Members JoshuaLogan Posted March 12, 2008 Author Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 can somebody answer the question about the hard drives? should I try to get an external hard drive for the 2nd one or is it fine just to have another internal drive? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blargh Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 can somebody answer the question about the hard drives? should I try to get an external hard drive for the 2nd one or is it fine just to have another internal drive? sure, why wouldn't it be fine? SATA is a much faster bus than USB or firewire. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LaXu Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 Well, I know a 32 bit OS can't recognize 4 GB but it's close.... something like 3.5 GB or so. I want to avoid vista altogether right now because it also doesn't have very good driver support yet, and the OS itself uses a lot more system resources so it's quite a bit slower... I just want to go 4GB for XP because it'll pretty much max out the memory capability If you are going to get a new PC you shouldn't have any compatibility issues. Mine is a bit over a year old and the only things that did not work were a 7+ years old scanner (which barely worked with XP) and almost equally old serial port graphics tablet. And for the record Vista 64-bit runs just as well as XP did on the same machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JesperX Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 sure, why wouldn't it be fine? SATA is a much faster bus than USB or firewire. A lot of motherboards have SATA ports accessible from the back and some cases have external SATA ports that you can just wire up to the mobo the same way you would an internal drive. Just sayin', in case portability is a factor. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Herald of Light Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 As far as the processor and motherboard go, I'd go with that Gigabyte P35 board that was linked to, and an E8400. Those Gigabyte boards overclock better than pretty much anything, to the point where they're actually rated to handle front side bus speeds beyond what the chipset itself is. And they're very easy to set up. It will adjust everything automatically when you up the front side bus speed. You don't need three hard drives. You don't even really need two, though it makes enough sense for the money, instead of just buying one huge drive. Get a quad core.Some will try and convice you that dual core is faster in some way, but I think they are just that typical percentage of technology dinosaurs that don't trust new things. In SOME way? Like the fact that the clock speeds are universally significantly higher at the same price, and that they overclock so much better, there's no contest? In what way is a quad core really faster, aside from the very rare event that something really utilizes it? Unfortunately, the only real "dinosaur" here is about to be your processor. Sorry buddy, but it's not everyone else's fault you bought one of the first mainstream quad cores. Current dual cores step all over them in the vast majority of the cases where people would be pushing their processor, and when quad cores become the standard with the next Intel line, there is such a radical difference between the Core architecture, that the fact that quad cores may begin to be utilized won't even mean anything for the older ones. It's Athlon 64 all over again. If you don't see the parallels, sorry, I can't help you there, but that's the way it is. It's just the other way around this time. Instead of Intel not really bothering with 64 bit capable processors, AMD is not really bothering with quad cores. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JoshuaLogan Posted March 12, 2008 Author Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 If you are going to get a new PC you shouldn't have any compatibility issues. Mine is a bit over a year old and the only things that did not work were a 7+ years old scanner (which barely worked with XP) and almost equally old serial port graphics tablet. And for the record Vista 64-bit runs just as well as XP did on the same machine. Yeah, I don't know... just heard a lot of people having problems with vista. The main thing I'd worry about is having drivers that work well on it for the presonus firestudio.... presonus is notorious for having crappy driver support... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JesperX Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 Yeah, I don't know... just heard a lot of people having problems with vista. The main thing I'd worry about is having drivers that work well on it for the presonus firestudio.... presonus is notorious for having crappy driver support... Just looking on their site it doesn't appear that the firestudio has drivers for XP64 or Vista64 yet. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members noseminer Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 Recording creates a ton of data, and i believe in quad cores 2 cores share a cache. You are gonna get a {censored} ton of cache misses and your memory bus is going to be the bottleneck, not your processor power - so the extra 2 cores are probably going to be waiting around for {censored} to do and not worth your money. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JesperX Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 Recording creates a ton of data, and i believe in quad cores 2 cores share a cache. You are gonna get a {censored} ton of cache misses and your memory bus is going to be the bottleneck, not your processor power - so the extra 2 cores are probably going to be waiting around for {censored} to do and not worth your money. Quad cores at this point are just two dual core dies in the same package. In each dual core you've got a private level 1 cache and a shared L2 cache. This means that on the quad cores that are just two dual cores sandwiched together, there is NO shared cash between the two chips. Intel's solution is to just keep making L2 Caches bigger, which is nice but it does effect latency. Even barring that whole issue, by the time we're able to properly utilize 4 cores, the quads that are out then will stomp all over the current ones. So it still makes more sense to buy a faster dual right now. **Edited for rambliness Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wkwon Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 I would suggest that you get the newer 45nm chips instead of the 65nm ones. They're more efficient, cooler, and are overall better, even though the numbers may not be even with the 65nm ones. And since 45nm is the future, you should be able to just switch out chips later on, instead of having to switch your motherboard also. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members blargh Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 I would suggest that you get the newer 45nm chips instead of the 65nm ones.They're more efficient, cooler, and are overall better, even though the numbers may not be even with the 65nm ones. And since 45nm is the future, you should be able to just switch out chips later on, instead of having to switch your motherboard also. The 45nm chips use the same LGA775 socket the 65nm chips do, I think. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JesperX Posted March 12, 2008 Members Share Posted March 12, 2008 The 45nm chips use the same LGA775 socket the 65nm chips do, I think. You're right, they do. The only downside is waiting for them =( Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members wkwon Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 The 45nm chips use the same LGA775 socket the 65nm chips do, I think. Did not know that. Thanks. So correct me if i'm wrong... Only the chip is smaller, and the dye is the same size? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members code_blue Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 XP 64 is notorious for having horrible driver support. Microsoft requires vendors to release drivers for both Vista 32 and 64 bit this time around- the problem isn't 64 bit Vista support vs. 32 bit Vista support, the problem is overall quirks in Vista drivers as a whole and that's gradually going to get better as time goes on. Ive been using x64 for about a year and have never run into a bad driver problem. I use the living crap out of my computer too for everything, and have changed many pieces of hardware. Everything that is halfway decent will have support, if you are looking for drivers for obscure parts made before 2005 than you may have some trouble. See that is what started this whole myth, people wrote off x64 because it didn't have drivers at first and it has had that reputation all along. x64 is also the most stable version of XP, I rarely ever see windows interface errors or things being slow in any way. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members RoboPimp Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 you should really think about an analog solution, digital recording sounds like {censored} compared to even a tascam porta studio Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Weathered Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 you should really think about an analog solution, digital recording sounds like {censored} compared to even a tascam porta studioYeah....sure. 2" analog tape sounds incredible, but recording to a cassette is for people playing in their bedrooms. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members newholland Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 you should really think about an analog solution, digital recording sounds like {censored} compared to even a tascam porta studio that's crazy talk.. new digital sounds pretty honest to me, and i love the big tape. it's not saturated the same way by virtue of the technology-- but with good preamps, you can get great results. not that you can't get decent results to cassette 4 track-- you absolutely can, especially going through outboard pres, but to say you get better results to it than to GOOD digital.. i dunno 'bout that. craptastic 16 bit through behringer boards or a digital recorder input? ok... you win.. but solid digital through a decent machine... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members LaXu Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 Yeah, I don't know... just heard a lot of people having problems with vista. The main thing I'd worry about is having drivers that work well on it for the presonus firestudio.... presonus is notorious for having crappy driver support... The driver thing is indeed a valid concern. If you're stuck with 32-bit OSs you might as well just go with 2 GB RAM for the time being. I still haven't really run into anything that would significantly benefit from more than that. Good thing too because due to my crap Asus motherboard my system doesn't overclock at all with 4x1GB sticks. Vista has given me far fewer problems than XP. With XP every time I installed it I had to spend several hours tweaking it to get it running well. With Vista all I did was suppress the UAC prompts and disable a bunch of services. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members yourguitarhero Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 Cheers for the info on this thread. Planning on buying a new PC real soon, and had originally considering going quad core. I think I'll hit up a 45nm dual core instead - valid points here. Plus I'm sticking with XP. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Def_Pearl_Pilot Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 That's not entirely true. The areas in which multithreading is possible are still very limited because it's insanely difficult to parallelize certain types of programming that are very dependent on things happening in a specific order and that constantly communicate with other areas of the code. We're seeing it used more and more in the places that we can take advantage of it, which are basically sections of the code that are highly independent and can just {censored} off and do their own thing without need a lot of communication or synchronization. These are things like encoding and rendering.I say this because it is NOT one of those things that in a short while will just explode and everything will be massively multithreaded. The biggest problem is, like I said, a lot of the code is dependent on results from other sections of code or needs to constantly communicate with some other process to ensure things happen in the correct order. All of the mechanisms that have been created to solve these problems create serious performance issues in code that is tightly coupled with other sections of code- which is why only certain highly independent tasks gain any real benefit from multithreading.Encoding is one of those areas that contains tasks which are highly independent. Saying most new games are multithreaded is kind of misleading as well. The truth is that certain sections of the engine are multithreaded, like rendering and particle systems and whatnot. They are far from being massively multithreaded and far from needing a quad core over a faster dual core. You must be a developer. Very few consumers understand software enough to make judgements on the benefits of additional cores. Not only does the software slow down due to synchronization but the hardware has it's own overhead. Also, you technically don't need a multi-core processor for multiple threads. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JoshuaLogan Posted March 13, 2008 Author Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 you should really think about an analog solution, digital recording sounds like {censored} compared to even a tascam porta studiolol is you crazy? have you looked at... hmm.... just about any studio nowadays? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Weathered Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 lol is you crazy? have you looked at... hmm.... just about any studio nowadays? I'd sell my firstborn child for this tape machine:http://electrical.com/item.php?page=6&pic=pictures/6.jpgBut apart from that, I'm a digital kind of lady. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members JoshuaLogan Posted March 13, 2008 Author Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 I'm still not sure about the quad core / dual core decision. A lot of you guys saying the dual cores will be better are gamers and referring to gaming... Isn't there a new intel Q series quad core coming soon? Starts with a 9 I think? Q9_ _...? I wonder how soon that comes out... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Herald of Light Posted March 13, 2008 Members Share Posted March 13, 2008 Isn't there a new intel Q series quad core coming soon? Starts with a 9 I think? Q9_ _...? I wonder how soon that comes out... They're supposed to come out on the 15th. However, that date was set a long time ago when there was a manufacturing delay, and the entire series won't be out, either way. I know that one of them is basically a more affordable Q6600, and another is slightly better, but more expensive. It's not like they're suddenly releasing an equivalent of the dual core versions at the same prices. The E8000 series isn't even done being released yet, so that's pretty much just not going to happen at all. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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