I am getting ready to order my components for my new DAW. But I am not the most computer savvy individual. I am even going to have to pay someone to build it for me.
From reading about other systems on this forum I came up with what I thought was a good system.
P 4 3.0 GHZ 800mhz FSB 512kb L2 cache
Asus P4peDeluxe MB
2 WD hard drives 8mb cache
1 40 gig 1 80 gig
corsair xms Extreme Memory 1GB DDR 3200
Enermax Noisetaker Series 420 Watt Power Supply
Matrox G450 Video Card 32 mb
Mitsumi floppy drive
RME Digi 96/36 LE soundcard
latest Cubase SX
The problem is that I was looking at the other Pentium 4 prescott 3.0 chip with the 1 mb of L2 cache. I am not sure if I should go with the Northwood with the 512 kb L2 cache or the Prescott with the 1 mb L2.
What do you guys suggest? I am not even sure if the prescott is compatable with the motherboard I have chosen. But since they are so close in price I am not sure which one to get.
Comments
The Athlon 64 is a great chip, but doesn't offer any significant
The Athlon 64 is a great chip, but doesn't offer any significant performance increases over the Barton (32 bit) Athlons. However once 64 bit Windows is available, together with applications that are re-coded to take advantage of 64 bits the story may be different. Also the chipsets are still early in development, although I note that the new Nvidia nForce 3 is now on par with the Via K800 series. But by the time the afore mentioned op system and applications are available there would have been more time for development of the chipsets. One of the advantages of the AMD 64 is that it handles some of the operations formerly handled by the chipsets (such as memory addressing and memory I/O) itself, meaning less reliance on the chipsets. For me, I would wait a year or so.
Looks good except that I would use an AMD 3200+ Barton core with
Looks good except that I would use an AMD 3200+ Barton core with an ASUS A7NX Deluxe (that's my preference!)
Upgrade your disk capacities to 2 x 120Gig (shouldn't cost that much more) and maybe SATA, for no other reason than minimising the clutter (and therefore maximising the cooling/airflow)
I would use the Corsair TwinX ram for dual channel mode (this might be AMD board specific - I gave Intel the flick so long ago I don't know whether dual channel memory configurations are relevant in their systems)
Good to see someone paying attention to good quality power supplies - I use 550 watt Antecs myself
The Matrox should be a G550 - G450's are old hat now and I'm surprised they're still available
What about a CD Burner? DVD buners provide a good solution for backing up images of your drives - I believe the Gigabyte W04040A is a good one
And the case? With such a tricked up system pay the extra and go for a Lian Li or an Antec
Reports from other builders and users suggest that the Prescott is nowhere near as good as expected. The days of fears of non-Intel systems are gone long ago - all my systems are AMD based (built two more last week). On my own system I run SX, Wavelab, Triligy, Reaktor, Moog Modular V, Autotune, Kandos and more - these types of systems are fanatastic
But good luck with whatever you build