Cpu And Mobo Recommendations...

Tips & Tricks
1

Hi peeps

I’m thinking about getting a new mobo + CPU… :huh:

I’ve read somewhere that P4 hyperthreading CPUs cause buzzing/crackling on some VSTi hosts, but this stops with the hyperthreading switched off.
Has anyone experienced this with their CPUs whilst running Renoise?
Does hyperthreading even help run Renoise faster?

P4 2.4, 2.6, 2.8, 3.0, 3.2 - is there that much of a difference now that everything s in GHz? If there’s not much of a performance difference between a 2.6 and 3.2, but a big price difference, I’ll go for the 2.6.

AMD Athlon 64, anyone using one of these yet? I like the fact that they’re quite a bit cheaper than P4s.

What Mobos would you recommend?
It-Alien, you wrote that you got a P4 3Ghz recently, what mobo are you running it on? :blink:

Graphics cards which will be better and less interfering with the soundcard (Audiophile 2496), on board or AGP?

Opinions/Comments plz?

Thanks.

2

Thanks for the replies guys, they were very helpful.

3

I’m running it on a VIA PT800.

I’m having a lot of blue screens since I’ve switched to p4 3ghz :(

I should get a new searial ATA HD soon (it will be my secondo sATA HD) and get rid of IDE. Then I will reinstall the OS and probably I won’t have any blue screen anymore… at least I hope so…

My advice is to go for serial ATA if you will use VST samplers (HAlion, Kontakt, Sampletank, VSampler): this will really boost up your system!

(ps: give us some time to reply, damn!! :unsure: :) )

4

sATA drives claim 150MBps vs pATA 133MBps - but both are burst speeds. i don’t think there is much performance increase. but if you use more than one drive, you may see the increase, cos sATA supports single device per cable. pATA has this lousy master/slave thing. you can run your harddisks on RAID-0 if you do lots of diskbased work.

AGP is definitely better choice overall. it does not used the shared ram on your mobo, and generally has better performance.

as for mobos - i would recommend abit or asus ones, based on VIA or NVidia NForce chipsets. the 3Ghz+ /800/950FSB are relatively new technology so you might want to wait till the price settles and hardware revisions stabilizes.

5

heat is still an issue though. of course i’d recommend amd for the price… but if you want to keep it cool with a powerful heatsink and fan, it’s going to be noisy. that’s not very desirable in a studio of course.

i don’t say the p4 is silent… the p4 just dissipates heat more effectively because of it’s large core. HT + 800 fsb might be a good investment anyway - i’ve not read many reports though.

6

Motherboad : Asus P4C800-E-Deluxe is PERFECT!!! ASUS Rulezzz… :yeah:

CPU: 3.0 GHz

Graphic Card : Get ATI or Nvidia - at least 9600

Memory 1 Giga

Sound Card : go for an M-Audio (1010 LT or Adiophile 2496)

With the latest KX Audio Drivers they fix a lot of problems with hyperthreating.

Thats all :)

7

cpu:
with the money you save when going for an amd system, you can easily spend a bit more on a better and more silent cooler.
athlon64 seems like a good choice for audio to me; you get superior float performance for older apps, plus sse2 support for the newer apps that are optimized towards it.

i read that intel will change it’s socket very soon… so you probably won’t be able to upgrade much in the future. but future-proofness is probably a thing that souldn’t be taken into account anyway.

about HT… correct me if i’m wrong, but HT is only a gag from intel’s marketing folks i think. if i understood right, HT is an attempt to fix a P4 specific flaw; athlons don’t have that flaw and therefor don’t need hyperthreading (great name - sounds speedy and high-techy, eh?)

gfx card:
not sure, but from what i have read on forums, onboard gfx often can cause trouble. like audio glitches when the pattern is scrolling. if you don’t need fancy 3d features, get an older card that doesn’t produce that much heat. i read in forums that a lot people still have matrox g440 in their daws… they say it’s a solid card for 2d, with good dual-monitor support. i don’t know myself.

somewhat offtopic: from what i read, athlon(64?) users can probably enjoy a nice speed improvement with some apps in the future… i read that intel compilers have an option to produce a binary that will only run on a P4, but giving about 20% performance increase. now recently someone removed the cpu check from the compiled binary - and it worked flawless on an amd system, with the same 20% performance increase. i find that somewhat funny… hopefully no old news to you?

8

I think my choice for the next CPU would be an Athlon64 .
Right now I’m having some funny trouble with my Athlon 2500+ , can anyone help?

I had a P3-500 before and when I ran Renoise I got gapping sound on a CPU load of > 80 % .
Now on the Athlon 2500+ I get very soon a CPU load of 100% but it won’t crackle and gap. Just sometimes when I start playing it crackles and gaps in the beginning. I thought maybe 'cause it’s a mobile processor and it switches down its speed after a while. I have to turn this off but I can’t. No software-/BIOS options.
And then there was another funny thing. A friend got himself an Athlon2400+ (not mobile) which runs on 2 Ghz. My 2500+ runs on 1,86 Ghz.
Where’s the sense of it all?

9

Processors get ghz label according to how they perform in tests after coming from manufacturing line. That’s why AMDs has these weird labels I think. And different cores have different labels with different ghzs.

I have HT p4 800mhz and no probs. 64’s should be faster, if u got the money then you could get one. Otherwise I would suggest p4 800mhz ~2.4ghz northwood & asus p4c800 & 1gig of cheap 400mhz ram & reliable vid card with dual monitor support with dvi out in case u want new shiny TFT. Just know that lots of AGP cards have compatibility issues.

If that’s too much money then u should save some more.

And DON’T think about upgrading with same mobo, it’s just stupid. You almost certainly have to change your mobo when you decide to upgrade to new processor, unless you just get one from same family, and the sockets are changing all the time. AMD’s have been “upgrader’s choise” but the situation is about to change AFAIK. Just buy good parts that u’re happy with and use them as long as u can.

Gilli, u didn’t tell us much about your problem. Are you sure it is about processor? What mobo & soundcard do you use?

10

no that’s not right!

read this: http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1557/

11

I wonder if taktik or martinal, seeing as they write Renoise, could suggest what cpu/mobo to use? :blink:

12

that’s called Performance Rating (PR) by the AMD marketing department. it gives better gauge against Intel processors, by marking them to the Intel P4 equivalent.

so the XP1700+ works at 1.4Ghz but performs at roughly a 1.7Ghz P4.

HT is a whole new architecture, not a flaw fix (if it was, which flaw is that?). you have more than 1 processor thread simultaneously.

intel has the ICL compiler which claims to run better on intel machines. so far, i think the apps worthy of ICL compiles are codecs and drivers :)

13

i just upgraded myself to the following:

  • Asus P4C800-E Deluxe Rev. 2.0
  • P4 2.4C @3.3Ghz 1.6Vcore
  • 2x 512MB PC4000 A-DATA 2.85Vdimm

i’m quite satisfied running that rig at 275Mhz FSB in CPU 1:1 DRAM ratio supplying me with a whooping 6.2GB/s memory throughput.
of course you don’t need that much in realworld applications, but however, you never can’t have enough ;)

so at the very moment there isn’t much benefit from HT (hyperthreading) when using renoise, nevertheless time will come and programmers might integrate code into our belove music apps feat. HT optimized code.
nuendo2 for example, already benefits from HT.

however the fastest CPU money can currently buy is either the P4 3.4EE or the athlon fx (required registered DDR in dual channel, which is not really cheap). the athlon64 problably gives the best performance at stock clocks as for example the athlon64 3200+ is quite on par with my rig, performance wise. the only weakness current AMD CPUs is the video encoding department, where intel really smokes any AMD counterpart at the same pricetag.

so afterall, if you’re not a friend of experimenting and overclocking, i’d suggest to get athlon64 3200+ (running at 2.0Ghz, 1024kb L2 cache) paired with an Asus K8V motherboard and either one or two sticks of 512MB PC3200 supporting good timings (corsair or mushkin come to mind).
the athlon64’s memory controller doesn’t support dual channel so you’d be fine with a single stick of ram.

however, if you like tweaking, experimenting and “overclocking” your stuff to the max, like i do, then a P4C (2.8C has best price/performance currently, DON’T go for a prescott P4E, they suk :) ) paired with a canterwood (i875p) board should be fine and won’t perform any worse (in most cases) as the athlon64 3200+.

but do yourself a favour and don’t get anything else or if you can wait, then do so, since the BTX formfactor and PCI Express are right around the corner and the prescott will take a jump onto another socket soon too, where he most probably will start to breath finally.
these things are supposed to happen in the near future (anytime this year)

14

You don’t need super tight timings if you are not overclocking. At stock speeds almost any cheap ram, like samsung or something, is enough, because it doesn’t need to pull extra mhz’s. The speed gain from better RAM would be like couple per cent max, and those high end memories cost you arm and leg. So I would advice anyone that is not going to overclock not to buy any crosair or mushkin or any other hifi memory, but some other pc3200 that cost half as much. That way you save some money for those other important things, like good soundcard that saves processor time and frees it up for handling VST’s and stuff like that.

What I have seen is that there is always some new technology “just around the corner”. If you start to wait all new miracles to come true then you have to wait to end of the world. Just upgrade if you need to. New fancy stuff always cost so much that it is not worth waiting anyway.

15

are you getting philosophic? of course you “don’t need” tight timings, because you don’t even “need” a new PC at all if you compare things with what you really need for your everyday requirements.
but actually it’s a fact, that athlon systems usually benefit alot more from little ram latancies than intel systems do and if you think that the only advantage of branded-ram vs noname one are the lower latencies or the increased maximum clocks, than you’re mistaken.
a lot of new boards out there have trouble with no name ram and motherboard manufactures even started to release “approved-ram-listings”, to avoid customer trouble. you might sacrifice stability or even workability of the entire system by going for low budget OEM ram…
but of course, these are just my experiences and yours might differ.
and by the way, talking about price differences:

Samsung DIMM 512MB PC3200 DDR CL3 = 74,42EUR
Corsair DIMM 512MB PC3200 DDR CL2 = 106,99EUR

that’s a pricedifference of 32,57EUR which i personally wouldn’t wanna risk to save.

that’s true, but i was basically referring to the new, upcoming BTX formfactor which is something that just “isn’t around the corner” every year as ATX was introduced in 1996.
and BTX will require you to buy a whole new comp, so i thought it might have been a valid point of consideration, when talking about upgrading now.

16

OK you are da man. I did not know about that AMD & latency thing. And prices have changed a lot I see, I haven’t really followed prices since I last upgraded some months ago. Back then the price difference was pretty big.

I just don’t have the energy to go to the discussion about compatibilities, so I just say you are right, brands have less problems, some even don’t. Of course there are ways to test the functionality of memory but who cares, they are all cheap! And without return policy its really very good idea to get something that is sure to work.

And what I thought about that BTX thing was that it really makes no difference. If you buy now then you get ATX things and BTX in next upgrade. If you wait then you get BTX right when it comes out, and just buy new parts to your old case in the following upgrade. There’s really no difference, except there might be more to choose from in the first episodes second upgrade. That’s why I would choose to go that way, but that’s just me. Maybe I’m too philosophic. Do what you want.

17

Too bad renoise dont support dual cpu. Then it would be end of discussion. :rolleyes:

18

wouldn’t that be something the host and the clients would have to support? :blink:

19

I’m not quite sure what you mean?

Anyway. I wonder how hard it would be to make dual cpu support. To devide vst prosesses to several cpu’s.
Maybe its enough that I buy taktik a new dual amd 64 system? :rolleyes:
Hey… maybe I would! :)

20

Perhaps it might be sufficient to split the rendering of different tracks to two threads?
Shouldn’t the OS handle putting threads in different processors?

But anyway, I very much doubt we will do, at least this in the foreseeable future…
Most users don’t have dual systems, so we should rather spend our time otherwise.