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I'm curious to find out if it's worth making an investment on building a DAW w/ lets say a dual Pentium 4, 3.06 processor. Mac has the new G5 that's suppose to blow the _hit out of everything currently on the market nowadays (even current dual processor setups). What would the system bus speed be like? More importantly, how would the performance standup to this new Mac monster. Does anyone have such a setup? And how does it perform in the studio? :cool:

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Opus2000 Thu, 08/14/2003 - 12:45

Well, remember there are no Dual P4 machines...only Dual Xeon machines.

I'd be curious to see the real world tests of a G5 not having any of the factory tweaks done that were supplied for the tests that were so modestly biased compared to a Dual Xeon machine.

I'm sure it would be close though. Bus speeds would be 533Mhz for the Xeons but it's coupled it dual channel ram so that in itself is synchronous to the processor. So is the G5

Now the G5 comes with 800Mhz, 900Mhz and a 1Ghz FSB and that may give the egde in the long run but it also may not be synchronous in the overall picture. It's hard to tell as they haven't even shipped yet!

Still some issues at the factory. This is a fact as well as the OS having some problems.

With the Dual Xeons you have Hyperthreading which makes each processor act as two. Unfortunately you would have to disable this feature for most audio applications as they can not take advantage and may cause the program to not operate with a total of four processors!

Applications like Photoshop or the likes there of would probably be fine.

To make this short, it would be an interesting test to see if indeed the G5 is "the worlds most powerful and fastest" personal computer out there.

Note the keyword "personal computer" that they put in there! A Dual xeon really isn't a personal computer but more of a server machine! But Dell and those who make Dual Xeons market it as both I believe.

Until then we won't know but can speculate that it might be a close race.

Now, at the end of the year when Intel releases the P4 processors with the 800Mhz FSB and a 1MB L2 cache, this could be a different story. That 1MB cache will help out truly in the long run.

Also next year with the release of the new chipset and PCI protocol we could see an even closer match or even outperforming the G5. Again, we won't know until these machines are out and in the hands of the real world people.

Opus :D

dabmeister music Fri, 08/15/2003 - 05:00

I appreciate the heads up info on the Xeon processor. That's interesting that Intel plans to release this new processor in the very near future. I can imagine what this could do with the various apps used to record music. But on the other hand , I have a general question pertaining to AMD. Are they still in the running with the others as far as producing the fastest processor?

Opus2000 Fri, 08/15/2003 - 16:27

It's not in the "fastest" processor label so to speak but the cost and the SSE vs. Float Vs. Instruction coding.

The fact that AMD has some good processors is great but there are some side effects to AMD..chipsets and the heat of the processors!

Before I truly went all Intel I researched AMD and possible motherboards with non Via or other chipsets and looked at what other people were going through. Most of them had problems with audio cards or USB based devices.

I chose Intel because it's typically a sure fire winner! You never have an audio card incompatability! Well, unless it's MOTU then you're just screwed in general with PC's :D