New PC- yay :-)

Okay, My old one's been struggling for a while now, Although it's quite a powerful system, it had been upgraded to it's maximum possible spec. And it was noisy.

So, yesterday I popped out and got a new system, an AMD 64 Dual Core 4200, with 2gb Ram, an ATI x1300 PCI-E card (I miss my 6800 already but this baby's SVideo out is awesome :)), with a 300gb Sata Hard drive.

It's Standard PCI most of the way, but with a PCI-E slot, Not sure what mobo it is again now :) but this was my choice.

I immediately took advantage of the Sata by placing my old system's hard drive's on the IDE channel, so I could have almost 1TB of storage space, and then I spotted something. it's ONLY got a 300w PSU. Ouch.


Anyway, bar the weak PSU, I'm really happy with this system, and it only cost me £790. I know, it may sound pricey, but I couldn't face building a new one again!

What's funny by the way is this system apparently runs at 900mhz in Idle :)

So, what do you think? *flashes shiny new system*

I'm actually planning a new amd64dual horse as well, but I aim for 4gb ram (large instruments and such :P)... dunno exactly when to leech it tho, but can't be that long.. I tried an orchestral/starwars setup in my sempron3000+/512mb notebook, and boy does it sweat.. and I'm only halfway! I need raw horsepower for this specific task! ^_^

There're several 4000+ models, does it matter a lot which one you take, or is the difference only minor compared to the price-difference?


btw, 300w ... isn't that enough for the system + a couple o' HD's? I bet I really am going to plug quite some HD's .. should I go for more watts?

I'd go for more watts- i was going to have 4 hard drives and a DVD writer. My last PSU to blow was a 300w and that was on my old system. I assumed it'd be safer to get a more powerful one :)

As for the processors, Go Dual-Core if you're software supports it. I'm using Fruityloops (Laugh all you will :P), which doesn't, so I actually seem to have a small performance loss in that area! :(

As for the 4000+ rating, I can't say I'm up to date in that area, so I don't know for sure, but AMD's "4000+" ratings all seem pretty similar in performance, except for the dual cores which shine when they're supported.

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Oh, and it goes without saying that you should make sure you get the lowest latency, highest quality audio card you can grab, I didnt put my old one in the new system yet and i get 60ms latency. Yuck! (heh, it's supposed to be High Definition, perhaps that's the performance loss...)

^__^

An important factor is the noise that comes from a PSU.. I want silence!

I'll be using a Terratec 7.1 with Asio4all..

That's exactly what I use, It works wonders!

Even with ASIO4All, I still have 40ms latence onboard. Ew :)

My system is *silent*. It's bliss :D

40ms??? My el-cheapo notebook, the cheapest E650 packard bell I could find, has only a few ms latency on that built-in AC'97 thing... O_o

Yeah, this was a built in AC97 HD codec too. My old p60 had less latency! :O but with the Terratec board in, everything's dandy at 1-2ms for really simple stuff, never needing to rise above say 4/5ms

Even that's enough to knock your timing out though, As I'm sure you know :)

Cool. Well have run with it. Hey I got Renoise last night and stayed up till 3am, it's cool. Is the latency for output or input? I'm not too clear but I know anything that buggers with your timing isn't good.

Nice, id have gone for the 3800+ and a better video card.

The latency is how long it takes for your keystroke to be heard.

Your computer usually uses a buffer to create sounds, and passes this buffer to the sound card when it's full. The larger the buffer is the longer it takes for the sound to reach the soundcard and therefore the speakers.

Sometimes, the soundcards themselves have a latency issue whereby they take a while to emit anyway, but that's uncommon, and if you get it, you have a naff card :D

Renoise? Cool, How much did you grab that for? I've not used it, keep meaning to though!


As for the 3800+, It wasn't a custom build, it was one that was as close to what I wanted as possible, with certain features a Must.

I never really pushed my 6800, so I am not going to be missing out on much between now and when I swap the x1300 for the 6800 :)

What I think: the first thing you should do is going to amd.com and install the cool'n'quiet drivers if you want to prevent some serious tming issues ;-)

Thanks for the latency info. I've got an Audigy 2 ZS (with the external box jobby) so hopefully that's OK.

Years ago I tried some recording on cubase with my SBLive+ and it was bad news. If I played a guitar riff in, then set it to play back and I recorded a new riff at the same time, my new riff was always out by a certain amount of time. It was really annoying. I assumed this was latency. This actually put me off using studio software as a simple 4 track was more accurate, so I just went back to trackers, but haven't really even used them much since Fast Tracker 2 stopped working due to lack of DOS and DOS-Style (legacy) sound cards. I gave Madtracker a go but it has bugs and ModPlugPlayer doesn't play it's modules with all the effects on.

As for renoise, I just downloaded the demo which is fully featured except for WAV export. Cool! If I end up using it properly I'll buy it as it's only $40 or something, cheap. It has multi VST effects on each channel, very nice. Hey I should have posted this in my samples thread.

Hmmm! I heard about these yesterday but I assume theyre already installed. I'll take a look later.