Jack Mackenzie :
So... much... information... this will take me a while to get my head around, but thanks for getting so in depth about it guys! Unfortunately I'm on a relatively limited timescale with this build so may have to just plump for something before I fully understand.
I have no idea why, but other FW chips cause dropouts in the audio which totally ruin the point of having a decent audio interface, speakers and effects, and can crash the system in extreme cases. Such a hassle. Equally, plugging a PCIe TI firewire in is still not guaranteed to work, because of the way motherboards interface with the card. It's ridiculous. No one really knows whether this is the problem of the FW or the soundcard manufacturers. USB audio works fine, however it isn't as fast and the drivers tend to be more poorly scripted. I know the USB interface I had previously had AWFUL drivers that munched almost a full core.
Interesting that the AMD has higher performance/cost ratio, I've seen other people slating them compared to similarly priced Intel chips - seems more a religious thing than factual! (You get a hell of a lot of this in audio production) Worth further investigation.
Yep, replacing the FW audio boxes I use would not be cheap, only other option would be to go PCI with the RME Multiface, which is where things start getting very expensive.
I do occasionally do video tutorials so I probably would need a graphics card with a small amount of bite just to avoid waiting around for ages between small edits - but this is a very rare occurrence!
$50000 in microphones - that's a recording enthusiast for you! Luckily I work mainly solo 'in the box' (computer-based composition) so don't need to record that many live instruments, just some synths and guitar which I plug directly into the soundcard. That said, I've never counted up the total value of the hardware+software I use but it probably runs near that figure!
So you guys are going really heavy on the new equipment angle, would this deliver similar bang-for-buck, as in, a £100 new motherboard vs a motherboard that was more expensive in 2011 but now sells at £100 BNIB?
Glad to see that computer advice attracts the same level of geekery as music equipment advice does, sometimes I think I enjoy talking over the options more than the product itself!
Jack Mackenzie,
Yes...much...geekosities...but an example of necessary geekoid actions- the damnicious Firewire.
When Firewire audio peripherals first began burning a hole in USB, I was very interested as it promised quite a bit greater bandwirdth and transfer speed. However, as mentioned, I tried it, albeit at the lower end of the scale and came across the mysterious TI chipset requirement and the Five Firewire Fictions Foundation that protected the public from ever knowing why. I started, and stayed with, internal card interfaces.
BTW, the GA-Z68XP-UD3 (rev. 1.3) Intel MB you mentioned at the start has the VIA FW >
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3978#sp
AMD CPU> While I have a Dell Optiplex 740 with an AMD CPU [ Athlon X2 64 6000+ dual core @ 3.0GHz] that works very well, I have been Intel focused for so long- falling into the Xeon crowd, I've not followed AMD closely. As the GIGABYTE GA-990FXA-UD5 V 2.0 is the only current MB I could find with the TI IEEE1394, I then stumbled over the AMD 8350 and found it was not only higher speed- 4.0/4.2 but had 8 cores and only 5% off the i7-3770K performance for £82 less.
By this accident I might occasionally join AMD prayer meetings. As you say, that strange rivalry between Intel and AMD- which can be very intense in the NVIDIA vs. AMD and Geforce vs. Radeon / Quadro vs. Firepro geek-o-ramas, does have an aspect of religiosity. It reminds me too of football fans- blind faith that their team is top of the first division no matter what the scores are. Still, the numbers can't be lying (And see last paragraph this post!). I don't know, are Firepros so named because of catching fire?
On the subject of graphics cards, yes, if you're doing even a bit of video editing, something of a higher order would be advisable, something 384 or 512-bit and with more memory and CUDA cores. I am an advocate of used graphics cards and you might consider a used GTX 580 3GB or a GTX 285 2GB. I had a used 1GB GTX 285 for awhile- about 2 years- for CAD and it is 512-bit, has 240 cores, worked well and was not expensive used. I only changed- to Quadro FX 4800 because of eccentric behavior in Solidworks and Sketchup and so I could use 128X anti-aliasing.
$50,000 in microphones > Yes, it seems a lot, but my friend, who has a small production studio in Van Nuys, California claims he needs esoteric mics allsorts and cult items- vintage Neumann KM 84, Royer ribbons, various valve microphones, AKG C12 ($6,000), Schoeps (usually $2,000- $3,000 ), Manley Reference Gold- ($7,000) because his clients are almost superstitious about a certain microphone suiting them best. These seem to represent some kind of "comfort microphones", and make a hole in the budget requiring barrows of brass to fill. I have only a lonely pair of Oktava 012's- supposedly Russian copies of KM84's!- and that are used for piano, harpsichord, and clavichord with a Peavey VMP2 valve preamplifier/EQ. These days, I mostly use a Yamaha S90 with Garritan virtual Steinway D and Hauptwerk virtual organ software for improvisations. But, yes, audio today forces us to become delve into the nature of geekabytes. Actually, I don't mind, because digital sound constantly improves and is so amazingly easy to get reasonable results. The very low noise floor and ease of editing, and publishing to CD is worth the fuss. When I listen to music though, it is most often vinyl LP and through an all-valve system [Oracle Delphi III w. SME V arm / McIntosh MR 67 tuner, Audio Research SP10 (preamplifier) , Audio Research D115 (power amplifier), Vandersteen 2C speakers] With the tuner going, I am using 72 valves of which probably 40 haven't been made for 30 years! < How's that for geekonomics?
"New equipment angle" > You ask about the advisability of, "a £100 new motherboard vs a motherboard that was more expensive in 2011 but now sells at £100 BNIB?". Is that a general question or have you found something specific? Can you provide a link to model number or the sales listing? In general, I would say, if the motherboard has never been removed from the original, sealed anti-static bag, and has all the original pieces, it could be a fine choice. Something came up in this thread about Intel motherboards, with the comment that Intel is getting out of that business. That may be a risk several years away as there will not be BIOS updates, but Intel boards are reputed to be quite high quality. Also, Intel, along with Samsung, make among the most trustworthy SSD's. However, if the board in question has ever been out of the bag, it may have been a dud in some way > dead RAM or PCIe slot, or ruined with bent socket pins or by static discharge, etc. If the seller has a pile of the same, that's a better sign than if it's one found at the bottom of the cupboard, but I would ask about their history carefully and in detail.
I am actually an advocate of buying used, high quality computers that be tuned gradually to a reliable high middle of performance. For one thing, it's much less expensive than new- my three year old $500 Dell Precision T5400 cost more than $5,000 three yeas before, and is beautifully made- with a very heavy case/chassis that is very quiet. It's never missed a beat, performed very well. As I've inensified use toward large 3D models, 6,000 part assemblies, and rendering, I've improved it for about $500 > a Western Digital RE4 500GB ($90), to 16GB of RAM (+ 12GB, $150), a Quadro FX 4800 1.5GB graphics card ( $1,200 new, $150 to me) ,and a 2nd CPU /heatsink, a Xeon X5460 ($1,300 new, $100 to me). By the way, the T5400 new could be purchased with 2 Firewire ports- 1 front, 1 rear- using a TI chipset on a PCI card, but mine doesn't have that option.
The point is, with some research and careful shopping, you might find a used computer, ready to use much faster than researching, collecting the bits, assembly, configuring, solving compatibility problems, and so on, and all for less money. But, the new one is likely to be
much faster. >
On the Passmark Performance Test, my T5400 makes an overall rating of
1909- high marks for CPU- 8400 and quite good 2D=512 and fair 3D=924, but the memory=732 and disk=942- very ordinary. In comparison, the one baseline listing for > "AMD 8350 8-core + Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5", with 16GB RAM, a Radeon HD 7950 and Corsair Force GS SSD is > Rating=
3193, CPU= 9354, 2D=520, 3D=4411, Memory=1460, Disk= 2820. The high memory and disk scores are important as music files are much, much larger than for example the CAD models I deal with. That machine is using a higher end graphics card -$300+ and the Corsair SSD starts at $130 for 128GB, but again we have
very good geekarific numbers that are not costing a lot of £££ numbers! Earlier, I stated the numbers are not lying, so from the cost / performance perspective I should jack up the T5400 and put a new AMD 8350 underneath!
Sorry- much... more...geekatistics!
Cheers,
BambiBoom
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram