PC DAW builders.

[abarnett]

I have an Asus LGA 775 MB and a Intel Celeron d 352 copper mill.

I'm thinking of upgrading to either
-Pentium 4 Prescott
or
-Pentium D 820 SmithField

Anyone use these in a DAW?

Celly 352 claims 64 bit, but linux doesn't buy it and I'd like to Upgrade to 64 for Matlab and a nice linux build. Also wouldn't mind 800Mhz FSB and 2MB L2.

[SorenP]

On mine that I put together I have a P4 prescott and 800Mhz FSB. A board died on me awhile back and had to get a cheap replacement for awhile withOUT the 800 fsb... i almost threw it out the window. It makes such a huge difference. it's a P4 3ghz hyperthread with only a gig of ram and there's not much I can't do on my old LE 5.3.1 digi 001.

[neal79]

The bus speed is almost always the limiting factor in any PC. Get the fastest one you can and you will be much happier.

[abarnett]

Thanks for the replies. I've been thinking that I need a better Front Side Bus. I don't know when I'll be able to upgrade this. (Its only about a hundred bucks).

[SorenP]

I'm going to reformat and start my setup from scratch this weekend so I was reading some article on optimizing XP for audio, some interesting not-so-obvious stuff Like completely disabling system restore (yikes... thats a leap of faith) and totally killing virtual memory (if you have good fast RAM it forces it to use all of it as opposed to bogging down cpu based system resources) I'll edit this post and link it later when I find it.

But yeah man, get that FSB upgraded as soon as you can, it's like doubling your processor speed, its a whole new deal. Get the fastest RAM you can too. Especially in LE based systems where stuff like reverbs delays and amp-sims (sansamp is a friggin resource slut) just drains your resources like crazy.

[smopo24]

I knew someone that would disable his screen savers on every computer he was using for recording. He said that even that took up resources that he would rather give to his recording software.

[SorenP]

haha. yeah that's on there too. disabling screen savers, even the little animation that closes windows that takes a half second, using 16bit video instead of 24bit, all sorts of stuff.