Topic: Trying to build a great audio PC(seeding, taping,).any suggestions for specs??

[rerem]

The Athlon64 3000 Winchester core can outpower the top P4-while running cooler and quieter than even an old 1ghz Celeron-the 939 socket opens the door to the Nforce 4 chipset which,on various mobos introduces a bunch of breakthrough tech stuff that has been talked about but until very recent could not be obtained. A lot of this stuff like SATA II and PCIe  will be the future standard. If I put $1500 in a puter I want it to still be the real deal in 2010. The Athlon64's have special features in that they can be set to basically underclock themselves when full power is not needed,which means cooler-quieter.It is quite true that an XP1800 would have no trouble running audio apps-and while the 13micron XP1800 runs reasonably cool-the new Winchester 9 micron cpus run even cooler and quieter and minimal background noise is why I recommend it more than its power

[not logged in]

i'm another big fan of the athlon64.

just put together a new pc with a athlon64 3500, msi K8N neo2 platinum motherboard and wd raptor 74gb.  housed in wavemaster case. 

take a look at the anandtech guides.  here's the mid-range guide

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.aspx?i=2250

haven't used the new pc for audio however.  for that i use a mac g5....

[Nick in Edinboro]

Alright Ray, I've looked at your stuff.. Here are my thoughts

PROCESSOR: Go with the 939 not the 754 slot.

Why go with a 64bit processor?  When you're running a 32bit OS (Windows XP) and 32bit applications, the performance gain is like 5% for a large increase in price until OS's go 64bit. 

Some of this spiel below comes from what I learned in a comp. architecture class, at the time I believe we were dealing with the Opteron core and as such some numbers may be out of date.

With a 64 bit processor you can in theory have more than twice as many registers on board (might now be quadruple).  Along with doubling the general purpose registers it has an additional eight dedicated 64 bit GPR's and eight additional SSE2 registers.  You get true 64 bit memory addressing, no more slow paging scheme Physical Address Extensions that come with 32bit architecture after the 4gig limit is met.  AMD uses a 64 bit flat addressing scheme that can hold 256 terabytes of addresses without the need for paging.  It has more than twice as many SIMD (single instruction multiple data) SSE2 addresses than a 32 bit chip. The ALU is faster with newer algorithms and much larger registers, floating point calculations (the hardest/slowest thing for a chip to do) are faster and can be more accurate.  Better branch prediction and more effecient "hyperthreading" technology then Pentiums allow AMD's to perform faster then higher clockrate (ghz/mhz) Pentium 4's.

You are correct in the assumption that 32 bit OS and 32 bit applications are still only going to use the eight registers they used to have on a 32 bit machine.  However, they could be recompiled in order to take advantage of the new architecture.  Even without this added benefit of older applications running faster wouldn't you rather have a system which is ready for the future?  If I were spending the money today I would buy a 64 bit processor and know for a fact that in a years time it will be much more current then any of the 32 bit processors around..

[Nick in Edinboro]

The Athlon64 3000 Winchester....the 939 socket opens the door to the Nforce 4 chipset...A lot of this stuff like SATA II and PCIe will be the future standard. If I put $1500 in a puter I want it to still be the real deal in 2010.

Word.  Rerem says the truth...  I sent Ray an e-mail with my suggestions last week on a $1500 system and it included both a Winchester core processor and a board with nforce4 and SATA2/PCIe.  Glad to know that others were thinking the same...

[Ray76]

Thanks yall!!!
ray +T