Guest Kits Posted August 29, 2002 Share Posted August 29, 2002 Hey All... I am considering spending some money on seriously upgrading my system. First of all, my specs: P4 1.5 512MB SDRAM 20GB 5200 HardDrive, WinXP, Store bought Cubase5.1r and Halion, decent yet amaturish monitors, fruity loops, reason, Wave Lab and vst etc etc.... I am going to spend some money on a dsp soundcard, i want something as proffesional as possible and am probably going to buy the Luna2 card. Also I want to upgrade my Pc... should I replace my motherboard with a newer model alowing faster memory chips (RDRAM DDRAM) ? Should I buy a newer , faster HD? How critical is the affect going to be on my pcs preformance? I am not looking to cut cost but want a smoothly running system with quality and compatible gear yet dont want to go buying things i dont need. If the motherboard is critical I will buy it. The third thing I want to buy is a Hardware synth... I'm looking for something out of Waldorf or Access... maybe also the KorgMS2000... any thoughts? how do you people feel about buying used hardware? oh... also... if anyone has the Luna card.... how good is the Mixer? Can it replace hardware (at least for now)? Thanks for any thoughts... keep up the trance Kits Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Will Posted August 30, 2002 Share Posted August 30, 2002 you did not specify the motherboard you have. The first problem I see is your hard disk. I would recommend to upgrade to a 7200 rpm disk. A Maxtor d740x ATA 133 disk is very good. For best performance you want two hard disks each as master on seperate IDE headers. Then you can have your system files on one disk and the paging file on another disk. The reason for on seperate IDE headers is that the IDE channel can only access one disk at the same time. So if you put both on the same channel then performance is slower. You should also check for tweaks to winXP to allow it to run with best performance, especially tweaks related to music making. Apart from that your system seems to be quite good. Are you having problems with performance? Perhaps they may be solved with the purchase of your new soundcard. I believe maximum performance can be gained with RDRAM and the 850 chipset. However whether the performance/cost ratio over DDRAM and an 845 chipset is worth the extra expense, I dont know. Sometimes when computer parts are compared, you are talking about something like a 10% increase in speed and a large increase in cost. Please note if you are thinking of taking advantage of the 533 Mhz system bus, you would require a P4 as follows. I would also recommend a chip with the on board 512k cache rather than 256k. 533MHz system bus: 2.80 GHz, 2.66 GHz, 2.53 GHz, 2.40B GHz, 2.26 GHz 400MHz system bus: 2.60 GHz, 2.50 GHz, 2.40 GHz, 2.20 GHz, 2A GHz, 2 GHz, 1.90 GHz, 1.80 GHz, 1.70 GHz Best memory performance can be gained with two identical memory chips of whichever type you choose, rather than one big one. At the moment i am looking at the Intel D845EBT board, the only complaint is that it does not have ATA 133, has only ATA 100. I am most interested in stability. Another option would be MSI. Probably you will find the performance difference between SDRAM / DDRAM / RDRAM on P4 chipsets on the site http://www.tomshardware.com I would upgrade the hard disk, install the new sound card and then see how your system is going. Then if it is still not satisfactory then look into upgrading the motherboard and ram, probably to DDRAM. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Kits Posted August 30, 2002 Share Posted August 30, 2002 Thanks Will, that helped a lot Kits Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Will Posted August 30, 2002 Share Posted August 30, 2002 No problem, I am here if you need any more assistance. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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