On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 9:31 PM, Jeremy Jongepier <jeremy(a)autostatic.com>wrote;wrote: Hehe ear flow, should be air flow, right :) ha ha On Sat, Sep 4, 2010 at 9:53 PM, Mark Knecht <markknecht(a)gmail.com> wrote: You don't mention if you're comfortable buying components and building That's one of the options, to build it myself. Looks like it is going that way... My recordings are not very heavy, but I also want to use my system for other work, like packaging and working with debian live-helper and making some custom Debian live cd's. Yeah, good chance it's gonna be more... Thanks for the info. After some reading and discussion, the i3 or i5 seems to be good options indeed. After reading this: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2901/7 and considering my budget It looks like I better go for a i3 540 or something close to that, compared to a i5... Regards, \r

On 5 September 2010 21:18, rosea grammostola <rosea.grammostola(a)gmail.com>wrote;wrote: Arrandale i5-750 you get 4 cores (but no hyperthreading or GPU) instead of 2 cores with hyperthreading plus on-chip GPU. You can see the equivalent Anandtech review for Arrandale at http://www.anandtech.com/show/2832 . If you compare the benchmarks in the review you quoted, the i5-750 has a Sysmark score of 217 versus 204 for the i3-540, which is only a 6% difference. However, if you look at multiple benchmarks (see Tom's hardware comparison chart http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/charts/desktop-cpu-charts-2010/compare,2414.h… is for i5-530, not i5-540 but is still relevant)) the differences are often much greater. In particular, if you look at the Adobe Photoshop Image processing benchmark, which is the only one that I know is definitely using parallel processing on all available cores, then the 4 core processor is twice as fast (unsurprisingly). My expectation is that as time goes on more and more compute-intensive applications (such as audio and video encoding and compiling) will start to use multiple cores fully, so it makes sense to buy for the future. Another factor is memory bandwidth; assuming that some audio work is memory intensive (in particular playback using large sample banks) then I think this is important. The i5-750 has a memory bandwidth of 16.9 GB/s vs. 11.6 for the i3-530 (from the comparison chart); this is a 46% improvement. Compounding this is the fact that the onboard GPU is using main memory as video memory, so that memory bandwidth is also being shared with all the video data, which could eat up a large chunk of the capacity. So the i5 must come out way ahead on memory bandwidth available for the CPU. Thirdly, you can get cheap fanless video cards with far better performance with the onboard GPU and no uncertainty about whether they work with the real-time kernel (but ask what models are tested, I remember hearing that some of the proprietary drivers also caused problems it the RT kernel). My philosophy is to let the CPU do processing, and the video card handle video with its own separate memory that doesn't compete with the CPU; combining the two can only lead to compromises. Fritz

Hi, Processor: So it looks like I go for a intel i3 processor, with integrated gpu. Anyway, I'm a fan of Asus MBs, either Intel or AMD processors. I used MB: Does it make sense to go for an Intel motherboard when I have also a Intel processor? Then it should fit right ;) Like the Intel Desktop Board DH55HC for example? Asus is also mentioned pretty often indeed, MSI too. Which is the best, that's all I have to know ;) Power: When it comes to a power supply I was thinking about Enermax PRO82+ 385W. I heard that brand is good... Cases: There are pretty some option these days. Towers, mini-itx, htpc. I like the style of the Antec ones ( antec Solo-EU Quiet Mini Tower Case, NoPSU, for example). Smaller is more mobile and looks nicer, but what is better and more silent? Memory: Any recommended brands, type and speed? Regards, \r

On Mon, Sep 06, 2010 at 10:44:18AM -0700, Mark Knecht wrote: I'm enjoying this thread because I'm putting together an estimate for building an Ardour DAW for a friend's studio. What about the Xwindows bugs with the Intel graphics chipset? There was some horrible bug that made RT kernels lock up or Xrun (I don't remember which; both are unacceptable), and the Xorg team didn't look like they were working on it. Is it fixed? Which distros have that fix?