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Love Monkey
Junior Member
United Kingdom
113 posts
Joined: Apr, 2002
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 Posted - 2002/04/30 : 05:24:21
I havent been able to make any tunes for a while because my computer cant handle it.
Ive been looking at some upgrades and i'm a bit stuck on which motherboard to get.
It seems as if all newer p4 motherboards have on board audio. ive always thought that this is a bad thing.
Would it be ok if i disabled and used a regular soundcard? (I have a delta 1010)
Also can anyone reccomend a good hard drive. I was going to get an ibm deskstar 120gxp but have heard nothing but bad press about them.
In the words of Ali G: "Give a man a compilation tape and he'll dance for a night. Teach a man to scratch, and he'll be dancing for generations!"
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phosphor
New Member
Canada
44 posts
Joined: Mar, 2001
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Posted - 2002/04/30 : 10:05:50
oh man ... pc specs are a pain to get right .. especially with audio.
I had to upgrade to a solid box a couple months back (the 400Mhz PII finally died and without a solid audio box, my life was almost over ;) So i was forced to get something within the week (and as a result had to postpone a trip to the UK :/ ). The system i got was a custom built one from a local shop in town run by some friends. One of the guys that works there is a producer as well and had done a nice stack of research into what's out there for audio. Here's the specs of the system i'm running rite now:
- AthlonXP 1800+ with an Asus A7V133 Mother Board
(the board was basically made for the chip and you can overclock it if ya want ;)
- 2 Deskstar 07N6654 60GXP 40GB ATA-100 7200 RPM 8.5MS
- 512MB's pc133 ram
(tho if you can get the DDR style ram - aparently it's just wicked for speed!)
The 2 hard drives are running on a Raid 0 controller - very fast!
(Raid 0 runs 2 drives in parallel so one file is split between the 2 drives ... effectively cuts the access time in half)
As for the IBM drives themeslves i haven't had any problem with them yet and the newer ones are supposed to be much better than some of the older IBM ones wich i hear have had some dodgey reports
The sytem just flys running win98 - soid under NT4.0 for my sofware development stuff as well. Haven't dropped XP on it, but there shouldn't be a problem with that OS either.
I have had no problems running any software or hardware on it (tho the PCI SCSI card to not conflict with the on board ATA controller was a bit touchy ..)
The sound card i'm using is an Echo Gina24. Most other cards are happy with that motherboard as well i hear (theres a few audio nuts in my city here that have the same motherboard). Both cubase, reason, and Logic are all happy as well (also running the Emagic AMT-8 midi interface - running on a serial connection mind you .. not USB ;)
The specs are a bit dated (2 months ago) but generally the Asus Motherboards running the AMD Athalon chipset is a wicked combinaton for audio. If you want to stay with an Intel Chip (like the P4's) .. make sure you do some solid research on what will work. 2 months ago there was only on board and memory combiation that would work for audio ... then there was this copywrite issue with the memory and they had to take it off the market .. leaving no stable P4 sytems out there for audio. There may be a p4 board/chip combination available now .. but i don't have any specs on one just yet. Just be warned!
Cheerz!
Dan aka phosphor / phaXis
www.djphosphor.com
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-Dan aka phosphor/phaXis
www.blizzardtracks.com
www.warningrecords.net
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Oli G
Advanced Member
United States
1,817 posts
Joined: Oct, 2001
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Posted - 2002/04/30 : 10:06:02
heh Delta 1010.. /me drools
yeah you can disable those on board tripe-cards in the bios
i intend to be doing it my self when i get a studio pc with a decent soundcard
:)))
"ENERGISE"
\o/ <o/ \o> <o> /o\ _o/ \o_
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Hardcore Underground 4 - Released October 19th
http://www.myspace.com/camelrecords
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DJ Mouse
Advanced Member
United Kingdom
2,687 posts
Joined: Jul, 2001
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Posted - 2002/04/30 : 10:18:44
i still haven't got mine sorted out,having to make tunes at college is cool but since i finish in a few weeks i'm buggered after that
i'll try get it all in a few sentences: i've no midi on the computer, i'm running an sb live but the only outputs i've got in cubase is sb live midi out and mros.
i used to be able to select other ones like the creative synth (crap) and the a & b sb live synths,but after installing a dodgy copy of cubase i lost it all.
HHEEEELLLPP!!!!!!
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"Don't frown when someone annoys you, it uses 42 muscles. Bitch-slap the fu©ker, it only uses 4"
DJ Mouse
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Love Monkey
Junior Member
United Kingdom
113 posts
Joined: Apr, 2002
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Posted - 2002/04/30 : 11:07:00
damn. the only thing i was getting for definate was a p4!!
More research methinks....
In the words of Ali G: "Give a man a compilation tape and he'll dance for a night. Teach a man to scratch, and he'll be dancing for generations!"
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Soren
Senior Member
United States
499 posts
Joined: Mar, 2001
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Posted - 2002/05/08 : 07:57:19
I think I just answered your questions on another thread, but here's my advice:
Stick with a P4, so long as it's a P4a with 512K Cache and a 2.26 GHz+ with a 533Mhz FSB, they crush Athlons for everything but Video, and are still better at that. I love Athlons and they are definitely a best buy, but if you want pure speed the P4a's can't be beat right now.
Get an Asus P4T533-C. I think these might be available with built in RAID, not sure. If not get a 2 channel RAID controller from Promise. (that is if you want RAID, and ill address that later).
Get RDRAM. Everyone still hates it cause it used to be expensive, but now it's cheap and PC800 and the new PC1066 chips destroy DDR DIMM's.
Stay away from Deskstars, they blow. They blow a lot. Then they blow up. Get Seagate Barracuda's (single or 2 for RAID) or if you got the cash get the WD1200JB, it's got 8 MB of onboard RAM and is the best IDE drive out there right now.
Responses or Phosphor and comments on RAID:
"(Raid 0 runs 2 drives in parallel so one file is split between the 2 drives ... effectively cuts the access time in half)"
RAID arrays do not increase access time at all (OK, that's a lie, they will increase access time about 3% but that's not much). What they do is split the data chanels allowing double rate transfers, reading, writing etc... They are good if you will be dealing with a LOT of huge files. Say 50MB+ files a lot. Otherwise there is not much advantage to RAID arrays. A lot of graphics people use them (or RAID SCSI arrays at least) cause they deal with 100MB+ files all the time. If you are just going to be editing small WAV's and doing sequencing on the computer then you don't need RAID. However if you are building a dedicated Gigastudio PC that will be hosting like 20GB of samples RAID would rock.
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Happy Hardcore makes me feel like a Koala bear just crapped a rainbow in my brain.
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Edited by - Soren on 2002/05/08 08:30:35 |
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