Avid Pro Audio Community - View Single Post - Best Core 2 Series Desktops-Results and Specs

wakebrdr549 · #**503** 12-18-2007, 07:14 AM

Quote:

Let me know what you think about the Video Card, I believe your going to need to pick up a Digi approved FW card. The P5K should be using the VIA 6308 FW chip and there have been problems reported with that particular FW chip. Some of the newer (large capacity) HDD are going to a variable speed HDD controllers to save energy. While I'm not familiar with the particular WD drive you mentioned its something to keep in mind when speccing a drive for PT. Other than that things look good. My old P4 was getting around 39 Dverbs I think you will be pleased with the Quad.

Thanks for your comments Sunburst... What issues should I be on the lookout for with the FW? How will I know if its not operating correctly? As for the hard drive, what problems would the variable speed cause? I see in the specs that the WD drive (which I plan to use for the audio drive) has the intelliseek variable speed functionality. I found a demo on WD's site http://www.wdc.com/en/flash/index.asp?family=intelliseek which makes it seem like a useful function. Have you heard of it causing problems withh PT? If so I will find another drive without it. I dont see any mention of variable speed with the Seagate drive, so I am assuming that it is not.

VIA 6308... from what I understand it just doesn't play nice with PT and throws out error codes that bring the show to a halt. Using a DIGI approved FW card like the SIIG listed on the Specs Page should solve any issues. If you not using a 002, 002R, 003 ,003R than the FireWire incompatibility is not a problem.

Variable Speed drives. It will be interesting to see how it works. I don't know for a fact it won't work. I was surmising since PT doesn't like certain chipsets, USB drives, Slow drives, Fragmented drives ETC that it may very well object to having to wait to access or write to a file while waiting for the disk to spool up to 7200 RPM. I was just trying to give you a heads up on a potential problem. It may be perfectly fine too.

We won't know till YOU try

MR Western Digital intelliseek hard drive BETA tester man

I will glady detail my results when I get this thing built. Thanks again for your help.