Quote:
Originally Posted by brian_delizza
Save yourself a lot of headaches. Buy a mac.
Hmmmm....I don't see that. There's been a lot on both sides of the fence, as a non-hardware advocate...(i.e. buy what works, not what the ads say)...building your own is a huge win.
There's a great thread on the DUC for the Quadzilla (outperforms all known PC's and Mac's) and it's about $2000 depending on hardware choices.
Performance is near 5x an average CPU since it uses 4 cores and the latency is near insane (negligible) since there's plenty of CPU to go around.
I'd encourage a multicore, multiCPU solution.
As to latency...here's a great way to go...you can get around dedicated hardware, latency issues, etal with an inexpensive
NATIVE computer. I'm neither Mac nor PC advocate, just best of breed for least amount of money.
Performance tests can be read in the Quad thread, needless to say, I'm getting performance equivalent to 5 of the Waves APA44m systems or another way to say it is my performance rivals an HD3 system
Hardware acceleration can't touch what we have natively on this new configuration. We've yet to see anything come close (when an accel card only does 36 Dverbs or the posted performance from Waves on the APA is sadly much slower than our box, I've yet to dig into my wallet for anymore hardware.
I can (and do) currently track close to 80 tracks (have been well into 120) with plugs galore and have no latency issues to speak of so if you're looking for a solution, the hardware is all on the approved list, build away
Here's the sum of what we've implemented (and will actually be in several magazine articles late this summer/fall):
The Quadzilla Native Rig
-Tyan Tiger K8WE (S2877ANRF) Motherboard - Detailed specs here.
(Purchased from Antares Digital)
-Two Opteron 270 Dual-Core CPUs
-4G of Corsair CM72SD1024RLP-3200 (1024MB Registered DDR400, 2 Ranks)
-One ASUS EN6600/TD/256 Video card
-Seagate SATA 160G 7200rpm hard drive
-Seagate SATA 500G 7200rpm hard drive
-Lite-On DVDRW SHW-1635S
-OCZ Powerstream 520W Power supply
-A very well ventilated generic case(The Tsunami VA3000SWA is now my current case).
Cost for the above ($2523US)
-Digi 002 Rack with PT LE 7.1cs6. Very stable with no issues other than the odd plug-in when PT LE 7 was first released.
Dverb test gives me 141 Dverbs with the ability to play/stop and record on all 32 tracks in a 24bit/48K session and a hardware buffer of 1024.
I've since added a Digi SCSI|128 with 3 outboard LVD's at 36Gig each
The Quadzilla Hybrid Rig
Moved to HD and added an HD Core card (as you'll note, this is only for access to TDM plugs like the Access Virus and such)
With a Digi 192io as my primary input.
This also makes mixing a joy and latency is nill.
I've dual imaged my system so I can utilize either the Digi002r or the HD system depending on my needs (currently I spend most of my time on the HD side).