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anonymous 10 December 2005

I'm running my DAW on a Gigabyte GA-K8NS-939 (nForce3 Ultra chipset) with an AMD 64 Athlon 3000+ (1.8 Ghz) and 1 gig of RAM. I've had this just over a year. However, my projects have now become too taxing for it to handle.

They typically involve rewiring Reason and running Sampletank from Sonar. This is fine and rarely takes my CPU higher than 30%. Adding numerous mixing and mastering Waves/TC Native plugins takes me up to 75-99% and I'm beginning to lock up with my work.

1) The 3800+ and 4000+ are 2.4 Ghz while my 3000+ is 1.8 Ghz. Should an upgrade of this sort allow me a ~30% increase in DAW processing power?

2) The 3800+ has a 512 MB L2 Cache (like my 3000+). The 4000+ has 1 gig. How significantly will this doubling in L2 Cache translate to inreased DAW/ plugin processing? FYI, the 3800+ is $350 CAD, the 4000+ $410 CAD.

Thanks.

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anonymous Sun, 12/11/2005 - 10:23

dabmeister music wrote: :-? Did you mean 512 KB & 1 MB instead of the previously posted measurements you quoted?

No - Actually, AMD has developed a superfuturistic chip that blows away all that have come before it. It has a 1 GB L2 cache and will redefine the way all computing is done.

Thanks, smartass. lol.

Yes, I meant 1 MB. Now any comment on the actual decision or value of this doubling of L2 for DAW processing?

Also whether say a 30% increase in CPU Ghz will result in a 30% increase in DAW processing?

Come on guys. Someone's gotta know what's going on.

dabmeister music Mon, 12/12/2005 - 01:46

Boy AV, I can't wait to get my hands on one of those. I bet it's the *hit. Well excuse me for asking, you don't have to be so cranky at me & the reset of the world for misunderstanding your question. BTW, whats up with folks nowadays? You make a statement and before you know it, you nearly get your head chewed off. Has the FDA checked our food & water supply lately? Are these symptoms of madcow desease or something...? :shock:

anonymous Mon, 12/12/2005 - 15:38

I actually found your post funny and laughed at myself for it and my post. I was joking. I'll "j/k" in the future to be sure.

I'm a very laid back guy! No hard feelings, eh? (look - I even gave you a hearty Canadian 'eh' - i don't roll those out for just anyone..)

ps. It's not the Mad Cow, it's delerium from the Avian Flu.

dabmeister music Mon, 12/12/2005 - 17:37

That's what it's all about...humor :) Dude, we're probably more alike than different. But I did zero in on your question about that cache thing. As I understand it, the more the merrier. Especially when it comes to memory intensive multi-media programs and such. Having any of the dual-core 2MB processors should allow for more swifter filepage sharing & executions. Unfortunately for me, I'll have to wait it out a little while longer before I can jump ship. My 2.4Ghz has'nt died on me yet. As a matter of fact, it's funny you mentioned the waves & TC bundles. I just downloaded ver.2.0 of the TC Native Bundle the other day (from their archives). I've had ver.1.0 ever since it came out back when win98se was the mainstay, and it's even better with the additional reverb plug they threw in. I also used waves back in the day when it was ver.2.5 (NPPII) but did'nt feel the need to spend a lot of $ on one s/w package. So I grabbed the musicians II bundle w/ the R-Comp, R-Eq, R-Vox, Doubler & Super Tap. I'm happy :D All in all, I still have'nt stretched my rig to its limits. But I think all of that will change as soon as I put some more horse power under the hood. Maybe then I'll have a good enough excuse for doing that all important upgrade.

Guest Tue, 12/13/2005 - 06:24

instead of the 3800/4000 get a
Dual Core 3800. about the same price as the 4000.

2 times the power and yes there is a working bios for that board to allow for dual core.

that way you get a 1meg total and 2 processors for double your VSTi pleasure.

as to the original question, not really we have seen little to no improvement with additional cache.

Scott
ADK

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