PC overhall coming - What performance differences can I look forward too?

Posted on Jul 27, 2011 02:47 pm
RockWood610
John
Member Since: May 06, 2007

Hey guys,

I am about to make a major PC upgrade (once Mr. UPS man drops off my new stuff later this week!) and I was wondering what performance increases I could be looking forward to with this new system setup compared to my current one! I feel like a kid on Christmas! Haha

Currently in my home studio, I am using an Alesis DM10 triggered drum kit through EZDrummer or Superior Drummer 2.0. for drum tracking, a Line 6 UX8 interface for guitars, vocals, and bass, and Sony Acid Pro 7 for my DAWS.

I also do video editing/rendering with Sony Vegas. I've been doing SD video editing for years, and now that HD is around, 30 minuet video projects take FOREVER to render down with my current system.... 8+ hours for a 30 min HD video with only 2 audio tracks, 2 video tracks, a couple plugins and a few text titles! EWWW!

On my current system, I am running Windows XP Pro (32bit), 4 gigs of dual channel ram, and an AMD Duel Core processor at I believe 2.5ghtz. (Can you see now why I want to upgrade?)

My reasons for upgrading are many. First, when using my Line 6 interface, I often use Gearbox/Pod farm to generate my guitar tones and vocal pres. I'll often record the guitar tracks 100% clean as the guitar player plays through through the pod farm/gearbox amp simulator, so later I can change or tweak the guitar sounds however I see fit using the gearbox plugin. Well, while in full sessions with bands, or even my own band, this chain of events starts to suck the life out of my pc.

Gearbox plugin, along with running EZdrummer or SD 2.0. for playing drum tracks, plus countless other plugins, leaves very little power to even track vocals. I had a recent session where as soon as I hit record to lay vocal tracks, I got the lovely slow dragging/stuttering playback that was no good to me for tracking. This would make pushing latency times higher my only option, meaning vocals where not as dead on as the other tracks.

So, I said enough was enough. I decided, it was time to upgrade! I have a power supply that is pretty much over kill at 850wats. But I got a great deal on, and I am actually running at least half of its power with all my internal drives.

I have a huge cooler master HAF-X full tower, 5 internal hard drives, and 2 optical drives.

I am upgrading my motherboard to a Gigabyte GA-880GA-UD3H that houses an AM3 AMD processor. It has good on-board HD video and audio chip-sets (plenty of power for what I'll be doing), a front side bus of 2600MHz Hyper Transport (5200 MT/s), USB 3.0 support, 6 SATA ports for 6/Gbs transfer, and It allows up to 16 gigs dual channel ram.

For ram, I am getting the full 16gigs, 4 chip-sets of 4 gigs in a Quad Channel kit.

The processor is going to be an AMD Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition Thuban running at 3.3GHz, and has 512KB L2 Cache 6MB L3 Cache.

I'm going to have a 1TB hard drive for my OS and programs. And I will have a least 4 other internal hard drives at random capacities, all running at 7200 RPM. Not sure what the cache on them all is.

I am going to be running Windows 7 64bit as my OS on this new system. I have used Windows 7 on my studio PC before with the current dual core setup,so I know all my hardware and software will run on it. My issue then was, Windows 7 was to demanding, so I had to re-downgrade to XP.

So, just wondering from those who have made major PC upgrades, what kind of performance differences am I going to see? How much can I do at once? And how many audio plugins is it going to take to make this system sweat at all? I like the thought of my new toy! Haha.

Thanks for any feedback!

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