[LAU] help for building new desktop pc

[october001 at gmail.com]

I've been running an maudio delta 44 internal sound card for years, moving it from one pc to the next as I upgrade.  Probably not the cheapest card out the but not the most expensive either!  Very low latencies were obtainable (without xruns) even on my earliest single CPU machines.  Running it now on a 64 bit quadcore amd I built and I've never thought about replacing it.

I've never overclocked any of my machines, even for gaming purposes.  

I experiment a lot but tend to stay around some sort of debian/ubuntu (or mint) hybrid, usually with a hand rolled rt kernel.  A yamaha 4 channel mixer and an maudio midi 4x4 has allowed me to mix hardware synths with soft in a loaded ardour setup quite effectively.

Best,

Jon

Sent from my iPhone

On Mar 10, 2012, at 7:35 AM, Renato <rennabh at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi list, I'm looking into building a new desktop, and possibly buy a new
> sound card, and I'd like some advice.
> 
> Right now I'm using an Acer Aspire laptop, with an intel core 2 Duo
> T5500 - 1.66Ghz and 2gb of ram, and a Rig Kontrol 2 USB sound card.
> 
> What I'd like to do is have one or two audio inputs, apply [possibly
> lots of] real time effects (like rakarrack and ladspa), have some 
> samplers/synths playing, maybe a loop program, and record to disk. I
> probably wouldn't be doing frequently all these things together, but
> I'd like if possible a system that could, if needed, handle it. With my
> current setup even parts of this is very difficult (especially the real
> time effects part) and gets me plenty of xruns. 
> 
> Am I correct in assuming that the source of xruns is double: from the
> soundcard chip when the jack daemon is invoked with low latency
> settings (possibly too much for said chip) and from the CPU when there
> is too much DSP going on? 
> 
> I'm asking this because, being on a budget, I'm wondering if I'd be
> better off with keeping my Rig Kontrol 2 and getting an i5 2500k CPU or
> getting a lesser CPU but a better sound card... I know it's a difficult
> question with no straight answers, just wanted to hear some opinions. 
> 
> And while we are at it, do you have any other particular suggestions
> for building a desktop with my audio needs? For example is
> overclocking ability something to search for in a CPU? Online there is
> of course an overwhelming quantity of info, but most is targeted to
> people building computers to play games.
> 
> best wishes,
> renato
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