On 2003.06.09 21:45, Peter Groves wrote:
> How fast does a system really need to be before it can handle recording
> with practically no limits? (let's say fewer than 10 tracks at a time
> such as with a delta1010)
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
