Dana Olson wrote:
Hello,
I am wondering what I should do in order to get a bit more performance
out of my system for using JACK and friends.
I currently have two systems, and they are relatively similar. My main
system is a Dell Optiplex, can't remember the model exactly right now,
but it is:
Intel P4 2.8GHz
512MB DDR
onboard video
Creative Audigy2 ZS
The other system is:
AMD AthlonXP 2800+
512MB DDR
NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti4200 128MB
Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1
I was considering buying a 2x512MB DDR kit for the P4, and dropping
the old 512MB from there into the Athlon system.
The RAM I am thinking about is:
http://canadacomputers.com/index.php?do=ShowProduct&cmd=pd&pid=003982&cid=RAM.178
Would it be better to save up and invest in a CPU/mobo upgrade? Or
will a different sound card give me a performance boost (not sure how
it would be possible, but..)? Or maybe I should find a PCI video card
(NVIDIA or maybe there is something better?) to put into the Dell, if
onboard video causes issues? Or is RAM a pretty good upgrade at this
point?
I ask because I am new at using software (other than Audacity) for
multitrack recording, and when I get more than a couple apps up and
running, my system gets sluggish, and I can't even load the Titanic
SoundFont in Qsynth because it crashes (I presume due to lack of
memory).
Thanks in advance for any advice.
Dana
Memory and more memory would be my first upgrade on hardware like that.
Buffering into /swap is not good for audio applications. Your
motherboard/cpu combo is fairly up-to-date and should get you by for
quite some time. Second pick would be doing away with the onboard video
with seperate card (preferably nvidia) especially if you are using apps
with realtime/pseudo-realtime meters and spectrum analyzers and the like.
Best,
Jon
