Pico-ITX Design

[dawman]

For years I have watched giant Mac and PC configs where guys spend thousands and
whine when their massive PLAY, VSL and Kontakt templates takes forever to load,
then due to ASIO inefficiency gag when recording multiple MIDI tracks, or playing back
MIDI tracks to hosted instruments kills the DAW.
The design below is meant for an Orchestral rack, 4 x separate machines, 1 for strings,
1 for brass, 1 for woodwinds and another for percussion.
Each has a 3.0GHz+ CPU, 16GBs of DDR3-1600, an embedded mSATA connector for a
a Micron M600 mSATA device, OS+Apps, then it's own M600 SATA III SSD in a hot swap
tray.
3 x displays each using Intel HD5000 GFX built into the CPU.
Now add this to your 1U PC and Scope XITE-1 Rack and show them how it's done
on the big jobs....
I priced this at 3400 USD for 4 x Slaves to go with your Mac/PC.
Bye-Bye big bulky inefficient towers....



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[erminardi]

Intriguing.

[dante]

Looks great - would you need the other 1U PC ?

[Immanuel]

What will you use for outputs?

[dawman]

I will use the 1U 32GB 1U I have now as the Master DAWg.
I will get 4 x ADAT Cards unless VEPro turns out to work well.
3600 USD total costs.
Then buying the PLAY Orchestreal libraries will be a couple large.
So I will work for free again, story of my life.
Sound is the juice for me, I can always be a homeless guy with a killer rig.

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[Immanuel]

How have you planned to secure syncronization? Will they be hooked up in series? It will take quite a few optical i/o ports to get it all hooked up othervice.

[dawman]

I am starting with 1 just to make sure it does what I want, if it doesn't I have another Kontakt slave.
But I won't know all of the details until I get knocked down a few times.
That's the only way I learn as so many times I took advice from folks that didn't pan out.
It's worth the risk.

[jhulk]

i thought the pico was just used for the atom processors which are not that great in performance

now a mini itx you can have a i7 they come with an spdif port so digital stereo out and you can fit larger memory

you can fit 2 mini itx in a 1 u case

the i7 would be able to use 2 libraries at the same time on different midi channels

would be a lot cheaper than $3600

[dawman]

I saw those too and wanted a dual 1U, but I am greedy and want 4 x slaves since the new mobile Haswells can easily run VSTi instruments.
Saw a guy using the old Ivy Bridge NUC that ran @ 1.3-19GHz and used 6GB RAM cache.
Worked really well, but waited for the new Haswell that will be out in a few weeks.

If not, I know I can have another Kontakt slave and stop at buying 1 Pico instead of 4.
But I am pretty sure these DAWg's will hunt.
We'll see.
I haven't made any mistakes since I built a 1U Clarksdale that was worthless years back.
Since then my gambles have paid off.

Fingers Crossed.