How good is your PC?

[Infinitus]

Just nosying to see if anyone has a really decent PC around these parts, so if you ain't that techy you should probably close your ears/eyes right about now.

My studio computer: Asus K8N-DL mobo, 2 AMDx2 64 Opteron 270 processors (quadcore @ 2GHz per core), 8GB PC3200 DDR400 ecc registered RAM, BFG Geforce 8800GTX GPU (overclocked edition), E-MU 1820m soundcard, 600w Coolermaster iGreen PSU, CM stacker 832 alluminium case. 32-inch LCD monitor (well TV, but it's used as a monitor). Behringer Truth 2031A Monitor Speakers (No crappy pc speakers for me). Logitech Mx5000 Keyboard and Mouse (with bluetooth "dongle"). It all functions flawlessly on Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit.

It's a geek's/gamer's dream. Cost me an arm and a leg though, but I built it myself, saved myself quite a bit of £. I'm a music producer/student and believe it or not, I can actually use up the CPU pretty easily, the RAM I have in spades, even on a 64-bit OS. I say it runs flawlessly, I only have one problem; the soundcard drivers are pretty naff because they're only beta drivers, but once they release the final ones it will be flawless. I've heard a lot of crap about Vista, but if you have a machine that has multiple cores (esp. more than 2), you ain't going to get the performance out of XP. I've tested this thing on XP and Vista 64-bit and it's Vista that multithreads the best, it spreads the load even and is as solid as a rock. XP has a hard time multithreading and doesn't use the RAM as efficiently as Vista does. I had way more blue screens in win98, followed by XP and Vista has been the most solid OS I've ever used. Seriously, at least with a quadcore it is. You'll probs be okay if you have a single or dual-core with XP.

Still I need more power; If I can fit water cooling in this thing I am going to clock the Opterons to 3 or 4 GHz (3Ghz they'll do easily) which will be at least 12Ghz of theoretical power. I just need M$ to make more RAM available and this thing will be a real monster. Considering it's only the second PC I've built I'm quite pleased with it.

Yes I'm a real geek, but I need to be for what I do. So let's talk PCs...

John

[flashy]

i wouldnt know where to start with my pc johnny, i switch it on, it does what i tell it to do, then i turn it off, simple as....

[MargaretR]

I agree Flashy - I never understand why men need to know WHY & HOW something works.
I remember my brother dismantling our old valve radio (in the days before TV) in order to 'find out how it works' - he was panicking because he couldn't put it back together before mum & dad got home

If it aint broke - dont mend it

[***Mr D***]

Nice set up you got there, Built my own a while ago.

Think it ended up as this lot.

Intel Core 2 Duo E6600, Socket 775, 2.4 GHz, 1066MHz FSB, Conroe Core, 4MB Cache,

640MB XFX 8800GTS XT PCI-E (x16), Mem 1700MHz, GPU 530MHz, 96 Streams, 2 x Dual Link DVI/HDTV

600w Seasonic S12-600 SLi Ready Silent PSU 2xPCI-E 4xSATA 120mm Fan ATX1.3/2.01

Asus P5B Deluxe/WiFi-AP iP965, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, ATX

2GB (2x1GB) CorsairTwinX XMS2, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12, EPP

320Gb HGST (IBM/Hitachi) HDT725032VLA360 Deskstar T7K500, SATA300, 7200rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.5 ms, NCQ

Antec Nine Hundred/Ultimate Gamer Case no PSU

Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro - P4 up to 4.4GHz - S775 Dual Core / Core2Duo Ready

Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound for CPU and Chipset Coolers

Sony AW-G170ASV Silver 18x DVD±RW x12 Ram Dual Layer DVD-Writer OEM

[panther]

mines good, it gets me on the internet, i can play games on it, thats all i need to know

[Mick]

Er which one i have 5 at the min

[entwisi]

I'm intruiged by the if M$ would make more comment on RAM? care to expand?

Also , I'm afraid your experience of Vista doesn't tally with teh majority of people I know. Even an Microsoft devout bloke I know agrees that Vista has some serious flaws in core functionality. (e.g. try getting Vista to connect to a WPA1 network), file deletion and general network file handling has some MAJOR flaws in it. For a flagship OS to have such problems is to br frank, scary.

I'd also like to understand how you feel the system is flawless when you say you do music production andteh soundcard drivers are buggy? Surely your whole purpose of music production relies on the sound subsystem working to perfection?

Impressive spec list though

[Mick]

er "Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound for CPU and Chipset Coolers"
not something i would put in a pc specs list

[***Mr D***]

Originally Posted by mick

er "Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound for CPU and Chipset Coolers"
not something i would put in a pc specs list

Copied and pasted from a previous thred.

One thing I am annoyed at is apparantly I need Vista to take full advantage of DX10 games.

[entwisi]

and you then need another 2 gig of ram for it to run properly again

[Infinitus]

Originally Posted by entwisi

I'm intruiged by the if M$ would make more comment on RAM? care to expand?

Also , I'm afraid your experience of Vista doesn't tally with teh majority of people I know. Even an Microsoft devout bloke I know agrees that Vista has some serious flaws in core functionality. (e.g. try getting Vista to connect to a WPA1 network), file deletion and general network file handling has some MAJOR flaws in it. For a flagship OS to have such problems is to br frank, scary.

I'd also like to understand how you feel the system is flawless when you say you do music production andteh soundcard drivers are buggy? Surely your whole purpose of music production relies on the sound subsystem working to perfection?

Impressive spec list though

Hi,

What I meant about the RAM is allowing more RAM to be used by the OS. At the moment I've got 8GB RAM, but only 4GB can be used by vista, 2GB of this can be used by my music production software. If I had a 32-bit OS then only 2GB could be used by windows. This is why I'd like microsoft to basically have no limit on RAM, I can't see why not in a 64-bit system, especially when the board has a capacity of around 24GB of RAM. You'd think Vista would be future-proof, but a lot of people I know already have more than 4GB. Seems a little odd to me. If they had a max of say 8 or 16GB. I'd be able to reserve 2GB for each core. Plus my music software would use more RAM (and it uses RAM to load virtual instruments & audio recordings; so more is better).

The system is flawless in that it's stable. The problem with the soundcard drivers is that everytime you make the sytem use the audio card drivers (media player or any program that requires the sound drivers to process sound), the drivers tend to make the sound go to one side i.e sound just comes out of either the left speaker or the right speaker (or none for that matter). If you get the sound to come out of both speakers and never "restart" the process (you leave the media player/program open) then it comes out of both speakers indefinitely. The quality and latency of the audio is perfect and with all the power, it allows me to use higher sample rates, meaning higher quality audio (although the human ear can't notice the quality difference anyway). I find my experiences with
Vista pretty strange, as it works pretty much flawless for every single process I use it for, people have been having real issues with it, yet I haven't, only soundcard drivers. They have nothing to do with M$ or Vista.

XP is pretty much solid as a rock too, it's just it doesn't seem to work as well as Vista on this particular system (all my other PCs have XP as it works better for them). I hope they do resolve the other issues with vista though. I think i'm one of the only people that are satisfied with it

John

[entwisi]

Can I just ask, are you using a 32 bit program on 64 bit OS? thats why you are limited to 4 gig address space. Is there a 64 bit version of the software?

I like your protection of the OS with regard to the driver software. You bought a flagship OS on a flagship PC and it doesn't work as well as a 10 year old PC running win 95 (i.e. sound works fine!!!! )

[Infinitus]

Originally Posted by entwisi

Can I just ask, are you using a 32 bit program on 64 bit OS? thats why you are limited to 4 gig address space. Is there a 64 bit version of the software?

I like your protection of the OS with regard to the driver software. You bought a flagship OS on a flagship PC and it doesn't work as well as a 10 year old PC running win 95 (i.e. sound works fine!!!! )

At the moment, the software is 32-bit and there's no 64-bit version (otherwise I'd have it already). It's coded in Delphi and Delphi haven't released a 64-bit coding environment as of yet. The developers say they're going to make a 64-bit version asap, Dephi say the tools/software should be available early 2008. There's nothing I can do but wait for a 64-bit version really

If I use the onboard sound then technically the sound already does work fine, there's nothing wrong with the sound when used that way, it's pretty obvious that there's no point in blaming M$ or vista for the slackness of a seperate company. I have had words with this company (E-MU/creative) telling them about this and telling them how unsataisfied I am with their service, but I'm just the "little man". I did have it running with 64-bit XP drivers previous to the beta Vista drivers and it had exactly the same problem as the beta drivers (my guess is that they are using modified XP drivers as beta drivers; that's how cheap they are). If I could, I'd use the onboard sound to prevent all these problems, the only thing being I need ASIO sound drivers and the connections on my soundcard to record instruments, plus the connections on my monitor speakers are either XLR or balanced 1/4 inch stereo jacks. The onboard sound device only has 1 1/8 inch jack; I need at least 3 1/4 inch stereo jacks. This is why I'm forced to put up with this crap.

All this being said, I do have several other computers I can produce music on. They're all XP driven and they work flawless. My best one is a dual-core Athlon 64-bit with 1GB RAM w/ GeForce 7 series GT, E-MU 1212m soundcard, which is my last studio computer. It's pretty rapid when it comes to loading times/latency, it just can't process as much instruments/audio as the quadcore can.

Regards,

John

[entwisi]

I 'll let you know when Delphi is updated as I know a couple of Delphi Guru's

32 bit is your real problem. (he says when he was brought up with 8 bit and even a couple of 4 bit ones )

I'm happy that there is at least one person that isn't having problems with Vista as your the exception that proves the rule!

[kathleen_firth]

i know our comp is a good one but i couldnt tell you much about it its a samsung laptop thats all i need to know lol