The PC-user specs thread!

[tearsofthedragon]

Hey guys, I think it’s time to upgrade my PC for recording purposes, currently I’m using an athlon AMD 2600+ (192Ghz) with one gig of ram and XP. Which works great for recording audio - but starts to fall down a bit with more modern plug-ins (superior drummer, symphonic quires etc).

I’ve been reading up a lot on PC specs for recording lately, and would just like to know what you guys using or what you would like to be using (for those of you who are PC users). But before we get into the whole MAC / PC debate, I’d also just like to say that Macs are great, but they are just not my thing, I’ve been a PC user for too long now to change.

I’d also like to hear about any kind of compatibility issues that anyone has had with various PC components and/or hardware/software etc… Any info or advice you think is relevant is also very welcome!

Thanks!

P.S apologies if this is in the wrong part of the forum, the ‘Gear’ thread looked a little bit instrument-specific for my thread.

 

[lilhermiejobo]

If you use your computer for recording, it is considered equipment. MY DAW is listed in my sig, if you're interested.

 

[Notuern]

First rule: NEVER EVER buy a shitty AMD.. those are only for 15 year olds playing Counter-Strike!

And if you are going to build a PC for recording, buy an older graphics card, if you buy a modern graphics card it will stand for 1/3 of what you have to dish out for the entire setup.
My rule when building computers is that i ALWAYS use ASUS high end motherboards(Crappy motherboards will screw you over.), Intel processors, Corsair memory and Seagate Barracuda drives, and i have _NEVER_ had any compatibility issues building computers this way.

Another tip i have is the following: Every piece of hardware you are planning on buying, google for the name of the hardware + problems/error/issues to find out what problems people are having with them.

 

[jarenare]

First rule: NEVER EVER buy a shitty AMD..

Why?

 

[Harry Hughes]

It's been a while since AMD have been making CPUs that could properly compete with the best from Intel.

 

[Notuern]

Why?

It's been a while since AMD have been making CPUs that could properly compete with the best from Intel.

There you have it.

Just check this out:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/overclock-phenom-ii,2119.html

 

[tearsofthedragon]

The AMD has actually served me quite well up to this point (although I have had a few compatibility issues, like with the Presonus Firebox for example), but it is a custom built PC - so it’s not PC-world shite or anything! But yeah, I was thinking of going for a pentium quad-core, I'm not a gamer so I'm not too bothered about getting any kind of overly-flashy graphics card (even an onboard one would do me - I presume?). But I’ll look into some of the older models, any suggestions?

 

[KillDivision]

Okay, my comp, build it around march I think.

Cooler Master Cosmos S (secondhand 100 euro)
Intel i7-920 (OC at 3.6 Ghz)
OCZ SSD 120 GB (with dualboot XP & Sonar/XP internet)
4 x Samsung F1 drives
Corsair 6 GB DDR3 1600hrz memory (only using 3 GB with XP-32bits)
Scythe Mugen SCINF-1000 cooler (the i7-920 gets hot!!)
Asus W6T Pro WS
Western Digital Firewire port.
NVIDIA Geforce 8800 GTS 640 mb (secondhand 80 euro)
2 x Samsung 20" monitors (Sonar on left monitor, plugins on right monitor....)

I can run shitloads of plugins. Running Superior Drummer 2.0, Steven Slate drums 3.5, loads of ampsims, compressors, softsynths and all kinds of heavy plugins without the computer working hard. I've never gone over 30% CPU usage.

I would love to have a 8-core Mac, but I didn't have the Mac money.

 

[Notuern]

The AMD has actually served me quite well up to this point (although I have had a few compatibility issues, like with the Presonus Firebox for example), but it is a custom built PC - so it’s not PC-world shite or anything! But yeah, I was thinking of going for a pentium quad-core, I'm not a gamer so I'm not too bothered about getting any kind of overly-flashy graphics card (even an onboard one would do me - I presume?). But I’ll look into some of the older models, any suggestions?

AMD might work pretty good, but if you take an Intel and benchmark it with the competing processor from AMD, the Intel will kick the AMD's as so hard that it will taste the Intel's foot. ;D

About the graphics card, i would get some "older" NVIDIA card, preferably something that was high end when it was new.
In Sweden you can buy a brand new Asus 9400GT for 50$, and thats a pretty decent card if you're not planning to run the latest über graphics games.

I wouldn't use any on board graphics card, because the on board stuff will use your CPU and RAM to function.. besides, if you want to run dual monitors you need a real graphics card.

 

[tearsofthedragon]

GOOD POINTS Notuern! Thanks for your help!

 

[GarethSE]

Get a decent graphics card for sure or you'll bottleneck your system and not get the FULL performance.

 

[Torniojaws]

If you don't need 3D graphics from the graphics card, I can recommend Matrox cards instead of AMD/ATI and Nvidia cards. Matrox cards have far superior 2D quality (desktop use), and you don't pay extra for things you won't use.

 

[mick thompson]

ahem...mac

 

[Notuern]

Get a decent graphics card for sure or you'll bottleneck your system and not get the FULL performance.

I dont think you can even buy a graphics card today that would bottleneck your computer when recording audio.

 

[tearsofthedragon]

Thanks for all the suggestions!

Does anyone know what the difference is between these special DAW PCs and regular - or even custom build PCs (like some of you guys have):

http://www.directresolutions.co.uk/producer.html

They seem a lot more expensive, and are apparantly 'tweaked for audio use'? What the 'tweaks' are I'm not exactly sure...

 

[Notuern]

They seem a lot more expensive, and are apparantly 'tweaked for audio use'? What the 'tweaks' are I'm not exactly sure...

These Tweaks are within the operative system.
They basically shut of everything you dont need to make music to spare ram & cpu.

Other things that are unique about it is probably that it has a very expensive PSU thats well shielded etc. to reduce risk of noise spreading.

If i where you, i would just buy a case that has rubber suspensions for the HDD's and CD/DVD's, and buy so called "noise-less" fans for the case, CPU, GPU and PSU.
I remember someone posting a web site with XP-tweaks for audio, but i dont remember or have the address left, so if someone has the link it would be great(I want it as well!).

 

[jrt12]

i'm confusing this thread with a similar one in the OffTopic section. I will post a link to the 2 sites that discuss optimizing PCs for audio production when i get home from work (unless someone posts it sooner).

 

[narcossintese]

I dont think you can even buy a graphics card today that would bottleneck your computer when recording audio.

True.

Get an Intel Core2Quad CPU. A Q6600 will do the job flawlessly and doesn´t cost much. As said, any onboard video will be more than enough, unless you want to use two monitors.

Anyway, Modern Warfare 2 comes on november, so this might be a good excuse to spend on a nice video card

 

[Erkan]

Whatever you do when it comes to OS tweakage... don't turn off the page-file as some audio tweak guides suggest. That resulted in some nice blue screens for my part atleast sysaudio.sys was the file that was involved in the blue screen, and it had to do with "PAGE FAULT IN NON-PAGED AREA" or something similar. Anyhow, it happened after I turned off the page file as suggested by the audio tweak guide, and stopped when I put it back on. So avoid that. Every other tweak seems to have worked very well actually, it's just that one that's a bit fucked up.

My specs are:

Asus P5Q Deluxe
Intel Q9550 Quad Core (2.83 ghz, no overclocking)
4GB Corsair RAM
400 Watt Corsair PSU
320 GB Samsung F1 for system drive
750 GB Samsung F1 for audio recording and projects (these disks are ridiculously fast and cheap)
Gigabyte ATI Radeon HD4350 GFX Card (does the job just alright, but has a slightly annoying fan sound)
LaCie FireWire card

guess that's the most important to list. I decided to not run the CPU overclocked because I prefer stability over anything else. It doesn't matter anyway, I have about 5-6 times more processing power than my previous audio computer which had an AMD X2 4400+ so... it kicks quite some ass! I can easily run a couple instances of Addictive Drums, 16 tracks of amp sims, and like 10 synths before the crackles and pops show up, and that's with only 64 samples latency setting!

 

[JBroll]

192GHz? And people say AMD can't keep up with Intel?[/sarcasm]

I do get what people say about AMD not competing with Intel's best... hell, over the summer I built a dual-Xeon 5500 server that installed the entire Fedora package set in less time than we took for a smoke break. However, competing with Intel *for the price* is a different issue entirely, and pretending that they haven't made their own contributions (x86-64, for example) or some really great values is going past criticism and straight into brand loyalty at the expense of thinking clearly.

Erkan, I'm interested in the errors you got... it appears that something is trying to access a nonexistent page file which means either confused coding - 'paging'/'swapping'/'whatever you want to do along those lines' isn't exactly intelligent practice very often - or insufficent RAM - which I'd be surprised at with 4GB of the stuff.

(Note: some UNIX systems use swap files or swap partitions for a similar thing... Mac OS X should be one of them. I've been safely and stably running without a page or swap file for years now and never got any issue along those lines.)

I have an AMD 4400+, 6GB of RAM, ASUS M2A-MVP, some ridiculously overpowered power supply, an NVIDIA GTX260 (would not recommend due to driver hell), and two hard drives - 250GB disk for operating systems, 500 for other stuff.

Jeff