how much cpu and ram do you really need

[kensuguro]

I was looking through custom pc specs to see if I could spec out a fancy i7 desktop. I look at the numbers, like 1066Mhz fsb vs 1300Mhz, etc.. ok, theoretically you get more bandwidth... but with a cpu that's faster than any core 2 quad (that's in turn faster than any core 2 duo, obviously) I was thinking, heck, how much cpu can you theoretically use, doing audio?

Theoretically, going 196khz and 32bit will add lots of overhead. I'm okay with 44.1 16bit since most of my stuff isn't written to sound fancy and hi-fi anyway. But for argument's sake, if you went 196 and 32bit... would that even make a medium range core 2 quad sweat? I have a core2duo 1.5ghz notebook, and running stuff in 44.1 16bit hasn't even made the thing budge.. Maybe I should try 196 32bit just to see the impact. I wonder if bit crushing sounds better at 196 32bit, lol.

With ram it's more understandable since sample libs are getting bigger by the minute, and less disk streaming is always a good thing. For me, personally, it's only my piano lib that streams so it's not that big of a deal. I doubt I'll ever use over 2gb ram.. but let's say windows keeps bloating itself, and ends up using, say, 5gb of ram. With an added padding.. 10gb max?

I'm just wondering, all this stuff really makes a difference for video encoding and 3d rendering... but for audio, there seems to be a theoretical limit as to how many tracks you'd use (realistically), and how much effects you'd apply to them. At least for me.. I'm on the minimal side when it comes to effects, so maybe it's just me.

I'm just not sure if a hyper juiced up machine at this point is necessary to make a decent DAW. Which is a cool thing, of course, since the money can be spent having dinner and meeting people, etc. Which seems to bring upon a bigger and better impact on my music these days.

It also allows musicians to budget more money on controllers. Which obviously is a neglected market. It'll be nice to see some higher quality / budget controllers.

[braincell]

You will use as much capacity as you have. I would go with the best one you can afford since you won't have to replace it as quickly. The biggest pain for me is rebuilding the system after years of adding software and configuring it the way you want it.

[valis]

I do agree with briancell, that in the long run developers will manage to consume any spare horsepower that becomes available in modern computing.

However I think we began to really 'get serious' with computer based audio during the end of the P3 era (and with the emergence of the initial Athlons). During the few years that followed (P4 & Athlon XP systems) audio software seemed to evolve by leaps & bounds, with the loosening of computing constraints that restricted audio synthesis & deeper processing before that.

Now with apps & plugins that could absolutely demolish systems from 3-4 years ago, there's horsepower to spare with even current generation systems (quadcore 45nm 3ghz machines). Tack on DSP systems (like ours), 'freezing' things in your sequencer, and a workflow that's been honed by having to use systems that didn't have unlimited performance, and I don't think you NEED to build a "God Box" to be productive. The option is there if you want it, or spend those saved dollars on taking your significant other out for some fun (and other such examples that you stated Ken).

CPU:

If you're thinking of an i7 system, I'd wait until this coming fall when everything has iterated at least once. The initial i7 boards probably won't be compatible with cpu's in 12-15 months due to voltage changes & power supply tolerances, regardless of what current press says (at least if past platforms are any indicator) and i5 will roll out bringing prices down across the board. The current i7 platform is targeted at enthusiasts. Also Intel is gunning FAST for 35nm, skipping the next generation of cores.

If you don't care too much about upgrade path and just want something reasonably priced (and need it soon due to the age of your current machine) I'd suggest a Core2 / socket 775 system. You can actually start with the Core 2 Duo @ 3ghz (E8400) if you want, but the 3ghz Core 2 Quad (Q9650) is only about double the cost now (it's dropped $250 on newegg over the last 2 months) so it's not as much of a savings as it once was.

Either way you probably won't be disappointed even with these systems, if your current system is more than a year old. The downside to getting a Core 2 Quad @ 3ghz NOW, is that there won't be much room to expand your socket 775 machine in the future.

RAM:

4GB ram is pretty much standard for any audio machine right now (post-XP), and running a 32bit OS will give 3.2 to 3.6GB of that as 'available' (depending on what the graphics card & onboard devices reserve). Even Vista32 should run relatively well with 4GB. Moving to 8GB (or the 6GB that's standard on triple-channel i7 systems) will require Vista64. Win7-64 is just around the corner and can use Vista64 drivers fine, it's really a fork of the core OS codebase from about 6-9 months past the Vista SP2 codebase anyway. MS now forks 'release' code from the main 'development' trunk in an effort to avoid the problems they had with Vista at launch...

Either way you'd have to make sure that your drivers & applications all have good Vista64 support, and you'll find quite a bit of other problems plague that world still. The upshot is that you'd be set as 64-bit support becomes mainstream (avoiding figuring this stuff out later), but I am not under the impression that this is the year that musicians move to 64bit en masse. If you do intend to use huge sample libraries (like briancell) you should consider it, otherwise you can probably wait another year or two before bothering. Note that currently it looks like Win7 will allow you to choose 32bit or 64bit at install time, current SKUs show 2 dvds sold in packaging, this may change as they've barely just decided what versions they're even going to ship. Sure would be nice to not have to deal with a new purchase or talking MS out of a crossgrade though...

Also note that 64bit will separate most installed software to 2 different locations, where 32bit software and 64bit software will have certain problems when used together due to 32bit software running in a "Windows on Windows" container where you might find other issues crop up. For instance I can't easily open many configuration files in Textpad automatically, even with UAC disabled I still have to often run Textpad & other tools as Administrator via right click and drag/drop or open files I want to edit and so forth. Much of this is OS-level integration stuff for general use that reveals how many programmers still haven't adapted to MS's current 64bit 'best practices' for applications (UAC was about forcing application developers to do just this, prompts are generated by applications that "do the wrong thing").

I do NOT recommend Xp64 for general audio use, unless you're damn sure your hardware drivers & software are all well supported. It's actually the Server2003 kernel and many things don't work as well as they should, even where drivers are released. And the OS is essentially dead in the water for future development from companies as Vista is the current focus with Win7 on the horizon.

Looking forward to the future (and your 5-10GB thoughts) I would say that past Win7 it's not certain we'll stick with the 'monolithic' OS model. Win7 itself has a stated goal of not consuming more resources than Vista already does, and I think overall future computing is going to focus less on sheer power and more & more on being smaller, less obtrusive and ESPECIALLY on efficiency & power savings. Ie, rather than buying a computer in 2 years to get double or quadrouple your current horsepower, you may find that you're shopping for something that offers moderate performance gains but fits into a much smaller, cooler running format and uses half the power draw to boot.

Virtualization is in full swing with datacenters and servers in general ("cloud computing" even spreads these resources out across more than 1 physical computer), and the hooks are there in all current 64bit desktop hardware too. OSX users are more prone to be familiar with using virtualization to access windows applications, but there are a number of workflows that use virtualization even on windows right now (web developers can access alternate OS's & IE versions via VirtualPC & VMWare images for instance). Audio software is nowhere near that right now, but as we move forward in the mainstream audio software will follow (imagine hooking up applications running in virtualized containers via some "Hypervisor" version of ALSA).

[Neutron]

Yep save some money and buy something cool which will last beyond any CPU, like scope plugs, or actual hardware

[braincell]

Nord released Vista 64 bit drivers for the modular G2. So far there is no such driver for the Scope so I disagree that hardware will always work. I also disagree that it will always be better. Investing in a computer makes more sense.

[valis]

The problem lies in the use of 'always', much like braincells constant use of transient states of 'To Be'. Implying that level of constantness should be left for the theologians and atheists in those great debate threads, music is too subjective and situational to deal with totalitarian concepts (and don't musicians often even outright resist totalitarian ideals?)

I agree with stardust too, thermal/noise/size considerations for studio use don't have to make nearly as many compromises as they once did for a DAW (and as mentioned in the bottom of my post I think this is the direction the mainstream is already headed as well, as evidenced by the popularity of netbooks & the Atom cpu's).

[braincell]

My quad tower makes less noise than my laptop. It can be quiet if you build it yourself; if not, the components will be inferior not just noisy.

Eight gigs is the sweet spot for RAM. More than that and you pay too much.

[kensuguro]

thnx for the input. I'll think twice about the i7.. it just seems to me that overall, we're not seeing the old "7 voice and I already hit cpu limit!" problem like back in the days. It's more like, "after all my mix was done with eq comp, effects, I had to do away with the convolution and revert to a plain reverb" type of compromise, even on a mid range core2duo. Perhaps the requirements are much more steep when you run 196khz? I just don't feel the "need more ghz to stay afloat" phenomenon like 5-6 years ago.

Perhaps softsynths are yet to take full advantage of the more powerful cpus. Or perhaps efficient code is just that.. efficient. Many well written high quality native effects and synths sound very good and yet use much less cpu than poorly written ones. So, that's a good thing. It's a great thing actually.

But theoretically, yeah, it's only a matter of time 'til software takes full advantage of every cpu cycle available. Is that happening as we speak tho? I personally don't see it, but although I can build complex synths and know the workings of intensive dsp algos, in practice, I'm not an avid user of complex softsynths so I haven't felt it at a personal level.

My question is, what are some softsynths that pushes the limit so far, that a shift to 64bit, and a cpu greater than core2quad range is required? I'd just like to check out a couple of these to get bearings. My guess is that a good core2duo, or even quad setup is very cost efficient for the time being. And that time is better spent pondering what more can be done with what is easily affordable. I mean, I'm not really on the verge of dieing with a p4 3ghz with 1gig ram even when I go full native. Even though I need to cut corners and make some compromises, I haven't felt that I'm completely held back from realizing a particular sound I had in mind with lack of cpu power being the sole reason.

That does go back to my initial feeling about all this, is that much more is attainable with minimal cost.. just like you can have a pretty good setup with just a macbook and logic. And that just means it's that much easier for people to start writing. That's a good thing.

[braincell]

Nobody will be writing tight code when everyone has a Quad. You might not need it in every project but when you do, you will be glad. I would like to have an entire album as one "song".

[garyb]

if nobody writes tight code, then everybody will be overspending on hardware and getting less that satisfactory results. you'll find the your new computers stop being more functional than the old ones.

it would be better to optimize the code, at this point, than to make new hardware. jmho.

[Sounddesigner]

Whether a Quad is needed or not is depended on each musicians needs/wants. Some work at high samplerates and use power-hungry plugins (like myself) and don't like to work in a compromising manner (there will always be limits but preventing too many of them is the idea for some of us) so quad is best. There are also alot of big studios that use 2/3/4 computers and or pthd because the need for power. To get a Quad depends on the Musician/Engineers workflow/prefered plugins, and how many compromises they find too irritating and wish to avoide for more enjoyment,more accomplishments,etc

I bought the Core i7 920 Nehalem Quadcore because of the hungry plugins i use and because i like to work at 96khz and my needs for power are continuosly growing. I only needed a dual core but i also wanted the computer to last many years without me having to upgrade for more power so i decided on i7. Plus good dual cores are very close to good quads in price but the quads can better give longevity, wich means you save money in the longrun. A i7 920 build is'nt much more pricier then other Quad builds but it is much more powerful. i7 920 imo is the biggest bang for the buck out here when you want alot of power for not that much money. You'll probably pay only about a $100/$150 more then other quadcore builds with i7 920 but you get a much better CPU Architecture and its power will only grow greater as time passes because it is optomised for Windows 7 and Hosts like Sonar are Getting better at utilizing multiple cores/threads. The octo core processing of i7 and On-die memory controller make it a very powerful architecture, relatively speaking. Actually i've read the specs of some peoples quad builds and the difference in price between their build and a i7 one was not even a hundred bucks but more closer to $50. And some or all of that $50 could've been negated if they would've chose cheaper graphics card/chassis, etc.

Many of the latest instrument plugins such as Omnisphere and i hear the soon to be released D-cam Synth Squad can use alot of CPU, but also older ones like Massive, Tassman 4 and many more when you start using alot of voices, high samplerates, many sustained notes overlapping, etc. When ever i hear sounds that make me smile there usually is a heavy cost for the sounds .

Effects like T-racks 3, Ozone 4, Elephant 3, Nebula 3, etc can devour large amounts of Cpu when programed a particular way, and multiple instances are used. And these are the particular tools some people prefer to work with. Pretty much everthing thats convolution carries a heavy tax from Tritone digital plugins to reverbs such as Altiverb and Wizoo. And if you start using multiple instances at high samplerates with things like true stereo impulses, well the cost can be great. Even with Core i7 i can only run about 30 of the Effect plugins i like at 96khz and 12ms buffer-size. 30 is much more then i need but for big Studios that do large Mixes and like similar plugs, that number 30 would be hugely insufficient. This is why there will be a need for DSP cards like XITE-1, Uad-2, PTHD, etc for a looongtime to come for some people. And power needs will continue to grow after every cpu/dsp card improvements. The developers of plugins and host programs will need for more power to bring desired qualities, the Operating System will continue needing more and as many engineers/Musicians grow or go in different directions in their journey they will need more.

[garyb]

True. And this will also help the CO2 budget

F*** the G****MN CO2 budget!!!!!

MORE CO2 = HAPPIER LIFE ON EARTH!!!! NO CO2= NO LIFE ON EARTH!!!!

CO2 IS THE FOUNDATION OF ALL LIFE.

[garyb]

dunno about that....

[garyb]

man's CO2 production is 3.225% of all CO2. i doubt that new computers will make much difference there. total human greenhouse gasses are about .28%(POINT TWO EIGHT) of all greenhouse gas activity. the Kyoto protocol requirtes a 30% reduction in human output. what will that do? .17% compared to .28% is nothing compared to nothing. this is a swindle and a scam.

[garyb]

so? it was MUCH higher previous to that(10-20x). the earth is actually in a very low CO2 phase atm.

there are many more factors than "greenhouse gasses" and those gasses are not the primary engines of climate. the Sun is the biggest engine. the oceans are the real energy and gas sinks.

don't try to say i'm for wasting oil, using it for primary energy need or into deforestation either....

[dawman]

The brainwashing works really good though.
My buddy uses all 0stepping CPU's and Western Digital Green HDD's and brags about the Green PSU's, etc.
He got a little pissed when I told about how my one Raptor driven i7 designed DAW will be as powerful as his G5 and 3 x PC slaves.............
So who's more Green ??
I will use less watts and pay a lower Carbon Tax.
Oh and BTW if you think our power bills are high now, just wait until the new Green energy drive of the Obama administration hits us. They left out how expensive the " Green " technology would be.
I plan on being real green with a Solar Generator too.
I am buying it so when I move to the mountains to hunt and fish during the upcoming social breakdown, I will still be playing Solaris and XITE-1 next to the campfire...........
ankyuvarymush.

[JoeKa]

Ok, it's already in the offtopic area, but aren't we going even more off topic? Anyway, I have equipped my last machine upgrade to a quad core intel c2q 6600 and only 2 gigs of ram, as it is already four times of what I had before and since I hardly put my faith in sampled instruments but much much more in midi (any one machine with 512kb ram should do fine here; i.e. amiga 500) and maybe just one or two (at most) sample fueled instruments (ok, make it one gb ram then) I have not encountered any issues so far. What is most important to me is recording and mixing, and the 2 gb with xp 32 are all I need to have a flawlessly working environment for up to recording 32 tracks ADAT (32bit/48kHz max) without a hiccup. Watching these Velociraptors at work, I'd bet on having as much as 100 tracks run, no problem. If you happen to be one of the very few people who really need more tracks, you should be payed well enough already to afford whatever machine it takes. And if you happen to run short of processing cycles on even a "slow" quad, you better reconsider the efficiency of your ways of mixing, or maybe the fitting of your software to the use of multiple cores.
Bottom line: suit your machine to your individual needs. If you rely on an extremy sample (=memory) affected wayof production, go for 64bit OS and 4+ gigs of ram; but if you are into recording and mixing, make sure you have a really fast drive and cpu rather than a lot of ram that you might never need.

[garyb]

+1

[valis]

I have 8GB ram, don't use large sample libraries, and don't use nearly 8GB in OSX when doing music. I still use my Xp32 partition for music under windows, and may use 1.5-2.5GB of the 3.4GB available due to having several applications open when doing music (Reaper+Wavelab+Ableton Live or Recycle+Bidule for instance). I use far more 'ram' when doing print or web work under Xp32 or Vista64.

For comparison: doing simpler web work I can sit in Xp32 just fine. When doing "real" work and have to deal with graphics+html (not just backend tweaking) I can consume all 8GB right now, depending on how many applications I'm using (Photoshop+Fireworks+a few SecureCRT sFTP/ssh2 tabs+Textpad+Color Schemer+several virtual machines to test various incarnations of IE under different WinOS's+Safari+Chrome+FF3+Opera). I can also consume all 8GB of ram when doing moderate 3d projects, or moderate to heavy print projects. Other than my 3d application, none of the applications I use are 64bit (even photoshop64 is a bit hobbled atm) but I usually have several open.

I would actually like to put in another 8GB of ram before Win7 & Snow Leopard are out, though I'm holding off atm because I want to swap my current 4x 2GB 667mhz fb-dimms for 4x 4GB 800mhz fb-dimms. That would enable me to either BSEL mod my current Xeons to 1600mhz fsb/3.2Ghz or just keep the ram at the slower 667mhz speed until I'm able to grab a pair of "real" 1600mhz fsb 3Ghz X5472 Xeons when the prices finally drop under $1000. Probably 3-4 months after the new Nehelem based Xeons come out current generation Harpertown Xeons will finally start to drop in price, with 9 months out putting them at 1/3 the price they're at now (Xeons always plateau in price for about 2 years until they drop like a cliff, unlike consumer cpu's which are gradually reduced with frequent drops).

And just to note, I don't even use 35% of my 8 cores when doing music in either OSX 10.5.5 or Xp32. 3d Rendering or multiple virtual machines can consume all 8 cores. Manipulating very large print jobs can consume about 40-50% of my available cpu, as can the latest games.

The *biggest* slowdown for all of these things is when a task becomes disk intensive, 3d renders especially can slow to a crawl when they exceed available physical RAM. I used to use SCSI for this and am considering SAS as my machine is starting to age & software bloat increases. Again this applies more to my non-music work (since I'm not using orchestral romplers or etc), my disk activity meter in Logic rarely hits 40% and I only use 2 of my 5 available drives for OSX (multiple partitions per drive so some drives have both ntfs & hfs+ partitions).

In short, if Ken doesn't think he needs an i7 he's probably better off saving the money or waiting another 6 months for the prices to drop/i7 line to broaden and the platform overall to mature. I on the other hand completely ignore my own advice and spec my machines out based on years or using workstations for graphics work. I don't see my $3500 hand-built Xeon rig as being very expensive compared to the SGI & HP workstations I used in television work back in the mid 90's (our workstations were ~$40,000 plus expansion and software seats for our apps, our render machines were about $80k plus licensing for the render nodes.)

I would never build a Xeon for the music that I do though, I'm sure a dual core Macbook Pro would suit that just fine.

[valis]

True. PLUS in a 32bit OS some of your ram between 3 & 4GB is 'lost' to mapped hardware (referred to as a "ram hole" or "memory hole" so you don't even get a full 4GB. This is a decision made when machines were lucky to have 1MB. Also as of Xp32 sp2 you can't use /PAE (it's actually on for DEP by default in sp3 & Vista, but remapping the ram hole & access to above 4GB was disabled due to driver conflicts with mainstream hardware).

BUT! With a supporting motherboard, there is a company called Superspeed that can enable some interesting uses of more than 4GB. You could use RAMDisk and map your pagefile and temporary directory to memory between 4-8GB...but that's not really necessary for normal music use imo (it helps me a lot with photoshop/illustrator work in Xp32).