Members Adacto Posted June 28, 2012 Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 With USB3.0, will the need for firewire be even less? Short answer would be... yes, but only in the long term. At the moment there are relatively few USB 3.0 devices out, certainly compared to Firewire. When I say Firewire, I mean Firewire 800... USB 2.0 generally outperforms Firewire 400. It's been about 2 1/2 years since I built my studio PC and I'm getting good usage out of it still. From what I recall, spec at the time was: ASUS P6TSE motherboard (bought before I realised limitations of firewire chipsets!)Intel i7 920 (first gen) processorCorsair XMS 4GB RAM - would have gone for more, but I still run XP. Old school, but Windows 7 was too new at the timeSamsung F1 1TB HDD I still use the same HDD for OS and data - poor form, I know - but I'm running Pro Tools 8 and can still get silly track counts. The guy that said "get whatever makes you happy now, it will be irrelevant eventually" was more or less spot on. Get what you can afford... a lot of my musician buddies have powerful mac setups, stupid RAM figures etc... at the end of the day, my setup has worked for me for 2 1/2 years and I don't regret it one bit. Get decent case fans and, ideally, run a temperature based controller from the front panel. Really helps cut down noise, same goes for the CPU fan. Don't use stock fans if you plan on recording in the same room as the PC (via microphones). Sounds obvious, but I had to delay a project whilst waiting for 'suitably quiet' fans... Jon PS. If you're not playing games, get a passive graphics card. I'm a pedant about noisy fans... the noisest ones tend to be found in those gaming GFX cards! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ambient Posted June 28, 2012 Author Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 I'd go to LifeHacker and read about building a Hackintosh, then partition your HDD and install both Windows 7 and iOS. Best of both worlds. What are the advantages of this? I aleady plan to triple boot winxp 32 bit, win 7 64 and Ubuntu 64. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ambient Posted June 28, 2012 Author Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 Short answer would be... yes, but only in the long term. At the moment there are relatively few USB 3.0 devices out, certainly compared to Firewire.When I say Firewire, I mean Firewire 800... USB 2.0 generally outperforms Firewire 400. It's been about 2 1/2 years since I built my studio PC and I'm getting good usage out of it still. From what I recall, spec at the time was:ASUS P6TSE motherboard (bought before I realised limitations of firewire chipsets!)Intel i7 920 (first gen) processorCorsair XMS 4GB RAM - would have gone for more, but I still run XP. Old school, but Windows 7 was too new at the timeSamsung F1 1TB HDDI still use the same HDD for OS and data - poor form, I know - but I'm running Pro Tools 8 and can still get silly track counts. The guy that said "get whatever makes you happy now, it will be irrelevant eventually" was more or less spot on. Get what you can afford... a lot of my musician buddies have powerful mac setups, stupid RAM figures etc... at the end of the day, my setup has worked for me for 2 1/2 years and I don't regret it one bit.Get decent case fans and, ideally, run a temperature based controller from the front panel. Really helps cut down noise, same goes for the CPU fan. Don't use stock fans if you plan on recording in the same room as the PC (via microphones). Sounds obvious, but I had to delay a project whilst waiting for 'suitably quiet' fans... JonPS. If you're not playing games, get a passive graphics card. I'm a pedant about noisy fans... the noisest ones tend to be found in those gaming GFX cards! The newer intel cpus seem to have pretty good graphics, I'm leaning towards some kind of i5. Not sure whether to go with sandy or ivy bridge though, I may get one of the low power consumption models to help with cooling. As far as getting what makes me happy now, that would probably be the same as what would've made me happy 6 months, or even 2 years ago. I'm not gonna be pushing any performance boundaries at the moment, but I am concerned about the ability to add stuff to the system to speed things up if my needs change. That's why I'm not too concerned about loading it with tons of ram and drive space out of the gate, I can always add that stuff later (it'll get cheaper too). As long as I can keep using what I buy at the start it won't be a waste. I hadn't thought too much about aftermarket fans, is it that big of a difference? For recording/mixing and as I may wanna leave it on in the same room we live/sleep, noise and therefore heat are pretty big concerns. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members juri Posted June 28, 2012 Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 Buy what will make you happy now. CPU and RAM technology is improving quickly, and in 5 years, we will look back to today and think of an i7 system as a dog in performance.1. SSD Boot Drive. Do it. 64-Bit Windows 7 Pro is up and running 10 seconds after the BIOS screen goes away. A standard second drive for data.2. PCI-Express video card. Don't settle for PCI.3. Buy as much RAM as you can afford. More RAM is better than MORE CPU. Your CPU is already way faster than any other component in your computer. Do they even make PCI video cards anymore? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members Adacto Posted June 28, 2012 Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 For your purposes, I'd go Sandy over Ivy Bridge. The improvements on Ivy Bridge were mainly to the graphics side of the processor, and I think that's not necessarily worth the extra outlay for what you want... someone told me Ivy Bridge runs hotter too, but I've not seen anything to back this up yet. Aftermarket fans aren't that expensive and, generally, a LOT quieter than stock fans. I use Sharkoon case fans and an Akasa CPU fan.Jon Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ambient Posted June 28, 2012 Author Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 For your purposes, I'd go Sandy over Ivy Bridge. The improvements on Ivy Bridge were mainly to the graphics side of the processor, and I think that's not necessarily worth the extra outlay for what you want... someone told me Ivy Bridge runs hotter too, but I've not seen anything to back this up yet. Aftermarket fans aren't that expensive and, generally, a LOT quieter than stock fans. I use Sharkoon case fans and an Akasa CPU fan. Jon Thanks, cooler is definitely better. As is cheaper Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Phil O'Keefe Posted June 28, 2012 Share Posted June 28, 2012 Great series of posts Jon. Thanks for the great input - you should post more often! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ambient Posted June 28, 2012 Author Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 Great series of posts Jon. Thanks for the great input - you should post more often! definitely. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Members ambient Posted June 28, 2012 Author Members Share Posted June 28, 2012 Up! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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