in my quest for the ultimate renoise pc, I couldnt resist an offfer in my local computershop yesterday to buy 2x 512mb DDR2 memory for around 70 euro.
After opening the pc case, I came to the conclusion my Gigabyte motherboard (http://www.eagepc.com/product_details.php?dpid=15&catid=61&id=7898)
has 2 slots for DDR2 memory (which are already filled with 1 gig of ram in total), but the 2 empty slots are DDR1 memory! So the memory I bought was of no use, as I need DDR1 to make it fit in the slots.
Anyways, it was no problem to trade in the acquired memory for the correct DDR1 memory. But now when I insert the DDR1 in the motherboard (so all the 4 memory slots are filled) and reboot, my computer is running slow on 256 mb DDR2 memory according to the configuration / system screen!!
Can’t motherboards run on both DDR1 memory & DDR2 memory at the same time??? I want 2 gigs of ram, but don’t want to buy 2 x DDR2 of 1 gig , or 2 x DDR1 1 gig, especially since there is already 1 gig in there.
I feel f****ed, those computerneds could have told me this in the shop. But maybe I’m doing something wrong here, if anyone has experience with this please share.
I’ve decided my PC is screwed enough to justify an urgent upgrade…its no good when things crash less than 10 minutes after starting to use them and this PC is starting to age…
what is the best way to go with cpu’s n stuff these days? dont want to spent a fortune but it must be a signifigant step up from my 2.8 p4…
If it regards Renoise only, i don’t think there is much to upgrade to but expanding your memory.
I invested in a P5N32-SLi deluxe board from Asus. It was actually designed for high-end gaming and well, yes it for sure makes that promise.
But the board supports 16GB ram using 667Mhz memory dimms (or lower standard memory).
Add to it i had to replace the CPU as well as the socket standard from my old PC was 478 while the Asus is 775. So i took the medium range P4 CPU that even had dual core.
Also, i was buying it for memory so picked the cheapest dimm-set that could run on it.
And the last thing that made importance was the graphics card since the new board only supports PCI-X and my old GPU was AGP.
The investment was around 650 euro’s.
A dual core is this significant step up as you say, but Renoise cannot control this dual core power. If Renoise doesn’t crash, it will consume more CPU power with Hyperthreading than without (not massive amounts but a few percentages will for sure be wasted).
So the advise i would give you, if this only regards Renoise:
If you don’t pick a dual-core CPU, you can have the price lowered of this component by half of the dual core edition.
And if you pick an AMD this price can even become much lower than that.
But can’t predict what the board price would be.
The GPU card is not important either which could be 30 to 40% cheaper than it’s medium range price.
For the memory i can’t give any better price because the deal for two 1 GB memory dimmas are only a few euros more expensive than your set of 512MB dimms:
2 x PQI DDR2-667/PC2-5300 1GB € 72.95
So the last advise is to pick a (web)shop that can deliver your material cheaper than where you bought your memory.
I don’t agree with this. With many or CPU heavy VSTs you can max out virtually any CPU. I see no reason not to have a very fast processor for use with Renoise. Except for money then But when you have narrowed down the choices when it comes to processor manufacturer and model, it’s usually easy to spot which one gives you the most speed while beeing fairly cheap.
Also GPU can give a speed boost, but I guess that’s only if you have an older gfx card really. So in that context I can agree with vvoois.
I vote for Athlon for the moment, but that is more of a feeling than based on experience. I thought dual core worked well with Renoise and only the old P4 hyperthreading meant problems…?
I’ve checked out if disabling hyperthreading in the bios would benefit me in renoise power, and there wasn’t any noticable difference. The song still maxed around the same processor usage level. I expected much more of a difference.
You don’t see the difference because Renoise automatically sets the CPU affinity to core 0 only.
(In other words, Renoise disables HT software technically speaking)
If you want to see the results, just leave HT on in the Bios, start Renoise, then pop up the taskmanager, go to the processes, rightclick Renoise.exe and then on the bottom of the contextmenu select “Set affinity” and check the CPU 1 as well.
Then you can figure out the difference.
And to Johan:Ofcourse when going from 2.8Ghz to 3.6Ghz will probably mean a good difference.
I was merely aiming at the dual core variant which currently means no difference with Renoise.
If there was a chance to set CPU affinity for audio or drivers, there might be a chance to set the audio drivers to another core than the Renoise process.
For so far i only found a specific kernel tool on Microsoft.com that could do this on Win2K (or win3k) server only.
And i believe this was more aimed at stabelizing Serial com, USB and Firewire drivers.
well I didnt move up much on clock speed, got a latest generation 3ghz dualcore (the old one was one of the old hyperthreading thingies) but performance is up at least 250%…
(ie, something really chunky that required about 300ms latency to not f**k up in renoise now plays fine on default 50ms)
I had a cheap motherboard in the old one and cheap ddr1 ram…the new one’s much better, ddrII makes a big difference…
oh yeah, its got 4 ddrII slots
its also got a RAID controller, which might come in handy when I get some more hard drives.
Pays to spend a bit more on motherboards in the long run I think…
quick update; it was no problem trading in the bought 2x ddr1 memory of 512 mb for 2x ddr2 memory of 1 gig each (tho I had to pay 39 euro’s extra) So now my comp. is cruising on 2 gig internal I was thinking about buying 2x 2 gig, but they didn’t sell it in the shops, prolly would be overkill anyways.
My comp has raid controllers aswell, but i have no idea how to set this up. I once installed an extra harddisk, and I have f****ed that one up (wrong jumper settings?)
But when you have narrowed down the choices when it comes to processor manufacturer and model, it’s usually easy to spot which one gives you the most speed while beeing fairly cheap.
I was thinking about buying 2x 2 gig, but they didn’t sell it in the shops, prolly would be overkill anyways.