– by nanashiwanderer Ive been on a week long hiatus. and over the week I had a good chance to really look the computer hardware market, and coming up for christmas. I have to say Im a lot more enthused about the current hardware market than I was about the hardware market 3 months ago or 6weeks a month. Intels new chipsets are very solid, amd finally seems to have some good options for motherboards, and competitive for lower end DAWs. Manufacturers have realized theres a high demand for silent PCs and have really ramped up the Market for silent cases, with Antec Leading the way, but also a nice offering from cooler master. PC Power & Cooling, and Antec (seasonic) both have released quiet energy effecient Power Supplys.
This time around I’m not going to give a fixed template of what to build but general guidelines. These selections are untested, and made from a general knowledge of how hardware works, and an understanding of PC Design. The designs them selves are untested and any one who chooses to do so builds at their own risk. Before reading this article I suggest some, particular novices to DAW design, read my first article on how to select DAW, which would give one an idea of what to look for in DAWs.
Cases & Power Supplies. Power Supplies are probably the most important core component over looked in most peoples PCs. Since on paper, they seem to have no tangible effect, on the PCs power. However, Power supplies have a drastic impact on stability of PCs. After ram, the power supply is the second leading cause to PC instability.In general for my philosophy when designing a DAW, Stability, compatibility, comes before power. In todays market, the power most DAWs far exceed the ordinary engineer or musicians needs, with the given software. As new and inventive things come , we may need more power, but you can always buy a DAW for those days. No matter what PC you buy theres a finite life. For this reason I dont recommend skimping on the power supply for a bit faster CPU or a nicer video Card. Other than the Quality of the Unit itself, the two biggest factors that one should consider when purchase Power Supplies is the size of the unit (how much wattage does it provide), and the noise level. There are several manufacturers.
How much power does one really need ? Cheaper power supplies often underrate the value of their power which provides more power at a lower temperature levels. The problem is most computers are not room temperature, particularly sparsely cooled systems like DAWs. At the minimum most DAWs today use A Dual Core Processor, with 2GB of RAM, Dual Hard Drives, a DVD Burner, and a low end to mid range graphics card. This means most computers at a bare minimum will need A very effecient 400watt Power Supply. Higher End units, which use Quad Core CPUs, 3 or 4 Hard Drives, a Mid range Video card may want as much as 500watts.
So what are my selections for power supplies ?
PC Power & Cooling Silencer Seems like a solid choice for many people particularly, ones who aren’t buying one of the new Antec Cases. With a long standing reputation for making some of the best Power Supplies in the Industry,The Silencer 470 is 83.00$ and just the wattage one would want to cover most midrange DAW’s running a modest graphics card.
Antec has released a new line of energy effecient power supplies from Seasonics called Earthwatts which are of extremely high caliber and very low noise. (Seasonics is the leading manufacturer of quiet power supplies, and makes Power Supplies for Corsair, Antec and other companies). The best thing about the Earthwatts Series is the 500watt (price stand alone at a modest 80.00) is being included with many of the Sonata Series Cases, which are top choices for DAW.
Antec as of late has stepped up on the quiet case market, and has paid some attention to our own DAW market, with the introduction of the Studio Series Cases. While the Studio-Series is nothing to write home about. The Performance series has been. With 4
models, the P180, P182,P190, and now the Sonata III Designer. The Series has a number of features for quiet which can be found in reviews. The major ones are a dampening system on the side doors (Which makes these a monster to lug around, these are fixed install), and rubber grommet suspension system for the Hard Drives, which isolates the drives stopping that annoying popping and clicking sound. The Cases are equipped with 92mm or 120mm fans instead of standard 80mm. Which allows the user to purchase slower fans, 92mm and particularly 120mm fans push much more air at much slower speeds than traditional DAW fans.
A recent addition to the market of mainstream Quiet Cases is Cooler Masters new cosmos which also has a “sound proofed†side panels. The main aspect of the case it is large, spacious, and luxurious it has the type of features that will make it more of a pleasure to work with than Antec, which tend to be vanilla. Cooler master construction on their highend cases are usually flawless. But at 210.00 with out a Power Supply. It doesn’t come with out a price.
Antec’s new sonata III . Is a midtower case and has a variety of models, including the Sonata 3 Designer and Sonata Plus, the differences can range from size of the fans, the model of power suppy but all use Highend Power Supplies manufactured by Seasonics and have at least 500watts of power. They share majority of the core features of the Performance Series making them an astounding value. Sonata III which ranges from 140-160$ in price (including shipping.) It has room for 2x 120mm fans, and comes with an Antec Earth watts 500..
and can use 3 Isolated hard Drives, (or carry 4 total using normal mounting) and has 3x 5.25″ Drive Bays. The biggest complaint is the removal of the Firewire header that is present in its larger Performance 18x Series Cousins.
AMD or Intel, at the current moment Intel and AMD are admidst of a price war, and Intel has a firm grasp of the the highend crown. Price of Processors are lower than ever due to massive price cuts in the last year. A Quad Core 2 Duo @ 2400mhz (1066FSB) is right now 280$. and fast Dual Cores like The E6750 (2.66ghz 1333FSB) @ 195$. Intel’s processors clock for clock are 30 to 50% faster than AMD’s. Making Intel pretty much the only choice for highend. AMD hopefully will have more competitive processors once there new Barcelona desktop edition is availible. However at the given prices theres still place for AMD on the modern processor market. @ 65$ Athlon X2 4000+ gives a fair bit of power, for those of us on a budget. To top it off nicer AMD Boards can be found for 85 $ or So, versus nice Intel Boards costs 200- 2800$. Where money is tight AMD Can fill a gap. With the Price drops, there processors are right now a somewhat viable alternative. Factoring in that the cheapest Core 2 DUO 800mhz costs over 130$.
The Penryn Intel’s next generation architecture has been revealed at this point and will work with Intels exisiting X38 and P35 Chipset. Benchmarks show it to be a small improvement 5 to 10% over existing core 2s and quad cores, but much more over clockable. Since over clocking is generally a feature DAW users avoid this won’t be excitement to most people. The Penryn is a 45nm Die Shrink of the Core 2, and increased cache. Launching at a 3ghz and 1000$ the Penryn won’t be the choice processor for most new DAWs.
Processor Chipsets. Currently for Intel on Audio PC’s the top choice is their own chipsets. Though not in favour by Maximum PC and the like for a lack of SLI support. A simple troll through newegg will reveal why… Intel retains dominance in the Audio world. If one compares the reviews of the top choice NVIDIA boards, for the intel platform, such as the Asus Striker, and EVGA, one will be over whelmed by the abundance of negative reviews, this is a stark contrast to what one will read when one looks at top Choice 975X and P35Boards like the Bad AXE2, the New Gigabtye boards, and Abit IP35Pro. Intel’s own chipsets tend to be the most reliablie, fairly generous in terms of features, and motherboards based on the chipset, seem to have easier time integrating with DAW hardware. The only area that they are truely defecient in the eyes of many enthusiasts, are the lack of SLI Technology.
Intel Boasts two Chipsets for Audio that have similair features. The X38 and the P35. Both Chipsets have demonstrated very good performance and have a selection of motherboards that are Ideal for DAW use. The platforms are accomodating for the future as they offer both options for the current DDR-2 standard and DDR-3.
The X38 is intels luxury platform, while the P35 targets the upper midrange crowd.
For AMD a variety of options exist but the Nforce 5 with a good Firewire card is probably the best choice at the moment.
Memory in the current market, memory is with in a transition, DDR2 Prices are approaching their lowest prices, and DDR-3 has been introduced. Currently DDR-3 like most newly introduced version of DDR offers a lot of bandwidth, at the expense of latencey and a high price. Most Intel Processors don’t benifit too much from DDR-3’s performance and often do worse, at significantly higher price and AMD is a now show on the platform at the moment. As bandwidth increases and prices fall DDR-3 will replace DDR-2 (though DDR2 will be availible for many moons even once its no longer the standard.) Factoring, cost, and performance DDR-3 simply is not worth it in today’s market.
Current DAW Standard still uses Windows XP Service Pack 2 32bit, as Vista’s launch has been a nightmare (a resource hog, and annoying). With the life of Windows XP extended till at least this june. I suspect DAW’s will be running XP for quite some time. As a result the ideal amount of memory is Dual Channel 2 Gigabytes. (meaning two 1xGB sticks, or on some older motherboards 4x 512mb Sticks). The defacto spec that is compatible with most new computers is DDR-2 800mhz CAS 5 1.8V is considered standard spec in todays market. and will work with most new motherboards, provided its bought from a reliable company (corsair, crucial, kingston, mushkin, patriot, twin mos, samsung ect.)
The Hard Drive market is in full swing, with 32mb Cache drives already floating around newegg. In general a bump in cache size means a bump in speed. and at not much of an extra cost, these drive are worth jumping on. Seagate’s Barracuda 11 which features this 32mb Cache and 500Gb of ram costs around 125$. Making it well worth jumping on. With a 5 year warranty, Seagate and an excellent track record is still probably one of the safest companies to bank on.
Graphics cards… Direct X10 offerings are availible from both ATI and NVIDIA, at every price point. While power full graphics aren’t needed for DAWs, a Direct X10 card is a worth while investment, to ensure smooth transition, when we finally must move to Vista. Mid range graphics cards are of interest to those of us who also use PC’s as a general entertainment computer, most of the midrange cards such as the 8600GT and ATI X2600 Pro /XT have the power for light gaming, and features such as a hardware decoder that oddly higher end video cards lack, are of interest to those of us watching planning too watch HD movies. My personal Choices for Video Card would be a passively cooled NVIDIA 8600GT. Which seems to have a better track record than the ATI Cards. Though the ATI Cards have there merits, the 2600 Series is a better performer, and actually lower power consumption (though the 2900 is not) than its Geforce rival.
Motherboards. The motherboard market is looking good today. For intel Gigabyte and Abit have a number of boards with DAW features. The two of my particular interest. are the Abit IP35 Pro and Gigabyte P35-DS4. Both of these boards have Intel P35 Chipsets and ICHR9 which has a number of nice features, like lots of USB 2.0 ports, Built in SPIDF I/O. Lots of SATA Ports. The biggest strength of these boards though is they all have built in Texas Instruments Fire wire, which is a must have feature for those of us using external Firewire interface.
For those interested in the best of the best, utilizing Intel’s Flagship X38 chipset theres the Gigabyte GA-X38-DQ6.
For AMD Boards my suggestion doesn’t have my fullest confidence. Particularly because the Nforce chipset is hit or miss with some audio interfaces (presonus comes to mind). However with a fairly good track record for audio, for the budget concious the Nforce chipset could still be a viable choice. The MSI K9N4-SLI is the first AMD board I’ve seen in a while that has pretty solid ratings all around. MSI lacks any firewire which means someone would have to add their own firewire card. For that the best option is probably Siig NN-440012-S8 Texas Instrument Card.
| Heres Some Ideas for DAW availble today this ones 675Antec Sonata 3 | 140 |
| AMD Athlon X2 4000 | 65 |
| MSI K9N4SLI F | 85 |
| 2×1GB DDR-2 800mhz PC-2 6400 CAS5 1.8V Memory | 61 |
| 2x 250GB Seagate Barracuda w/16mb Cache | 70 |
| Samsung 20x DVD+/-RW PATA | 28 |
| Arctic Silver 5 & Vantec Stealth fan 120mm Case | 23 |
| MSI 8500GT 256mb PCI-E Passive Cooler | 75 |
| Windows XP Home | 95 |
| Siig Texas Instruments Firewire | 33 |
| Or How about this for 2480?Antec Sonata 3 Designer w/Earthwatts 500 |
| Intel Core 2 QX6850. |
| Gigabye GA-X38-DQ6 Motherboard |
| w/Arctic Silver 5 2x Scythe 92mm Stealth Fan |
| 2x 1GB DDR-2 800mhz PC-2 6400 SD-RAM 1.8V CAS5 2x 150GB Western Digital Raptor (RAID 0) 16mb Cache (audio Write) |
| 1x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda 11 w/32mb Cache (OS/APPS) |
| Samsung DVD+/-RW 20x |
| 3ware 8006LP-2 Hardware RAID Controller (more Reliable Better Performance) |
| MSI NVIDIA 8600GTS Passively Cooled 256mb |
| Microsoft Windows XP Home |
| Acronis True Image 11 (you better factor this in on A RAID System) |
| Microsoft Works 8.5 |
| Microsoft Natrual Keyboard 4000 |
| Logitech G5 |
| Mid range model total price is 1150ish with a Core 2 Q6600 is 1230 or so. | 1145 | |
| Antec Sonata 3 Designer | 140 | |
| Intel Core 2 Wolfsdale e8400 | 195 | |
| GA-X38-DS4 or GA-P35-DS4 | 185 | |
| Arctic Silver 5, 2x Scythe 92 mm Case fans | 35 | |
| 2x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda 11 w/32mb Cache | 250 | |
| Samsung DVD+/-RW 20x | 28 | |
| MSI NVIDIA 8600GTS Passively Cooled 256mb | 156 | |
| Microsoft Windows XP Home & Acronis True Image 11 | 140 | |
| 2x 1GB DDR-2 6400 PC-800 CAS5 1.8v SD-RAM (mushkin) | 61 |
| Upper Mid Range for 1600.00-1650Antec Sonata 3 designer w/Earthwatts 500 |
| Intel Core 2 Q6600 |
| GA-X38-DS4 |
| Arctic Silver 5 2x Vantec 120mm Stealth Fans |
| 2x 1GB DDR-2 800mhz PC-2 6400 CAS5 |
| 2x 150GB Western Digital Raptor (RAID 0) 16mb Cache (AUDIO WRITE) |
| 1x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda 11 w/32mb Cache (OS APPS ECT) |
| Samsung DVD+/-RW 20x |
| 3ware 8006LP-2 Hardware RAID Controller (more reliable, better performance) |
| MSI NVIDIA 8600GTS Passively Cooled 256mb |
| Microsoft Windows XP Home |
PC Power & Cooling Silencer 750
Cooler Master Cosmos
Intel Core 2 QX6850.
Gigabye GA-X38-DQ6 Motherboard
w/Arctic Silver 5 w/Zalman CNPS9700NT
2x 1GB DDR-2 800mhz PC-2 6400 SD-RAM 1.8V CAS5
2x 150GB Western Digital Raptor (RAID 0) 16mb Cache (audio Write)
2x 500GB 7200rpm Seagate Barracuda 11 w/32mb Cache (OS/APPS & Backup)
Samsung DVD+/-RW 20x
3ware 8006LP-2 Hardware RAID Controller (more Reliable Better Performance)
MSI NVIDIA 8600GTS Passively Cooled 256mb
Microsoft Windows XP Home
Acronis True Image 11 (you better factor this in on A RAID System)
Microsoft Works 8.5
Microsoft Natrual Keyboard 4000
Logitech MX Revolution
$ 2950.00
Apr. 15th, 2008 @ 05:37 pm