Hi;
It's my first time posting here. I hope I got into the right forum and I'd really appreciate any insight I could get. Four years ago I bought a DAW from an English firm and I've regreted it off and on since then for reasons I won't go into since it's not pertinent to now.
I don't have the speed and crunching power that I wanted and it's time to build a new computer.
Here is what I have come up with-
The case:
Enermax CS-718 ( silver black )
Power Supply:
Enermax EG565AX-VH(W)SFMA (2x PCIe, gold)
Mainboard:
Asus P5WD2-E Premium (2x PCIe x16, 2x G-LAN, SATA II RAID)
CPU:
Intel® Pentium® D Processor 960
CPU Cooler:
Arctic-Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
RAM:
Kingston HyperX DIMM 2 GB Kit (DDR2-800, KHX6400D2K2/2G)
Graphic Card:
256MB EVGA 7600GS Passiv 16x PCI-Express Graphic card with DVI, VGA, YUV HDTV und AVIVO
Systemharddisk:
160GB Samsung HD160JJ Sata-II
( 300MB/s, 8MB Cache, 7.200RPm, liquid stored, quiet )
Dataharddisk:
2 x 250GB Western Digital WD2500YD Raid Edition hardisks
( 150MB/s, 16MB Cache, 7200RPm, liquid stored, quiet )
Harddisks in Raid Array 0
(I have an external 300gig hard drive)
CD Burner:
LG GCE-8527B (Bulk, Black)
(I have a high quality external DVD burner)
Floppy drive:
3,5' Mitsumi Floppy ( Black )
Soundcards:
Creative X-Fi Elite Pro (Retail)
and MIDIMAN Delta 44
Running on Windows XP Corporate Professional
I'm assured by the person building this that I will have all the power and stability that I need. Meanwhile I have been reading a lot about the D-architecture compared to the new Core2 processors coming out in a few weeks. Their benchmark results aganst AMD are very impressive and they seem also to blow away all of the D-systems. I'm not concerned about spending a few hundred dollars more or less. I just want the best and I want it to be set up to interface with everything that is coming down the line in the next few years.
I use Adobe Audition 2.0 and occasional samplers and various plugins- VST and Dxi. I use Band in a Box to generate some portions of my music and I use TC Helicon to generate harmonies when I can't do them myself. I record the guitar and piano and voice and mostly work with audio files that are either direct or recorded from MIDI. That's about it.
Am I over kill already with this other system or should I wait for Core2 and put that in? I'd be buying the best and fastest. Can I use the same motherboard from ASUS and would all of the other components work as well; RAM, graphic card etc?
Also, if anyone has any recommendations for replacing any of the components I mentioned I would really appreciate it.
Thanks for taking the time to read this.
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Advice on new system Your spec looks quite well but I would say
Advice on new system
Your spec looks quite well but I would say that you dont really need 2x 250gb drives in raid 0 as well as a 300gb external drive. Last year I built myself a Shuttle Xpc with an Amd XP3200 chip in, 1gb RAM, 200gb Sata drive, DVDRW/CDRW drive and an Msi Nvidia GT6800 in just incase I fancied playing a few games. I also bought an external 300gb Firewire Maxtor drive and put a Lacie PCI 3 port Firewire card in to connect my external drive and Digidesign 002 Rack too running Pro Tools. I have partitioned my Bootable drive that has Windows XP pro on into 2 and record my Audio primarily onto my second 100gb partition and then back it up to my external 300gb Maxtor. I find that this drive space is enough so far but am planning to take my floppy drive out and put another 300gb Sata drive into my XPC to record my audio on and upgrade my memory to 2GB.
Also Raid 0 Offers no redundancy or fault tolerance, with level 0, data is striped across drives, resulting in higher data throughput. Since no redundant information is stored, performance is very good, but the failure of any disk in the array results in data loss. This level is commonly referred to as striping.
You other options are to either not bother with Raid as I have done and just simply backup your data to an equivalent size drive or have 2 of the same size drives running as Raid 1 which is called mirroring as all data is written to both drives although the performance of a level 1 array tends to be faster on reads and slower on writes compared to a single drive, but if either drive fails, no data is lost.
If you want true Fault Tolerance You would need a raid controller in your system that would support Raid 5 which provides redundancy by writing data and parity information across three or more drives, thus increasing performance. I.e. you would need 3 drives in your array connected to your Raid controller and if one drive goes down you can swap that drive out, replace it and rebuild the data in that array.
Hope this helps, have fun. I never have a problem with my Xpc.