[LAU] New Computer

[Will Godfrey]

Today I finally took delivery of a new computer for my music, to take the place
of the old one that was showing real signs of stress. The new one is custom
built by Scan (UK). It is in a 4U rackmount case and has an AMD Ryzen 5 1500X
processor, on an ASUS motherboard and with a Radeon R5230 fanless graphics card.
Audio I/O is via an M-Audio Mtrack 8, and MIDI via a Prodipe 4i/4o.

That graphics card was a significant problem, as it was difficult to get hold of
one, but it was worth the hassle.

The machine arrived quite early this morning, extremely well packaged. They had
even put bubble wrap inside for additional shock protection - with a very clear
warning on the top! Looking inside it has been very neatly assembled, no random
loose wires. I added a CDROM drive I already had, and a second SSD, both of
these robbed from the older machine. The SSD has all my working project files
on it.

I installed devuan Linix 2.0.0 rc without any issues at all - no more
inexplicable SystemD failures. I then built up the system with all my favourite
programs. This was the most time consuming part of the install.

And the performance? Stunning! The machine is totally silent. There wasn't so
much as a whisper when maxing out all 8 cores compiling the latest Rosegarden
image! One of my most complex projects had to run at 5.33mS Latency on the old
machine, and I didn't dare touch anything while it was going. On the new one I
can run it at 1.33mS, and shuffle various windows around without a single Xrun.

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.