're discussing here.
According to the Avid website, 64-bit windows is supported for ProTools 9, so you're wrong about that, too. And, if it's listed there, they're going to have to support you when you call. Oh, and if you're running a hardware RAID, what the hell would you need to tell them for? If your OS or HAL isn't handling data transfer to the hardware right, it's absolutely not going to be AVID's problem anyway, and of course they're going to tell you to go sort your shit out before you call.
And yes, Reason and FL Studio are still 32-bit, and the main reaction to both still being 32-bit seems to be a lot of "WTF?", as most other environments have embraced 64-bit just fine. This is a case of the vendor being stubborn, not that it couldn't be done. Both will have to move forward, as I alluded to in my previous post, since 64-bit is here to stay.
Now, about that guy who "just shelled out his last dime for ProTools 7.3", talk about misleading information! Protools 7.3 is vintage 2007. If you "just shelled out" for that, with Protools 9 available, you've got other problems. And, if that's the last investment you made in 2007 when it actually came out, and you still don't have any spare funds, then you aren't going to get much benefit from a thread on buying all-new components to build your own custom DAW system now, are you? Don't start dragging in irrelevant information just so you can try to be "right". You stepped on your dick already with the video cards, and I'll get to that in a minute; just to remind you again, since you seem to forget easily, this is not a thread on making the best of the old system you already have i.e. HERP DERP HI GUIZE I RUN A PENTIUM III and WINIDOWS 2000 AND I GOTS $76 CAN I HAZ NUENDO? This is about selecting the best, most appropriate *new* hardware to build a true, custom-tailored DAW hardware setup from the ground up.
And yes, you will need to disable services on a 1GB XP machine, if you're planning to run something on it other than the OS. Your example of your RF simulator is irrelevant, since what you're doing is obviously not RAM-intensive, as evidenced by your statement of redlining all four cores of one processor on a dual-socket Xeon box, and is unrepresentative anyway, because such a machine, with a 15k drive and all that processor, is going to run completely differently than a single-socket desktop machine.
Now, you say it looks like I read a 2004 how-to, and am trying to update with new tidbits. Well, you're wrong. I did point out in my original post that I'm not as knowledgeable about the specifics of the software, though I am learning, but I'm not just pulling this stuff out of my ass. However, I say it looks like you haven't left 2006, based on your badly outdated knowledge of memory recommendations and the fact that you seem to think ProTools 7.3 is something people are just now buying. Microsoft's minimum memory requirement for 64-bit Win 7 is 2GB. Recall that their minimum for Vista was 2GB as well, and their (admittedly somewhat unrealistic) recommended amount was 4GB, and that doesn't even account for what else you might be running; that's just the recommended for the *operating system*. Win 7 is the same recommended amount (4GB), though anecdotes do indicate you can get away with less, but then, as I noted before, not everyone is a computer whiz, or wants to be; they just want it to work so they can make music. So, they're not going to try to squeak every last bit of optimization out of their operating system. There are people on other forums railing at Propellerhead because they really wanted that extra RAM addressing capability, because Reason 5 is still 32-bit. So apparently at least some people are running into capacity problems. And eventually Propellerhead will get the message, or they'll die off and someone else will come in with an equivalent, or even an improvement. Oh, and while we're on the subject of RAM, are you going to piss in AE's cornflakes too? After all, in his original post, way back at the beginning of the thread, he recommended two separate machine configs with 4GB of RAM, and that was 2008, when DDR3 was just starting to appear.
You keep saying RAID is some complex, expensive thing to run. It's not. Many of the new boards from ASUS have it built in, and several even have SAS connections. It's no longer the province of servers and Adaptec SCSI cards. You don't need extra money, and you don't need any specialized hardware. Again, this is an example of your 2006 thinking. It might apply to the guys you talk about who have to make do with an older workstation and a limited budget, but once again, you've lost sight there of the fact that this is a thread on building new, ground-up machines, so it's perfectly logical to suggest a simple RAID setup.
Now, about those video cards. You originally claimed that nearly every card out there now was DVI, and almost all were dual-head. That's pretty obviously not true, and was easily debunked with a 20-second search on NewEgg. Now you're trying to save face by falling back on DVI adapters? Sorry, that won't fly. You stepped on your dick there, and you might as well just admit it. DVI-D and VGA are wildly different tech. VGA is an analog signal, and by now badly out of date. Yes, some monitors still come with VGA sockets if you don't have anything better, but more and more are coming with DVI only, and soon even those will start disappearing as the industry moves on, probably to HDMI. The only reason those adapters work is that DVI-I has channels for an analog signal. It'll light up the monitor, but you won't get the really clear graphics DVI provides, and the OS won't be able to "read" the monitor. Depending on your card, you might not be able to get maximum resolution from the monitor either.
Now, I have no doubt that you've successfully helped people in the past. Most of the recommendations you have, while primitive, will no doubt work due to your past experience. But, to say I'm misleading people just because my recommendations don't mesh with your PC-building philosophy is pretty much pure asshattery. You haven't managed to "debunk" anything I've posted, and have misrepresented a fair amount of what I've said along the way. I never said *anything* on my list was *necessary*. I made recommendations, and said there were things that would probably be good to have, but I never said any of it was The One True Way. That's what this thread is supposed to be about: providing *advice* on building a new, custom PC, something you seem to have forgotten in your crusade. If you can't discuss that without dragging in irrelevant information, like the problems involved in configuring old hardware, or what to do if you have no extra money to upgrade, you probably aren't going to be able to contribute much of value to this thread.
The assumption here is that someone wants to build a brand-new, custom-designed machine, so they obviously have a reasonably stout budget and aren't expecting to have to compromise much if at all with regard to hardware. Is the prevalence of 32-bit plugins and their compatibility an issue? Yes, probably, depending on who the builder is, but that could have been approached in a polite, helpful fashion along the lines of "sure, that config is going to have a lot of power, but some VST plugins are still only 32-bit, so they might have problems in a 64-bit environment; here's an alternative/here's a config that still provides 32-bit compatibility while maintaining upgradability/here's what the builder might have to give up", rather than your approach of "beat it, kid, ya bother me. No one needs more than 2GB of RAM and a good Celeron anyway".
Honestly, at this point, it looks like you just want to prove how big your dick is and "win", as you have tried to drag, into a thread on new PC-building, versions of software that are 3 years out of date, obsolete processors, and all kinds of war stories and other irrelevant bullshit. You've tried to bag on me for disk recommendations. You've thrown your feces around about RAM amounts. You tried to put me down for recommending dual-DVI because most cards already have it, and when I pointed out that they don't, you switched to trying to put me down for thinking it mattered. Next you'll probably start ranting about how you used to have to walk 10 miles to and from your recording studio every day, in the snow, uphill both ways, and how you had to make your recordings by waving a refrigerator magnet above the tape in time with the beat. I have tried to keep things polite and respectful, and provide what helpful information I can, but you don't seem to have any interest in actually helping anyone, just in "winning".
So, you "win". Three cheers and a tiger for you. Now, unless you have something constructive to say rather than pissing on the furniture, **** off.
Oh, and P.S, 2000 was the last year of the 20th century, so yeah.
Last edited:
This is an issue being faced all over right now. The OS has suddenly changed, but the third-party guys lacked the resources to start development on product to match it. The ride is going to be kind of bumpy for the next year or two as they play catch-up. The problem is, a lot of the smaller software houses are going to have to abandon their 32-bit versions so they can fully support the new 64-bit. This is going to cause a lot of heartache, because the consumers are going to be in a catch-22 situation: those who don't want to give up on 32-bit (their old favorite plugins) face losing all support, and increasing obsolescence. Those who jump to 64 face the risk that the 64-bit version of a favorite plugin won't have "that sound", or that their favorite won't even be available. And yet, ultimately, 64-bit is going to be the standard going forward.
This looks to me like it's going to be an opportunity to move outside the comfort zone. I'm coming into this fresh; I don't have a favorite go-to plug-in yet, so I won't know what I'm losing. I'll have to work with what I can get. This might also be a good chance for those of you who still have physical hardware to dust it off, and see what you can still do with it.
logic7
old school
yeah... just what I thought, you're obviously just a simple "IT guy".
YOu f_cked yourself a number of times. You came here looking to show off like you know something. You spouted off like everything you said was the gold standard and THAT, son, is asshattery. To sit there and come off as arrogantly as you did as if everything you said was defacto truth is you just being an egotistical desktop tech.
Why would you tell Avid about a hardware RAID? Because they will want to know your full system's specs before they help you with a problem, this includes your hard drive configuration.
Your initial post says "get a dual DVI card blah, blah, blah..." whne, had you done the SAME search you're telling me to do, you would have known that it was useless to even mention it.
No, you don't need to turn off services AT ALL with 1GB of RAM on XP. There's far to many people out there that don't because it isn't necessary.
Maybe I failed to mention that the sim I run is writing it's results to an SQL 2005 DB also running on the same box. Yes it's working, yes it's quite useful, and no, the rest of engineering doesn't think we need to add RAM to it.
Avid also says that PT9 is compatible with 64bit windows, it doesn't say it's NATIVE, which is a HUGE difference. Both Sonar and Cubase 5 are native 64 bit aps, which means they can both utilize the extra RAM available under a 64bit OS.
I didn't try to bag on you, but you came up in here with your chest puffed out. You're trying to make it stick that I'm talking about old hardware when you didn't even know that next to nobody offers 5400RPM drives, 'cause... you know... that's outdated tech... same thing you're saying I'm bringing up...
You're right, the assumption IS that someone wants to build an up-to-date machine competent enough to run modern DAW's. I've already recommended some on this board, it's something you have yet to do.
I'll do it again too:
To anyone wanting to build a new machine but you have limited funds, take a look at these:
AMD Athlon II X4 640 3.0GHz Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor
BIOSTAR A780L3L AM3 AMD 760G Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
Crucial 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1066 (PC3 8500) Dual Channel Kit Desktop Memory Model CT2KIT12864BA1067
(2x) Western Digital Caviar Blue WDBAAX5000ENC-NRSN 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive
LG 22X DVD Burner - Bulk Black SATA Model GH22LS50 LightScribe Support - OEM
XFX HD-435X-YAH2 Radeon HD 4350 512MB 64-bit GDDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Ready Video Card
COOLMAX V-600 600W ATX12V Power Supply
GIGABYTE gz-ph1a3 Black SGCC ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
Price - $410.91 (+shipping)
If you want to go Intel, then replace the processor, motherboard, and RAM with these:
Intel Pentium E6800 Wolfdale 3.33GHz LGA 775 65W Dual-Core Desktop Processor BX80571E6800
BIOSTAR G41M7 LGA 775 Intel G41 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard
Mushkin Enhanced Silverline 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Desktop Memory Model 996758
Price - $412.91 (+shipping)
Add your own monitor, audio card, and flavor of Windows and you're good to go.
noblewordz
sexing your mother
Wouldn't you say that PSU is a bit overkill?
logic7
old school
meh... kinda sorta... but considering the price difference between the Coolmax and, say, a Thermaltake 430W joint is only $1 (43.99 vs 44.99)... I'll get the 600W.
noblewordz
sexing your mother
I guess. Would it even kick out 600W?
I don't know that brand, I'm kinda anal about PSU's, I like to spend a little extra, Corsair, Antec, even a Be Quiet Over a budget brand.
I don't know that brand, I'm kinda anal about PSU's, I like to spend a little extra, Corsair, Antec, even a Be Quiet Over a budget brand.
logic7
old school
Coolmax isn't bad, nor is Thermaltake. For the same 44.95, you can get an Antec 430W joint too, so if that's more your speed then you've got that as an option.
Brandon Styalz
New member
Good read, but a quad core processor isn't a necessity unless the program you're using is even capable of utilizing multiple cores. Maybe for video, but for audio a dual core is more than adequate.