Hello! Im planning to buy new machine and have this question conserning Renoise and cores of cpu. Should I buy 3800MHz single- or dualcore AMD?
What are the pros and cons? Please post your thoughts about this, thanx!
at the moment, there is no benefit from running renoise on a dualcore/multithreading/SMT based environment.
that’s simply because the application itself is not multithreaded.
the only way to take advantage of SMT nowadays, is to fire up energy xt, use it as a vsti host inside renoise and apply each instance you load to one of the two CPUs.
i haven’t tried that myself, but read about somebody here on the forums having tried that successfully.
other applications will of course benefit from a multithreading capable system. if you’re doing various things with your PC at the same time (installing some software, browsing, mp3-encoding, etc at the same time) you will notice a severe performance boost.
but renoise-wise, a single core CPU will do its job just as fine as one core of a dual core CPU.
but if i was to choose between single and dual core now, and would have to buy a new PC anyways, i’d certainly not hesitate and go dualcore, because that’s definately the future when taking a closer look at AMD’s and Intel’s roadmaps.
Well I was one inch from buying a new PC
After reading a lot of reviews about everything from cases to motherboards I was about to get a athlon 64 4000 single core, because it runs at a higher clockspeed than the dual core which means that it is about as fast as a dual 4800 in applications that don´t take advantage of dual core.
However dualcore is the future so I came to the conclusion that I just will have to try and wait a couple of month untill the dual 4800 comes down in price.
The other hard part for me was to chose which graphic card to get. I wanted to have a ati 1800XL but the performance/price ratio was no good, so I was about to buy a nvidia 7800 GT which has much better performance in allmost all games.
However with xbox360 which uses a built in ati around the corner. I think new games might be optimized better for the ati card.
So then again the conclusion was that I´ll wait untill the prices on the 1800XT card drops.
The other reason to wait is that windows will soon release windows Vista. which has a lot in common with windows 64, I also think it might take advantage of dual core cpu.
So my advice for you would be to hold your horses if you can and wait till the price drops somewhat.
Thanx for replys mates.
One more question: Should I buy nForce4 or nForce4 Ultra mobo?
I have thinking Asus A8N5X or A8N-E, any thoughts about those?
yea, thanks for neat advice, im in the same boat. Im not gonna pretend i really know what multithreading would do for renoise but is this something that will be implemented or even have a great performance effect if it is?
i was in the exact same situation 2 months ago. i was building new comp and wondered should i go for single or dual core and also if single core then should it be nforce 3 o 4 as many sources claim nforce 4 have trouble with audio apps due to new pci express bus.
After many considerations i went for single core AMD athlon 64 3500+ and nforce 4 chipset. i choosed single core because renoise dont support multi threading… but i have an option to replace my CPU to dual core later (almost all newer AMD CPU based mobos support that swap)
Of course i was on quite limited budged, if i would had lot of money i would went with dual core setup. So if you have the money then go for it.
I have to say that my new comp performes very well. i havent experienced any problems with nforce 4 either, but then again i dont have cubase or nuendo to make tests those guys where talking about on nuendo forums…
Actually we could make our own test tune in renoise and compare performance on different setups, posting results on those forums… what you think?
if i remember correctly i have one test tune that somebody made (i dont remember who that was) i will check if i find it…
EDIT: OK i found the test tune… i will make new thread in general discussion…
if you don’t plan to overclock the hell out of your CPU and plan to keep things silent, get the ASUS A8N-SLI Premium if you got the money.
i recommend it not because of SLI, thats probably superflous, but it’s the only board available featuring a passive heatpipe cooling out-of-the-box, which really works wonders, because those little chipset fans are really annoying and tend to fail after a year or two if you’re unlucky.
price is about 150 EUR tho.
Nice info! 
I have Asus A8N-E and its a good board ,i have no problems with it. The only weak point is yes maybe the chipset fan…
and if you are going for nforce 4 chiset then get ultra… it supports some new features like SATA 2 etc…
How about OS with AMD 64bit. Do I HAVE TO use 64bit XP, or can I use my old 32bit XP with that CPU?
with a look to the future, I would recommend dual-core cpu’s at the moment.
because of the prices at the moment and this “new” technology/hardware, I would wait until first bugs on hardware (e.g. mainboards) are fixed and Win-Vista is released.
the same like with Renoise. there is no real benefit if you run a 64bit cpu with an 32bit OS …
yes you can, they’re downwards compatible.
You should not run windows 64 yet, unless you also have windows XP on the same PC.
If you do you will need to have two different drives or partitions for each version of windows.
Windows 64 does still in most cases does not add much speed.
I read that they recommend atleast 2 but preferably 4+ gig of ram if you run windows 64 
Each time windows opens a 32bit program it allocates 4gig of memory to that program in which it runs the program, so if the program crash it wont affect any other program, however this is also why you should have a lot of ram if you want to run it.
Another thing is that you can’t run 16bit programs or programs using a 16bit installer. However i don’t know how common it is for programs to use a 16bit installer.
What you think about this:
AMD ATHLON 64 FX-55 2.6GHz
Is it better than 4400 dual-core amd (thinking of pure Renoise use) ?
I´m quite sure that for now it should be better.