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clintfan · Location: USA

After much research I've completed a proposed shopping list for my new PC (thanks for your RAID and case inputs, too). Cool

Before I buy anything I'm interested in what you folks think about this setup. I've seen many of these "here's my new PC" posts before, but this is the first time I've done one.

This will be used primarily for CEP audio restoration/recording work, replacing my 4 year old P3/600. Tired of long waits, I've tried to optimize for very fast file save & copy times. It also has to do home video capture, a new thing for me. The PC is pretty rich, but there are still some cost tradeoffs in here, like it won't be as fast as SCSI. I would like it to last me another 4 years.

Sadly it will be on a network sometimes, with lots of corporate software, some of it #%&^!@ but some good stuff too, like full virus and firewall protection. This forces my O/S choice too.

I'm thinking of building it myself (first time but not too afraid Shock

with a technician background & plenty of friends who do this) using parts from: Newegg; Knowledgemicro; some disks from DigitallyUnique; and a couple other places.

So I'd like your opinion on the audio things, like...
Will this stuff play well together?
What do you think of these Plextor choices (I've never owned a Plextor before).
Is LynxOne a good fit for restoration work: clarity, highs, low noise, etc.?
What do you think of the suppliers?
Have I missed anything major?

kylen · Posted - Sun Jun 22, 2003 6:21 pm

post78 · Location: USA

SteveG · Location: United Kingdom

The trouble with researching all these things is that you are largely dependent on what the manufacturer tells you, especially with new items. I have no idea about your MOBO at all - the only thing that I do know is that in general, the Intel 845/P4 combination seems to work pretty well. But when it comes to what the rest of the board does... who really knows unless they've tried absolutely the same hardware combination as you?

The processor speed/FSB issue is getting a bit silly now - it's been clear for a while that what really slows down your throughput is the hardware, like HDDs and CD writers, etc. One thing that is worth considering is that if you are doing a lot of processor-intensive stuff that involves a lot of floating-point math, then a combination of high processor speed and fast L1 and L2 cache memory will speed this up. But how much is determined as much by the OS as anything - this is getting very hard to call.

So FX handling is still processor-dependant, yes, but with CEP the result still has to be written to a temp file... and that's the real bottleneck a lot of the time. I'd guess that if you really want to speed things up, one way to do it might be to use a sensibly-sized, blindingly fast SCSI drive just for CEP temp files. But there again, I would have thought that most RAID systems can perform this task at a similar speed now. Has anybody got any thoughts/experience of this?

As for wives... SWMBO accepts the upgrade path arguments. To the extent that she currently has the fastest machine in the house, and what does she use it for? Web browsing, email, word processing and report generation. I have an old 266Mhz Athlon-based machine lying around that would do all that just fine, but that's upgrades for you... and anyway, she's threatened to start using the digital camera, so there might be some point in it, I suppose...

But since I have constructional responsibility for all the machines in the house except the laptops, this upgrade thing has never been much of