THE BEST PC TO WORK WITH GIGASAMPLER?

[RICARDO BOTTICELLI]

intel or amd?
hey guys !!!i\'m planning to buy a new computer and i really need help to do that.
i don\'t need the bestest machine ever but good enough to work with gigasampler or gigastudio without crash or little stops (you know what i mean?)
the best processor,mother board and of course sound card(a good one but not the most expansive!!!!)
thanx everybody

[stmikkel]

If you want cheap and fast (and stable), get 1.33/1.4ghz athlon cpu and a7m266 mainboard, or you can wait for the nvidia ddr mainboard for athlon cpu. Supposed to be very good.
There\'s really no reason to buy intel anymore. AMD is both faster and considerably cheaper. (The pentium4 chip is definately not recommended.)
The only thing to be aware of, is that the fastest athlon cpus can get real hot, if you don\'t use some proper cooling.
A new version of the athlon cpu is due very soon, which will run both cooler and faster.

[dnortana]

Ricardo,
There\'s a thread on this forum that concerns PC configurations for Gigastudio. Well worth the visit. Also, visit the www.rme-audio.com (\"http://www.rme-audio.com\") website, they have several good audio PC configurations listed.
While you\'re at the rme website, have a look at the Hammerfall series of soundcards. They are excellent. I use the 9652, which gives me 24, 24-bit output tracks (12 stereo outs), and has word clock I/O. The card comes in smaller versions.

Good luck,
Trond

[Simon Ravn]

stmikkel, yes HEAT is the main problem with AMD chips. I hope AMD comes out with a less hot Tbird chip soon, because changing from Intel to Tbird on my Gigastudio system has caused my PSU fan to go into overdrive after a few minutes of operating, because the casing gets so hot. And yes I have a big casing, 2 extra case fans, Silverado 50 for the AMD and a cooler on one of the HDs.... Of course that I have 4 HDs doesnt make it less hot inthere but I had that with the P3 system too, and the PSU didnt get as noisy and the system temp not so high (its at 40-45 degrees, Tbird running 50-55).

[carlgt1]

I hated my AMD system and am happy to be back with Pentium. No wonder AMD profits are down 90%, they design a chip that operates at 155 and burns out at 154 deg F! ;-)

[stmikkel]

Simon Ravn:
That\'s way to hot!
I mean, 40-45C system temp is not recommended. I don\'t feel comfortable at all, when the system temp is more than 35C.

It is possible to get a reasonable cool systen (at least moderately warm).
Get the Thermal-Right SK-6 copper cpu heatsink with a Delta 38 CFM fan. Also get some Artic Silver thermal compound. Use a *very* thin layer of it. For instance use your creditcard to smear it out over the button of the heatsink (remove any thermal glue from the heatsink first).

This may sound like a lot of work, but it really isn\'t more than a small sum of $ and some 30 to 60 minutes, and you have a much more cooler system.

Bad heatsink and/or bad mounting is useally the reason why the AMD cpus are getting that hot. Your pc is definately more hot, than it has to be.

[RICARDO BOTTICELLI]

thanx guys!!!!great tips.

[Simon Ravn]

stmikkel, I don\'t agree... The Silverado is mounted with thermal paste and all. The things is the AMD is generating a lot of heat. The fan moves the heat away, but it it still inside the casing. To get all CPU heat the AMD generates away from the casing is about important without using a vacuum cleaner. The CPU temp will never be able to go lower than 10 degrees above the system temp, which is why the temps are as they are in my system. Not a lot I can do about it with conventional cooling, and I don\'t want to resort to extreme kyrogene or otherwise. The fact is that AMD\'s are just generating too much heat, like it or leave it. And in a system with as many HD\'s as I have it all adds up to a very hot system.

[Jamieh]

Just as a note, I am running my GigaStudio 160 on a 1GHz AMD and it runs just fine.

[Simon Ravn]

Yeah so am I. But it is still running very hot and noisy.

[Kenn159]

Question for stmikel
I was planing to put together a 1.4 athlon for giga studio but with the word from you that they are coming out with a cooler cpu , I have decided to wait .
Do you have a release date for that cooler faster CPU?
Thanks , Ken

[Simon Ravn]

Kenn, the Palamino is coming in about 4 months time. But I think it is only about 30% cooler, and I heard that they\'d only come out in very high clockspeeds - maybe starting at 1.5ghz.... so much for a cooler CPU http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif

[Jamieh]

My AMD fan is certainly noisier than my Intel PII 450, but it is not noisy enough to really bother me. As for heat, I haven\'t noticed anything out of the ordinary.

[stmikkel]

Well, athlons do generate a lot of heat, but it\'s useally far from as bad as in Simon Ravns case.
I don\'t know about the specific cooler you use Simon, but the highest clocked athlons needs a good heatsink. The silverados aren\'t exactly top of the line...
Get the heatsink I mentioned, and you\'ll see a big difference. There\'s plenty of heatsink reviews and comparisons on the internet, if you\'re still sceptical. :-)
I do agree, that athlon shouldn\'t be that hot. It\'s definately more of a hassle, than going with p3 pr p4.
Still using my 1.33 ghz athlon with my ddr a7m266 mainboard, I have a *LOT* of power. I can run logic audio and gigastudio simultainously with huge arrangements etc.
That\'s definately worth it for me.

Also use a powersuply that draws out air from below (from the cpu).
Many PSUs today have two fans. One in the back, and one on the bottom drawing out air from the cpu.

Right now, I\'m using a rather small heatsink (still waiting for that SK-6), but right now system temps are more or less 10C lower than Simons. I have three scsi harddrives (two 10000rpm), one ide harddrive and two cd-roms.

I just want to make sure both sides of the story are told. :-) I really like AMD. They are an excellent company, which treat their consumers much better than intel (=overpriced, underspec\'ed).
Though, amds latest cpus are a bit hot, they will still work just fine if one take some time finetuning your system.

One other thing, the FPUs (floating point units) in the athlon CPU are superiour to those in intels CPUs. The FPUs are very important, when it comes to audio use.
They calculate plug-in effects, vst plug-ins etc, thus making athlon a more powerful system when working with audio/midi (compared to a similiare clocked p3 or p4).

In fact, in many tests a 1.8 ghz P4 can\'t keep up with the 1.33/1.4 ghz athlons. That says a lot...

[Noisi]

Hi,

I have another question. At this point your all talking about processors. OK. But my problem is following. I got a new Athlon Thunderbird C 1.33GHZ . But have much problems like Midi-sync and others. Now I\'m thinking it must be my MoBo, it\'s an A7V.

So my question what motherboard would you recommend for an Athlon 1.33 GHZ??

BTW my CPU Cooler: P-1600BB know this anyone? is this a good one?

[Chadwick]

Stmikkel,

How did you get Logic audio running with Giga?

Are you running audio tracks and plugins and still getting 160 poly?

I\'m very interested in the details

[Simon Ravn]

Stmikkel, I started with a ChromeOrb.. that thing was terribly noisy and not very effective. The Silverado brought down the temperature about 5 degrees lower than the orb. It is pretty good actually... It uses two fans at lower rotation for less noise and efficient cooling. No matter what cooler I was using I bet I\'d still have the same system temperature. The Silverado moves the heat away from the TBird itself - but the air needs to get out of the casing too. For that, apparently what I have is not enough. I guess I need too vacuum cleaners to cope with the heat generated from a Tbird - one to suck in and one to blow out. My system wasn\'t nearly as hot when I had the P3 inthere with an out-of-the-box cooler. So the AMD is certainly generating A LOT of heat that is hard to get rid of.

[astrt4]

I think we are hitting AMD a little hard with this heat thing. The 1GHZ PIII\'s had some absolutely terrible heating problems. When AMD introduced the Thunderbird processor, it brought the problems related to heat way down. There was a significant difference between a slot A cartridge based Athlon 1Ghz chip and the Socket A ZIF Athlon Thunderbird.

Also, AMD actually did show a 1.5GHz Athlon running with no fan at all a few months ago. It had only a small heatsink to cool it.

[stmikkel]

Chadwick:
I\'ve already mentioned this several times here, but I\'ll say it again.
Get PrcView, which is a small utility that makes it possible for you to control what kind of priority all the tasks/drivers running in the background in windows will have. From low, normal, high and realtime.
The msg32 driver is set to realtime at default. Using the sequencer prority function in gigastudio2.2 isn\'t nearly as effective as using the PrcView program.
Set the msg32 driver to normal (instead of realtime), and try out for yourself.
I only make music on a sparetime-basis, so I mainly work with midi, and haven\'t used more than 2-3 audiotracks together with gigastudio. However, I use plenty of vst pluginns (evp88, 2 x B4, mtron) and logic effects together with huge arrangements in gigastudio (between 3-4 gb of loaded instruments). I have had up to about 120 in polyphony. I haven\'t tried any higher, because there hasn\'t been a need to..yet.

Just get the program. Do a search on the internet, and you\'ll find it very easily.
If not, I can mail it to you.
Try it out, and see what it can do for your setup. It doesn\'t make any permanent changes in the windowsregister or anything else. PrcView is perfectly safe to use.


Simon Ravn:
Maybe you should get some harddrive coolers?
(I have them on my two 10000rpm scsi hds).
In fact, when using 10,000rpm scsi harddrivs, some active hd cooling is adviced no matter what cpu you use.
Also have one fan in the front of the cabinet drawing air in, and 1/2 fans on the rear blowing air out.
Make sure, that there aren\'t a lot more air beeing drawn out of the pc, than is sucked in, because then you\'ll get kind of a vacuum effect, which will definetly affect your system temps in a bad way.
I understand your frustions with the high system temps, but they ARE higher than they should be. Maybe you should do something with the airflow inside your computer.

[Simon Ravn]

I can\'t really do much to help the airflow, but of course all the cables and such are preventing optimal cooling. However... my point all along, and I\'ll say it for the last time: It was not running half as hot with a P3 500@700 as the Tbird 900/1000...

[astrt4]

Simon Ravn,

When did you purchase your T-bird?

[midiboy]

Hi you all,

you may not know this ... but ASUS boards (A7V, A7M etc. ) generally add 10°-20°C to the temp monitor (in Bios etc.) I know this for sure, it is common knowledge in many overclocking related boards. This means, that your Athlon is not really that hot, you can deduct10-20°C from your monitor.

I have tested this by trying the same Processor/cooler combination on an Abit KT7 board. It showed up as being approx. 15°C cooler.

Asus apparently added this \"feature\" to prevent overheating but I think it´s bullsh*t.

BTW. I also own the Silverado cooler. It´s the best one out there as far as I am concerned and I tried many coolers.

So relax and don´t get an Intel just because of Athlons high temperature levels. They are not that high when compared to Pentium 4´s anyhow :-)

Alex

[Simon Ravn]

When I bought my TBird? Hmmm can\'t remember actually... maybe 6-8 months ago. Midi, yes I know the temp readings are wrong on ASUS - my P3 is running on an ASUS board and sometimes it tells me it\'s 85 degrees, the next second it\'s 50... can\'t really use it. But my AMD is running on an MSI board, and I can tell by opening the casing that the temp readings are pretty accurate.. http://www.northernsounds.com/ubb/NonCGI/images/icons/smile.gif