Intel or AMD for recording and editing live music

[idgaf13]

Which direction AMD or Intel ?
Want to use exclusively for recording artists music live and editing
Need a motherboard recommendation ,CPU and memory

 

[gaidin123]

Neither CPU is "best" for recording. For that you are much more interested in power/grounding, 24bit higher end soundcard, and good recording software than what brand the CPU is.

Processing tracks is very disk and CPU intensive though. How mobile does this machine have to be? You could get by with a laptop and a higher end USB or Firewire "soundcard". Take a look at Midmman's firewire and usb series.

If the machine needs to be mounted in rack audio equipment you may have to take that into consideration, along with a monitor of some kind. You can probably find some dedicated audio equipment that has 24bit recording and a hard drive in it that would be much simpler to use in concert. Later on you would just pull the tracks off it and edit it on a computer at home/studio/work.

Gaidin

 

[anandfan]

Don't design your system around the CPU. Since you have a specific use, work around that. The CPU will probably be one of the last things to choose. As gaidin123 suggested, it might be best to first pick your recording device/sound card along with the appropriate software. I know at least one video software program specifies Intel and not AMD CPUs. (I'n not knocking AMD, all my CPUs here are AMD, but I don't use that software!). Heck, you may even find the best sound capture device/software combination for your needs runs only on a Mac!

 

[squidman]

I agree. For sound recording youll need:

1) Ether AMD 1700+ and above, or intel Pentium 4 1.6 and above
2) 512 megs of ram (i assume you're gonmna record uncompressed wav files, and the bigger they get, the more memory they need)
3) ATA133 60GB+ drive
4) M-Audio Pro sound card ONLY!!! No Audigy's, no TUrtle BEaches. I use a really expensive m-auido with m-auido mixer - paid 300 for the card, 250 for the mixer.
5)VGA dont matter

So there you go.

 

[floccus]

My recommenrdation in this case is that because sound editing can be quite CPU intensive, you'll want the raw GHz of a P4. Applications can be adjusted to run quite similarly on both an Athlon and P4, but the truth is that sometimes faster is better. This is especially true for many A/V programs that need to run code over and over again such as audio encoders.

THG: CPU roundup

That is from Tom's and shows pretty clearly that the raw power of a P4 is much better than an Athlon. I do love the Athlon, and AMD, but in your case the P4, especially one of the 3.06GHz C's with a Canterwood board will definitely be what you want.

 

[Vette73]

Originally posted by: floccus
My recommenrdation in this case is that because sound editing can be quite CPU intensive, you'll want the raw GHz of a P4. Applications can be adjusted to run quite similarly on both an Athlon and P4, but the truth is that sometimes faster is better. This is especially true for many A/V programs that need to run code over and over again such as audio encoders.

THG: CPU roundup

That is from Tom's and shows pretty clearly that the raw power of a P4 is much better than an Athlon. I do love the Athlon, and AMD, but in your case the P4, especially one of the 3.06GHz C's with a Canterwood board will definitely be what you want.

I can't believe peopel still go by anything toms says. He is so biased and it shows a lot of time. But people don't care.


But like most said, get a great sound card and then work backwards. A Athlon with Dual channel ram will be cheaper and can leave you with some cash for a good pro sound card.

 

[orion7144]

How can you say he is so biased? He doesn't even write most of the articles anymore. His site give benchmarks that if you look on other sites are very similar.

Originally posted by: Marlin1975

Originally posted by: floccus
My recommenrdation in this case is that because sound editing can be quite CPU intensive, you'll want the raw GHz of a P4. Applications can be adjusted to run quite similarly on both an Athlon and P4, but the truth is that sometimes faster is better. This is especially true for many A/V programs that need to run code over and over again such as audio encoders.

THG: CPU roundup

That is from Tom's and shows pretty clearly that the raw power of a P4 is much better than an Athlon. I do love the Athlon, and AMD, but in your case the P4, especially one of the 3.06GHz C's with a Canterwood board will definitely be what you want.

I can't believe peopel still go by anything toms says. He is so biased and it shows a lot of time. But people don't care.


But like most said, get a great sound card and then work backwards. A Athlon with Dual channel ram will be cheaper and can leave you with some cash for a good pro sound card.

 

[squidman]

Ya, i got really disappointed with TomsHardware - too primitive. I started questioning it when Tom got 5500 memory marks for his nForce2. But why do other benchmarkers get 4900-5000 memory points for same memory, and cpu?! Easy: tom gets his stuff for free (i.e manufacturer optimizes the performance/quality prioir to sending it). Tom never said: "this board that was sent to us by asus is, though looks the same, in fact is quite different from the asuse you'll be ablr to buy. It is optimized for performance".
So really, if you have this forum, with real-life users, who buy real h/w why do we need Tom??!

 

[floccus]

Ok, my point by linking that was not, here's what THG says so take it as gospel. The link does, however, do a nice job of showing where pure M/GHz matters, which in this case was for sound compression. My point is still valid in that for some tasks you want an all out faster CPU and in others you want an optimized core. In games where you have a ton of instructions that need to get run, having a core that is optimized to do so works great, hence the Athlon64's have very high marks for games. Again, you'll complain that I'm lookin at benchmarks, but I'm not just quoting #'s... I'm taking relative comparisons and drawing my own conclusions, its called thinking and being informed.

My point here, This has nothing to do with the link and everything to do with the fact that a CPU that is able to operate faster is best suited for sound work because compression/decompression needs high clock rates. So dude, you want a P4 running as fast as you can afford. The rest of you... stop using this thread to debate the merits of something completely different. Go to ATOT if you want to bash Tom's.... i

 

[CraigRT]

Go to ATOT if you want to bash Tom's....

aww but this is the perfect place to bash tom's... THG is crap, always will be.

 

[amcdonald]

Here are some questions:
How much money can you spend?
Is this going to be a laptop? desktop?

 

[squidman]

If laptop - then M-Audio has kick ass pro audio mobile solutions.

 

[idgaf13]

Basically Money is not a primary concern
But why spend 3x as much for a CPU if people are getting similar results at lower cost.
$2000-3000 was the range.