Re: [linux-audio-user] Processor Recommendation

On 2003.06.09 21:45, Peter Groves wrote: I'm no expert, but here's my experience. I built a new machine about a year ago. Asus A7M266-D motherboard (with CMI sound), dual Athlon XP 1900, and 512 MB DDR ram. I also added a 60MB 7200 RPM HD, and an NVidia GForce2. The results are mixed... For day-to-day operations it AMAZING. Blistering fast. I bought it for scientific calculations... both proc's running 100% for hours. In that regard everything worked as expected, and FAST. Running many apps at a time is flawless, and most proc-heavy apps seem to be threaded in Linux. The bad newes are: cooling, and multimedia. The cooling requirements are INSANE. I had a big heatsinc and AMD fan on each proc. It overheated (I call that over 60oC) fast. I added a case fan, and it would run fine until I did heavy calculations. So I had to add TWO more case fans. Now I've got FIVE total fans, screaming away in my office twentyfour-seven. I think the small size case might be to blame, because removing the cover seems to help, but who wants a monster-tower on their desk? Multimedia performance has been a bit diappointing too. I'm not sure whether to blame the hardware or the software though, but it's consistenly worse performance than I expect. Even with a lowlat setup, I can't record many tracks without xruns. I'd say 4 to 6 are the max. Also, I can't capture and encode video at full size, only very small size frames. As I said, this could be due to the current state of Linux A/V software, or some setup problems on my part, but I'd expect more out of this monster, especially since I used to record several tracks of audio on my PIII-500 without problems. Non-realtime multimedia performance is amazing though... graphic rendering, transcoding, effects processing are all blazingly fast in NON-realtime. Hope that helps a bit. Austin -- Austin Acton Hon.B.Sc. Synthetic Organic Chemist, Teaching Assistant Department of Chemistry, York University, Toronto MandrakeClub Volunteer (www.mandrakeclub.com) homepage: www.groundstate.ca