Music making dream machine

[Organground]

Hi, I'm new to the forums and not very techy with hi-end machines so go easy I'm sure you will!!! OK the brief is for a machine that will run some specialist music software that requires at least 4 core i7, 24GB RAM and fast loading from hard drive (hence RAID0). As I'm also an Excel and Access power user, I thought I might push the spec up to a 6 core though it's a lot more expensive - is it worth the upgrade from the i7 950? However, I'm not planning to do any gaming.

I will be running three or maybe four monitors - two 1920x1080 touchscreens turned to portrait (with a different but fairly static image on each one), and one or maybe two at 1920x1200 in landscape. I don't want to spend tons on an all singing all dancing high powered graphics card if something simple will do. However, the touchscreens have one DVI and one VGA so I was thinking that if I got one graphics card, one monitor would get a analogue signal and the other would get a digital signal, and colours would be dissimilar etc. Unless I run DVI to one touchscreen, HDMI->DIV converter to the second touchscreen, and VGA to the third monitor. Thoughts? WIll the ATI5450 do what I need it to do? I might display the same image on the third and fouth monitors, in which case maybe I should use the VGA output and split it for the non-touchscreens. Or should I ask for two graphics cards to be fitted instead?

I need a quiet machine with as little noise as possible within reason. Will the Silio 500 plus PSU and processor coolers be enough, or is that overkill? Also, the PC will be going into a large cupboard (ventilated at the top and back), will that be an issue for cooling?

Finally, there's a specialist audio card that needs to have fitted, it uses a PCI-x socket. Is there one (or more) slots available and spare?

Here's what the configurator put together for around £1650. i7 four core would shave off around £400.

Case
COOLERMASTER SILEO 500 QUIET MID TOWER CASE

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Six Core Processor i7-970 (3.20GHz) 6.4GTs/12MB Cache

Motherboard
ASUS® P6X58D-E: DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0GB/s, 3-Way SLI

Memory (RAM)
24GB SAMSUNG DDR3 TRI-DDR3 1333MHz (6 X 4GB)

Graphics Card
1GB ATI RADEON™ HD 5450 PCI EXPRESS

2nd Graphics Card
NONE

3rd Graphics Card
NONE

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
1TB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 16MB CACHE (7,200rpm)

2nd Hard Disk
1TB SERIAL ATA 3-Gb/s HARD DRIVE WITH 16MB CACHE (7,200rpm)

RAID
RAID 0 (STRIPED VOLUME - 2 x same size & model HDD / SSD) (£9)

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

2nd DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
NONE

Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT

Power Supply & Case Cooling
600W Quiet 80 PLUS Quad Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan (£59)

Processor Cooling
SUPER QUIET 22dBA TRIPLE COPPER HEATPIPE CPU COOLER (£19)

Sound Card
ONBOARD 8 CHANNEL (7.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Network Facilities
ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT

USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD

Modem
NONE, I WILL BE USING BROADBAND

Floppy Disk Drive
NONE

Firewire & Video Editing
1 x IEEE 1394a FIREWIRE PORT ONBOARD

TV Card
NONE

Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£109)

Thanx for advice.

 

[Rmonkey808]

What DAW *requires* that amount of power?! Or do you enjoy making 100-osc + 100-filter Reaktor ensembles as much as I do? ;-D

 

[Organground]

Which DAW?

Hauptwerk. Optimised for multicore processors, large samples require at least 24GB, suggested RAID0 or RAID5 (apparently not available through PCS) for fast loading into RAM.

Good question, but still no nearer receiving advice on whether I've specced up OK...

 

[Rmonkey808]

Hi, it's robhal after a name change.

I'm not familiar with this specific DAW, I guess Sonar with a more-heavy-than-usual amount of audio channels would be the best comparison for my benefit?

I can't see a rig like this struggling with anything less than around 200 channels of simulataneous audio, although I don't know how well the multicore usage is optimised though for that software (well, I would hope). I don't want to point to anything opposed to PCS here, but SoS has a review of 'a six core system' in a recent issue which you could use as a benchmark.

The graphics card on your spec seems absolutely fine for the proposed use. I ran a Radeon 9200 in one of my audio PCs and it was fine.

 

[Rmonkey808]

Hi again, I just looked at what Hauptwerk actually was.. I probably should have done that sooner.

If you only intend the run that soft-instrument, the spec is absolutely overkill but very future proof. I would strongly advise that you upgrade to some better hard drives like SSD/Velociraptors for better access time on the samples though.

This may be useful reading, and shows you what an arguably lesser system was capable of:

http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/jul07/articles/pirates.htm

 

[neewhom]

Hey, if don't wanna stretch to SSD's then at least go for 64mb WD green drives, tiny price increment worth the upgrade

 

[Organground]

Thanks so much Neewhom - the green caviars use less power and cost only slightly more than the standard 1TB disks offered so I can get away with the 450W PSU and just saved myself nearly £30!

I can't afford a big enough SSD so for fast reading it was choice between a 150GB 10,000 disk or two 1TB RAID0 disks which come out at similar prices. The extra capacity is the dealbreaker, but can anyone tell me whether running two 1TB WD green drives in RAID1 on the P6X58D-E motherboard will give similar reading performance to RAID0? If it will, I'd prefer to have the extra drive failure security, but if RAID0 will read heaps faster than RAID1, then I'll take that.

Is it worth spending £19 to get the "super quiet" copper hotplate CPU cooler if I already have a padded Sileo case? I read a review that said it didn't have very good airflow though it was pretty silent.

For the record, I'm "only" planning on fitting an additional eight channels of sound, though one Hauptwerk user has something like 192 audio channels. But only yesterday a US supplier of audio PCs launched a Hauptwerk PC with 48GB RAM and twin six core processors so my spec is hardly overkill and I'm running software capable of something like 32,000 note polyphony.

Any other comments before I pull the trigger?

 

[Rmonkey808]

Raid1 is for redundancy and won't give you any performance benefit. Raid0 is what you'll want for that and is particularly good for large samples. I believe Raid5 is the one that combines both 'features' but I believe you need at least three drives to use that file system.

I would guess you wouldnt need a cooler if you're running the CPU at stock levels, although that depends on how 'enclosed' your cupboard is.

As for the overkill comment; sorry if it caused offence, which it seems like it might have done. I googled the software, saw that it was a high resolution sampler and based on your username guessed it was for performance purposes. My snap reaction was < 100 note polyphony.

I've a lot of experience with Halion and Kontakt which are comparable pieces of software if you ignore the midi control for the specific pipe organ features and I wouldn't know what to do with the spec in your post, it'd be hard to stretch it even on the most ambitious arrangment. Although the thing with audio PC's is that there's never a 'best possible' spec, there'll always be the project where it's a fantastic idea to have 12000 detuned copies of the same sample running through 100 buses of 100 vst's, even if it's just for your own amusement.

I seem to have overlooked your monitor requirements in my first post as well. I don't think the card you selected will have enough outputs to provide that many displays, I'd do a quick search to see what outputs you'd get with the various cards on offer.

 

[Organground]

No offense taken Rob, most gamers seem quite happy with 6GB and would probably think I'm mad going for 24GB, but for the number of samples I'll be using, even 32GB is insufficient to run everything at maximum 24 bit quality so 24GB is hardly overkill. PC specialist are by far the best value system that can be configured to 24GB.

As for the graphic card, the AMD website photo shows the 5450 has VGA, DVI and Displayport (or is it HDMI) ie three different types of outputs but it isn't clear to me whether I can run all three simultaneously - the website also says "To enable more than two displays, additional panels with native DisplayPort™ connectors, and/or certified DisplayPort™ adapters to convert your monitor’s native input to your cards DisplayPort™ or Mini-DisplayPort™ connector(s), are required".

Please can someone put that into English for me? The monitors I'm running each have DVI and VGA, so I was thinking I could output DVI directly from one of the graphics card ports, run a Displayport to DVI adaptor to the second, and run VGA to the third. Will that work, or will I need two graphics cards to run a different image on each of three screens? If so please can you recommend the cheapest pair that I can get?

Thanks a lot.

EDIT: just found this photo on another forum, basically it's like what I'm trying to achieve. The centre screen will be where I want to control Windows from, I don't want icons and things spilling onto the side screens as they will only be used when running one software application (and they will be running a fullscreen image when doing so). If I can do all this without using Eyefinity and multiple videocards then all well and good...but with which graphics card?

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v725/l88bastard/101220097121.jpg