Subject:Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Posted by: spinweb

Date:2/25/2005 1:48:34 PM

Should I come to the end of my patience with running ACID 5 on my T30, I may purchase a dedicated desktop for audio purposes.

Is there anything similar to this thread for ACID?

http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Number=360675&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=7&fpart=393&vc=1

Quite useful. C'mon ACID gurus. Have at it.

:)

Eric

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:2/26/2005 7:02:23 AM

From reading that thread, I can tell you with absolute confidence that you should NOT buy a Mac to run ACID! ;-)

The ingredients for building a good DAW are:

1. Reliable motherboard and chipset (not VIA)
2. Fast processor
3. Lots of memory
4. Large fast hard drives
5. Pro sound card

The reason your T30 is suboptimal is because, as a laptop, it has a slow processor, constrained memory, and ultra-slow hard drives. That’s NOT true of all laptops. I just happen to have a T30 and it’s painful to run ACID, Vegas. SONAR, etc on it. The T30 is old, old technology compared to the Thinkpad’s IBM is making now. (err. I guess IBM doesn’t make ‘em anymore because they sold the business but you get the idea)

Stay away from the VIA chipset. It has a history of problems with video and audio editing (lots of conflicts with audio and video capture cards). Get a motherboard with the Intel or SiS chipset. Use a reliable mobo manufacturer. ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, Intel, Abit (although Abit caters to gamers who overclock). Don’t use an unknown. If you are unsure of the quality of any component, check Tom’s Hardware Guide web site. They have reviews of everything and you can trust their reviews.

Buy the fastest processor you can afford but not the fastest made (unless you’re rich!). You will pay double for the latest processor to only get 0.2MHz difference, which you will never feel. An Intel P4 3.0 or 3.2 is more than adequate. No need to spend more on the 3.4 or 3.6. (heck a 2.8 should be fine) I am not familiar with AMD but I would get their new 64 bit processor if you like AMD.

1GB or more of memory is recommended. If a PC runs out of real memory and starts paging to the filesystem while it is trying to stream media from the same filesystem it causes a bottle-neck. You want to avoid this by having lots of memory and keep your page file a fixed size and on a separate data path from your audio/video. (by data path I mean separate physical hard drive on a separate IDE channel or use SATA)

Two hard drives should be 7200RPM (some say you can use 5400RPM but why bother? This is truly a case of faster is better but I don’t think the 10K drives are worth the price). SATA are great for audio/video because there are no channel conflicts like IDE’s have. 160GB-200GB for a dedicated audio drive should be plenty of room. Make sure you have a second hard drive dedicated to your video/audio files. While not required, it keeps the data access paths for streaming media and your applications separate. (this is more important for Video than audio) RAID 0 is not required but makes things faster at the risk of hardware failure.

Partitioning hard drives is always a personal preference. I like a separate C: drive just for the OS with all of my applications on D: and audio/video project drive on E:. This way you can back-up your projects on E: format the drive, and start the next project. Keeps things clean. I would share a 160GB drive between C: & D: and have a dedicate 160GB-200GB for E: (but, as I said, that’s just personal preference)

Having a Pro soundcard should be obvious but many people believe the Creative hype with their Soundblaster / Audigy 24-bit advertising. These cards are 16-bit internally and are optimized for playback not recording. That means the recording analog-to-digital converters aren’t hi quality. You know the old saying, “garbage in, garbage out”. Don’t skimp on a sound card. You can get Pro stereo cards like the M-Audio Audiophile 2496 for as little as $99 or an Echo Mia MIDI for a little more. Get the best sound card you can afford.

If you don’t want to build you own, I recommend a boutique internet shop like ABS Computers. They build from stock industry standard parts (unlike the big boys i.e., Dell, HP, etc.) and so upgrading these systems is very easy. They also tell you the exact parts (including make/model of mobo, memory, etc). With the big boys you get non-standard mobo’s and whatever the memory deal they struck this week was. (read: it’s a gamble) I like to know what I’m buying and have been burned by Dell so I have reason to doubt their integrity.

All of this is just my opinion (except that Mac part which is a FACT). I’m sure other will have their favorite specs and tweaks to share.

The parts list for my PC equipment is on my web site.

~jr

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: spinweb

Date:2/28/2005 6:37:18 AM

jr,

Thanks, as always, for taking the time to answer me in such depth.

<<1GB or more of memory is recommended. If a PC runs out of real memory and starts paging to the filesystem while it is trying to stream media from the same filesystem it causes a bottle-neck. You want to avoid this by having lots of memory and keep your page file a fixed size and on a separate data path from your audio/video. (by data path I mean separate physical hard drive on a separate IDE channel or use SATA)>>

OK. I will have to get a machine eventually that's more powerful. When I do, I would like it to be able to run ProPools and ACID (though [probably not simultaneously). But for now, it would seem like the question before me is whether to shell out $200 to double my T30's RAM from 512 to 1024. With a 1.8GHz Pentium IV, should I see less stuttering and other infuriating noises?

Thanks,

Eric

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: piotrk

Date:2/28/2005 6:53:26 AM

Hey JohnnyRoy this is really good advice as I'm looking forward to building a new PC for music production in the near future. One thing that I would like cleared up as there was some debate when XP came out is,should the drives be formatted to NTFS or FAT 32 if you are doing mainly music production? Mine are at FAT32 as that was the advice given to me at the time.

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:2/28/2005 9:19:17 AM

> But for now, it would seem like the question before me is whether to shell out $200 to double my T30's RAM from 512 to 1024

I don’t think doubling the memory on the T30 will help all that much. Processing audio is also very CPU intensive and the slow hard drives will also become a bottleneck with lot of tracks. Fixing only one of the 3 problems still leaves the other two.

Think of it this way: If you had a desktop, for $200 you could buy a new motherboard and 2.4GHz Intel Celeron D processor. For $270 you could get a new ASUS P4P800 SE mobo and P4 3.0Ghz processor! Do you really want to spend $200 on only 512MB of memory? It doesn’t sound like a good investment to me and I’m not sure how much it would help. I would save up and build a desktop system that you can expand later in increments.

Right now, there is a T30 on eBay for $670 and another for $958. Event if you could only get $670 for yours, add the $200 you were going to spend on memory and you could put together a nice P4 3.0+Ghz desktop for $870!

~jr

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:2/28/2005 9:20:59 AM

> should the drives be formatted to NTFS or FAT 32 if you are doing mainly music production?

I believe that NTFS is definitely the way to go for a number of reasons. NTFS stores data more efficiently than FAT32. That means fragmentation is less of a problem. As hard drives get bigger, FAT32 gets less and less efficient because it must use larger allocation units (because the File Allocation Table is a fixed sized index). Put another way, current hard drives sizes are far, far beyond what anyone envisioned when FAT was invented so FAT really doesn’t handle them well.

NTFS is also a journaled file system. While it does not handle full-fledged journaling (i.e, change-journal logs note alterations to files but can’t provide enough information to reverse them) it does offer more protection against data loss than FAT32. You’ll notice you need to run CheckDisk (CHKDSK) far less when Windows shuts down unexpectedly. The next version of Windows is said to have a full-fledged journaled filesystem just like JFS for unix.

Finally, FAT32 has a file size limit of 4GB. While this seems more than adequate for audio, it only holds about 20 minutes of video so if you plan to do any video NTFS is a better choice.

There is really no reason to stick with FAT32. You can convert your drives in place and I think you’ll find data access to be a little faster because of the way NTFS stores file indexes.

~jr

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: spinweb

Date:2/28/2005 1:40:15 PM

jr~

<<You could put together a nice P4 3.0+Ghz desktop for $870!>>

Thanks for the perspective on the $200 for RAM, however, if I sell my laptop, then I'm bogging down my new, zippy desktop with all my other apps and garbage. lol! I'd rather keep the laptop and buy a dedicated audio beast. I do have an old, slow, desktop, maybe a PIII, 933GHz I could try to sell on eBay.

From what I'm reading, it may be time to leave Pentiums behind. Many prefer the AMD chip, particularly for ProTools.

The first post on this thread has lots of great info, however, I'm not sure if/where ACID and PTLE diverge in terms of the hardware that will support their optimum performance.

http://duc.digidesign.com/showflat.php?Cat=&Board=UBB32&Number=360675&page=0&view=collapsed&sb=5&o=7&fpart=1

Best,

Eric

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:2/28/2005 2:33:23 PM

> From what I'm reading, it may be time to leave Pentiums behind. Many prefer the AMD chip, particularly for ProTools.

I too have seen benchmarks that suggest that the AMD 64bit chips are better at Audio processing than Intel. I also do video editing and Intel is still slightly faster than AMD at rendering video but I agree that the AMD 64’s will make an awesome DAW as well.

~jr

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: spinweb

Date:3/8/2005 10:46:14 AM

OK, I'm gathering info and courage for my next desktop purchase.

My new audio dedicated desktop shall be:

1. blindingly fast
2. quiet
3. expandable
4. will run BOTH proTools and ACID v5 (from what I can glean, ProTools is far more persnickety with it's needs and requirements than ACID).
5. capable of running these audio apps easily
6. flat screen monitor-enabled

From what I can tell, this machine can be had for $1K to $1.2K. I want a super fast AMD chip.

I don't plan to assemble this beast myself, so where do I start?

Is THIS my dream music machine?

http://www.abspc.com/app/config.asp?mono=1889,

this?

http://www.abspc.com/app/config.asp?mono=1711

this?

http://sys.us.shuttle.com/ModelsP_5.aspx

Do I fax a parts list to my local PC shop?

Man is ProTools finicky about hardware!

Eric

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:3/9/2005 7:28:56 PM

I always go custom.

I had my last DAW built by Motherboard Express. My previous system was also built by them.

I already had most of the basics (pro-level sound card, video card, hard drives, etc.). I just picked out my motherboard, chassis, CPU, and RAM and had them do the rest (including assembly and burn-in). Cost me about $781 plus change. Includes 3 year warranty and lifetime toll-free tech support. Amazing thing is that it took them just 8 days from the time I ordered it to the time it got to my door.

(Mind you, as I said, I already had some of the other components, like video card and DVD burner. Your price mileage may vary based on what you have/what you want.)

Whoever you go with, try to keep it to one vendor only. You might spend a little more than having to go with separate vendors for your parts, but if anything goes south, you'll only have to contact the one vendor should you have trouble (plus there will be no finger pointing).

Iacobus
-------
RodelWorks - Original Music for the Unafraid
Buy Instant ACID by JohnnyRoy and mD!
mD at ACIDplanet

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: Zacchino

Date:3/9/2005 8:20:15 PM

You should get a shuttle. Antec cases are known for their helicopter fan sounds.

I have a SB81P (custom built). But the other one with AMD you suggested (it's the last P style comp built by Shuttle) is great too. Great reviews so far.

Did you hear a G5 ? Well, it doesn't make a sound. Shuttle P chassis' series are almost as quiet as a G5. And can be as fast as a big antec tower. You can fit in 2 to 3 Hard drives in it (S-ATA or IDE).

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: JohnnyRoy

Date:3/10/2005 5:08:29 AM

I would be cautious about the Shuttle. They use proprietary motherboards (it says so right on their web site). This could limit your upgrade options in the future. This may or may not be a problem. I just stay away from anything that isn’t industry standard as a rule, but that’s just my personal preference. I'm not saying don't buy one, I'm just saying be aware of what you're buying.

I have an Antec PlusView1000AMG case like the ones used by ABS Computers and the fans are noticeable but not too bad. (I think my Video card fan is louder) I’m building a new rig around the Antec Sontata for my wife. It’s supposed to be a real quiet case. In general smaller fans (90mm) are louder than larger fans (120m) because they have to spin faster to move the same amount of air.

The ABS Computers with AMD64’s sure do look sweet. I would go for the one with no sound card. Why pay $98 extra for a card you don’t need/want.

~jr

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: spinweb

Date:3/10/2005 12:58:19 PM

******************************************************************************************
I already had most of the basics (pro-level sound card, video card, hard drives, etc.). I just picked out my motherboard, chassis, CPU, and RAM and had them do the rest (including assembly and burn-in). Cost me about $781 plus change. Includes 3 year warranty and lifetime toll-free tech support.

******************************************************************************************

So how much would you say the whole kit and cabudle cost you?

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: DKeenum

Date:3/11/2005 7:39:14 AM

If your planning to run pro tools and acid, I'd say get or build a system that will work for pro tools and acid will follow. What do you think about that plan?

Here is my latest system. It's working great.

Processor:AMD Athlon 64 3200+ 2.0GHz
MB: MB K8N NEO2 Platinum MSI CPU AMD 64 |3200+ Athlon 64 939P%

1 gig ddr 400 ram DDR PC3200 • CL=3 • Unbuffered • NON-ECC • DDR400 • 2.6V • 64Meg x 64
Video: Janton GF MX4000 Twin
Sound Card: Echo MIDIMia (only 2in and 2 out)
DVD+/-RW Sony DW-D22A-B2 BLK w/SW%
ASUS DVD-E616P2 QT RTL (Serial#: 48VM167258)
Nexus Breeze Quiet Computer Case Package
CNPS7000-ALCU Quiet CPU Cooler for P4
120 Gig SATA Samsung Spinpoint Quiet Hard Drive
80 Gig WD hard drive
160 Gig Seagate hard drive

I got it from neww egg, crucial, and endpcnoise.com.

Subject:RE: Best Desktop for ACID Pro v5

Reply by: Iacobus

Date:3/11/2005 11:51:27 AM

So how much would you say the whole kit and cabudle cost you?

About $941 if I included the DVD burner and video card I bought separately around the same time I bought the system.

Need to correct myself: I wasn't planning on buying a new video card but I liked the Radeon 9200 I saw (its 8x AGP was appealing over the 4x AGP I had) so I picked it up.

(The video card costed $100 and the DVD burner was $60 after rebate.)

Iacobus
-------
RodelWorks - Original Music for the Unafraid
Buy Instant ACID by JohnnyRoy and mD!
mD at ACIDplanet