Best Pre-Made pc for audio editing/studio host?

[sirocco]

I was thinking the dual xeons 3.20 or 3.06

but how about the a64s?

will an a64 alone beat a dual xeon 3.06?

will there be dual a64s soon?

...one last thing..is there any other good places that have highquality pcs except alienware and falcon-nw?

----ive already built my cpu 1.6A @ 2.56 ghz but i dont want to build this one for my studio!

 

[yellowperil]

Just curious, how intensive is your audio editing? Reason I ask is because I think a single P4 nowadays could handle it without a problem. My AMD XP1800+ handles 24-bit recording fine, but tends to choke up a bit when I've got a bunch of plugins running. If you use external rack effects then even a 500MHz P3 could handle 24-bit recording fine, provided you have a decently fast hard drive.

 

[Megatomic]

There are dual Opteron servers and workstations out there sirocco, if you want to go high end dual AMD that's the route you should follow. And while a single Opteron or A64 narrows the gap between Intel and AMD in audio and video editing performance, the P4 with HT enabled is still the top end.

What kind of price range are you placing yourself in?

 

[wacki]

Tyan Tiger MP or newer version
Dual Athlon 1700+ ~ $40 at newegg
or go with something more beefier if you have the ca$h

I have the board, and I am very

Also check out M-Audio and Terratec Cards. They offer professional level cards starting at $100.

 

[Megatomic]

wacki, sirocco doesn't want to build his studio computer he would like to buy one pre-made. That's the way professional types do things, the warranty is very appealing when you are talking about your livelihood.

 

[mrgoblin]

Mac g5 of a boxx dual opteron workstation. Your pick

 

[piasabird]

I have heard that for stereo sound encoding an playback of (music) DVD's the M-Audio Sound Card is really nice. For Top end I would look for something designed for MPEG4 Encoding. You could go nuts and Buy a Server designed to take 8 inupts and hardware decode it and stream it out over cable TV or MPEG4 for around $10,000.00. There is a company called I-Tuner that makes professional media servers. Hardware encoding is just as valuable as the speed of the processor. This is an area where having a large cache memory on the processor plays a good role. The software that comes with the hardware is probably important too. I saw some numbers on the new P4 EE processor with a 3 Meg L3 Cache coming out. It is like a $900.00 processor.

I recommend looking for Benchmarks.

On the Xeon chipsets look at what kind of Memory they can handle and the maximum amount of memory available.

Intel Prices go down on the 26th of October for desktop processors.

 

[sirocco]

Originally posted by: yellowperil
Just curious, how intensive is your audio editing? Reason I ask is because I think a single P4 nowadays could handle it without a problem. My AMD XP1800+ handles 24-bit recording fine, but tends to choke up a bit when I've got a bunch of plugins running. If you use external rack effects then even a 500MHz P3 could handle 24-bit recording fine, provided you have a decently fast hard drive.

i am editing itense audio and midi about 75 tracks max with cubase sx also handling vst plugins.