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• Looking into a new computer

Fragile Jar-Jar Czar Member Since: Sep 30, 2009		Nov 01, 2009 12:52 pm Not sure about the budget yet, as usual. Right now i don't REALLY have any expenses so i suppose the sky is the limit :] I'd like to keep it low though. Something like 500 would be reasonable. Anyway, i have no idea what specs i should really be concerned about, and product reliability. I'll probably end up building my own to save some cash. I've got some friends real into computers that would do it for a friday night pizza :] For the time being i'll most likely use an operating system from a friend, so xp. But i'd like to get a computer that will last several years, and could be easily upgradable (even if i have to buy a few new parts like more ram) to 7 if xp phases out to the point that it bothers me to still be using it. So i guess my question is, what specs do many of you prefer on your computer? Idrc about gaming. Just basic stuff and music production, though i'd like to get a high enough system that it won't limit my mixing. Also where do you recommend buying from? I've been looking at sites like these: pc-infinity.com geeks.com newegg.com Edit: Should I be worried about any parts (such as power supply) weirding up my system? As my other recent post said, my laptop is "glitching" the sound even with the latency all the way up. And there's a super annoying buzz.
Bleak ... and don't call me Shirley! Moderator Since: Aug 26, 2004		Nov 01, 2009 10:19 pm You could save a bundle by using something like this. ubuntustudio.org/ In terms of hardware i'd focus mainly on the CPU and RAM. If you are only running say 1 or 2 hard drives, DVD, Basic Video card and your sound card then a cheap power supply would do (say 500w) Don't go with on board graphics though. It's better to buy a cheap graphics card. I've seen an onboard card chew up mixes becuase of the time it takes to render images.
Fragile Jar-Jar Czar Member Since: Sep 30, 2009		Nov 01, 2009 11:06 pm Ya i've got the os all planned out :] thanks though. How exactly do you know how powerful of a power supply you should get? or is it just sorta guess work? And thanks for the tip on the graphics! So spec wise, I was thinking AMD processor. Anyone have reason to suggest intel? How important are quad cores as opposed to dual cores? And the Ghz, like whats more important between the two? And for my purposes, 2 or 4 gigs of ram? Would i want the extra?
Noize2u Czar of Midi Administrator Since: Apr 04, 2002		Nov 02, 2009 06:57 pm These days if your going to run a couple hard drives or more I do highly suggest getting a 500 watt PSU if you can. My main studio box runs a 600 watt quiet power fanless with 89 drives running on it. And that is plenty. SO a 450 or 500 watt would do for most needs.
zekthedeadcow Eat Spam before it eats YOU!!! Member Since: May 11, 2002		Nov 02, 2009 07:18 pm yeah the power supply is starting to make a difference to me... I bought a cheap referb dualcore HP Pavilion for about $300 and run Ubuntustudio AMD64 on it... but it only has a 250W PSU and no IDE capability which annoys the crap out of me.
Fragile Jar-Jar Czar Member Since: Sep 30, 2009		Nov 02, 2009 07:23 pm Gotcha. Thanks noise. Its only what, 15 bucks more haha, id rather be safe than powerless, though i never really expected power supply to be such a big deal. thanks :] I'm fairly solid on my choices for pretty much every part of the pc, i want 4 mb ram, a few cheap graphics cards to select from, and other little accessories. But i'm really unsure on the processor. I just cant decide whats better. say, a 2.3 ghz quad core. or a 3.0ghz dual core. About the same price range.
J-bot Czar of Employment Challenged Member Since: Dec 04, 2007		Nov 02, 2009 07:27 pm Edit: I meant to post this much earlier, but I tripped a circuit breaker when a bulb blew on one of our lamps. >_< I'm surprised good ol' firefox cached the stuff I already had typed up though ^^ I'm not sure if that's a good thing or a bad thing at this point. :-/ Assuming desktop compy here, but: I've used AMD processors for years without issue. Intels are fine as well. I haven't used the others, but Newegg is a great site, and I've ordered a number of items from them without incident. On processors, I remember there were a few threads in the past that showed how dual-core processors were actually faster/more efficient than quad-core processors. I don't know if the tables have turned yet or not though. Anyway, in my humble opinion, I'd stick with dual-cores for now since if a program isn't optimized to use multiple cores, then the single core it's stuck on will generally be faster than a single core on a quad-core processor. On the intel side, it's looking like the Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 or the E8500 is getting great reviews. On the AMD Side, it's either the Athlon 64 X2 5200 Brisbane, or the Phenom II X2 550. The Athlon 64 X2 is a bit slower though at 2.7Ghz total. Both intels and the phenom are at the 3Ghz range (or about 1.5Ghz per core) The quad-cores aren't -that- much faster overall as they are also roughly at the 3Ghz range, but that's all split up between the 4 cores. The more ram the better, though for the (windows)OS to utilize all 4 GB, you'll need to go 64bit (OS And Processor). If you go 2 or 3 GB (which is fine in my setup) you can stick with the 32bit OS and processor. I'm not 100% sure what the linux 32bit limit is, whether it's 3 or 4, but there are 64bit linux distributions as well. just an FYI. It's probably a non-issue though since dual-core processors are 64bit, and have no trouble running 32bit operating systems/software. Anyhoo, as far as wattage needed for the power supply, that depends completely on what kinda hardware you've got in the box. For example, if you're running 2 disk drives, DVD +r/w, super-spiffy grafx card, and all the bells and whistles, and the fans needed to keep all that stuff cool, then you're gonna want a beefy power supply, nothing less than 500 watts. 600W minimum for the latest and greatest. With a more bare-bones setup you can probably get away with a 350 watt or 400 watt power supply. My own computer here is running: AMD Duron Applebred (~1.8Ghz) 2GB PC 3200 DDR RAM, An older 80GB hard disk, and an even older 40GB hard disk, an ancient CD R/W, a newer DVD burner with lightscribe, an older ATI 9600 (AGP video card), a firewire card which my Audiofire4 connects to, and my midi controller running off the USB along with the mouse. Now, that said, I'm running on a 350 watt antec power supply. But I rebuilt this thing back in 2004, and the tech in it is about the same age if not older. It gets by fine, but I do think I'm close to, or at the limit of what that power supply can handle. Honestly I'd be better off with 400W, but I didn't have this much crap in it when I built it lol. Anyway, my system is good and solid/stable (for the greater part at least, except for the occasional user error)
Fragile Jar-Jar Czar Member Since: Sep 30, 2009		Nov 02, 2009 07:37 pm Gotta love firefox! It never stops amazing me haha. Thanks for all the info! Thats mega helpful. In either case, dual processing sounds fine to my ignorant ears, and i doubt it'd get phased out completely if 7 really takes off. And if it does, well. I can always purchase another cpu someday if i make the jump to 7. Alright, thanks a million. Back to more research on processors and price comparison!
Noize2u Czar of Midi Administrator Since: Apr 04, 2002		Nov 02, 2009 11:15 pm Ya, you won't regret having a little extra juice. I know I don't, as I've smoked more then my share of PSU's in the past running a load of drives. And yes indeed. FireFox is the Katz Azz Indeed.
Quincysan I'm probably wrong but... Member Since: Nov 11, 2007		Nov 03, 2009 03:48 pm I can vouch for the e8400, I use it. Runs like a champ. Overclocks like a mur'fuhr'.
Fragile Jar-Jar Czar Member Since: Sep 30, 2009		Nov 03, 2009 06:56 pm When burning my own material to a cd, does the quality of the CD drive affect the sound quality at all? i wouldn't imagine it would, and the descriptions don't suggest they do. But i'm still curious. That in question, do the blank cds i buy affect quality by much?
J-bot Czar of Employment Challenged Member Since: Dec 04, 2007		Nov 04, 2009 11:56 am Hmmm, that's a good question. I would think that as long as the CD itself is good, then it wouldn't matter so much how it was burned, since CDs are designed to be read by a lot of different players. As long as all the 1's and 0's are read properly, it should not be an issue. I'd say it's more an issue of having quality converters in whatever is being used to listen to the CD more than anything for getting a good sound. I'm just making an educated guess though.
Fragile Jar-Jar Czar Member Since: Sep 30, 2009		Nov 04, 2009 07:00 pm Hmm. Yeah your logic seems sound though. Just a bunch of 0s and 1s. When burning to a cd it doesn't matter if its wav or mp3 or whatever, right? just the time itself. Man that confuses me. Heck, i don't even get why my wave files are so massive and mp3s are only a few megs.
Tadpui I am not a crook's head Member Since: Mar 14, 2003		Nov 04, 2009 07:30 pm Quote: Heck, i don't even get why my wave files are so massive and mp3s are only a few megs It all has to do with compression. Not the kind we apply for dynamics processing while tracking, but data compression. The same basic idea that makes a .zip file smaller than it's non-zipped couterpart. It's all about discarding data that isn't absolutely essential for the listener to recognize the audio. The more information you discard, the smaller the file becomes, but also the less the result file resembles the original.
J-bot Czar of Employment Challenged Member Since: Dec 04, 2007		Nov 04, 2009 10:35 pm Yeah, Tadpui nailed it. Pretty much an mp3 takes a wav file, compresses it, and uses an algorithm to determine what parts of the data are considered "not important to the listener" so as you get a lower and lower bitrate, you lose a lot of the fidelity/definition, and you lose more and more of the original sound. Hence why they're called a "lossy" format. Ogg vorbis files are also lossy, but a little more efficient with the algorithm than mp3, plus Ogg vorbis is open source, so no need for dealing with the fraunhoffer institude. Many mp3 players nowadays are starting to support ogg format as well. Wav files pretty much keep the original sound and everything in it. So they are uncompressed, and all the information is there, which is why they tend to be very large files. FLAC takes the wav file and somehow compresses it, but it does it in a way so that none of the data is removed. I'm not 100% sure how FLAC works, but while smaller, they're nowhere near as small as mp3's. I'm not sure if current players are starting to support that format yet or not. Anyway, FLAC and wav files are considered to be "lossless" since none of the "unimportant" data is removed by an algorithm. Sure you can burn mp3's to disk. I know various burning software can convert mp3 into CDDA and burn it as an audio disk. Will it be as nice as burning standard wav files to CD? No, but it's not uncommon. As for my own personal ability to distinguish the differences between the original and the audio, I'm good up to about 256kbps mp3 files. Once you hit 256 or higher bitrates, I can't really tell the difference myself. But that's just me.
CptTripps Czar of Turd Polish Member Since: Jun 20, 2006		Nov 05, 2009 01:27 pm I burn MP3's to disc, but as a data disc which does no convert them to CDA. I can burn close to 10 albums for play in my truck. If you burn mp3 as an audio CD it simply converts your already lossy format so it may be played on all cd players. The sounds lost will never come back. The only reasons I export MP3 or burn them to disc are.... 1) I have an mp3 cd player in my truck and only want to swap discs every couple months. 2) I do not have the original wav file (perhaps an e-mailed track from a friend) but want it on CD. 3) For posting on the web. But yes, the norm would be to burn wav files to the disc for the best sound possible.
J-bot Czar of Employment Challenged Member Since: Dec 04, 2007		Nov 05, 2009 09:50 pm Yeah, and another problem burning mp3 to CDA for general playback, is sometimes an mp3 can get mangled by the converter and end up sounding like a big garbled mess of noise and static. At least, I know it's happened to one or two CD's I've burned where 1 or 2 of the tracks were mangled. Off track here, but: Unfortunately my current car (2001 Toyota Avalon) has the stock player, which does not support mp3 format. :( Back when I had my Honda Accord, I had changed out the factory player for a much nicer player. (I think it was a SoundStorm. brand) which supported mp3 playback) I think one of the first things I'm going to save up for (aside from saving for starting up a studio) is a new car with a decent sound system. (for the record, my car of choice for saving up is a Scion tC...which I think is basically considered a touring coupe) Back on topic: Er, anyway, so yeah, burning mp3 to disc has it's ups and downs. If you like the mass storage and not having to switch disks out very often and you have a player that can read mp3, then that's usually a good thing. If you have a standard CD Player though, you're going to want to burn the wav files to disc, especially if you ever plan on selling an album someday ;)

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