My trustworthy, beloved and dedicated music computer died today…
PSU, MB and fans are all fried… but it’s about time to upgrade to a newer system anyway. However, i’m in a big hurry, so I hope you can give me some general tips on components and combinations.
I need a new machine almost exclusively for audio and renoise,
with a silent cabinet/cooling system, dual DVI graphics card, good performance. and win7 64-bit - I guess.
but it’s all the other stuff I’m unsure of:
quad-core or dual-core? I’ve heard so many different things here regarding performance.
processor… i5 vs. i7, how much difference does it make with audio?
what kind of ram, and how many Gb of ram is reasonable to install, how much can renoise actually access?
SSD flash disk as system disk + secondary regular disk for files… good idea?
mobo tips?
I only need something reliable, doesn’t have to be the latest and greatest, just something that is known to work well.
If it is about the RAM, you can install as much as the MoBo can handle. Some don’t go beyond the 8GB limit, if they do, you probably won’t yet get further than 16GB. For Renoise it doesn’t matter, the 64-bit edition should be able to adress everything.
SSD for sample based libraries and regular disk for other system operations work like a charm.
A quad core CPU does offer more performance over dual-core, Renoise attempts to use each core efficiently. I myself have an old Core2 2.4Ghz quadcore that works fine with most stuff i build, but an i5 already seems to outperform that CPU quite a lot reading its specs (anyone correct me if i’m wrong).
If you plan to use a lot of synth-VSTI’s simultaneously that require a lot of cpu power, an i7 would give you the breathing space you need, if you mainly desire to work with sample libraries and internal instruments, an i5 will suffice by far, but in the latter case, you will need the memory.
so, I’m about to order my new system and I wonder if I should go budget or “extreme”:
the budget option includes intel i5 or i7, 8Gb Ram.
the extreme option is an i7 with 16Gb Ram.
both systems come with SSD system disk, and the price difference is huge.
Now, how likely is it that I would benefit from going 16gb, in a renoise scenario?
I have a feeling it is totally overkill, and that I would have plenty enough power with the budget option.
is anyone here really benefiting from 16gb ram with Renoise?
I have 8GB myself, it works fine for the Symphonic Orchestra gold sample libraries, the library is installed on SSD, that’s why i can keep the memory-buffers low because the samples load pretty fast form the harddrive using its DFD option.
I guess with 16GB, Windows won’t be paging anylonger i guess.
