Best Desktops for Pro Tools LE

[mpark9000]

All I can say so far is WooHooo!! Very nice and stable (so far). My little preliminary test is the "Be There" demo which barely blips the Performance meter, even when I unmuted all the tracks and added some fairly CPU-heavy plugs. I'll take it to the wall later and get 'er to choke Should be fun!

Anybody else notice that you can't get better than a 256 buffer in the Playback Engine? The old Dell 2.4ghz P4 could get 64 ocassionally, but lived at 128. Is this operator error on my part? I'm not overclocking.

I found the biggest problem is with the generic PS. The power supply is as loud as a jet engine, so I ordered a quiet 350w PS and a Zalman CPU fan. I had this budget case already in storage, but if your building from scratch I recommend getting a quality case/PS from the start.

And finally, the formatting problems I was having may be related to an old BIOS. After flashing it and rebooting, WinXP found a new IDE controller. Who knows how long this MB was sitting on it's little gray market shelf... Ahh, eBay...

[JonMitchell]

Thanks for the info Phil, I really was debating the LCD against the CRT. It seems though that whenever I spend extended periods of time staring at an LCD monitor I get the worst headache. Could just be chance though, do most of my reading at school and all the monitors are LCD, maybe some testing is in order.
Jon

[Phil O'Keefe]

Any time Jon.

[Tubthumper]

Hey all. Am presently sourcing parts for the top-shelf Allenstein here in Oz (no easy feat). Tried the Newegg link on page 1 of the thread in order to check the specs of the ASUS K8V Deluxe mobo, only to discover that the K8V Deluxe has been superceded by the K8V SE Deluxe. Apart from the LAN controller it appears identical to the K8V Deluxe, HOWEVER I'm reluctant to shell out the dough for the SE Deluxe until I'm sure it's gonna run OK in the Allenstein environment.

Anyone using the K8V SE Deluxe in the top-shelf Allenstein? All good?

Thanks a million. Greg

[JonMitchell]

I'm about halfway through my build using the se deluxe with a 3400 amd64, when im finished ill let you know how things went. Ill reply with my parts list too, which is almost exactly identical to the current Allenstein.
Jon

[Phil O'Keefe]

Hey all. Am presently sourcing parts for the top-shelf Allenstein here in Oz (no easy feat). Tried the Newegg link on page 1 of the thread in order to check the specs of the ASUS K8V Deluxe mobo, only to discover that the K8V Deluxe has been superceded by the K8V SE Deluxe. Apart from the LAN controller it appears identical to the K8V Deluxe, HOWEVER I'm reluctant to shell out the dough for the SE Deluxe until I'm sure it's gonna run OK in the Allenstein environment.

Anyone using the K8V SE Deluxe in the top-shelf Allenstein? All good?

Thanks a million. Greg

Greg: Yes, I've got that board - no problems with it at all. You can always disable the LAN in BIOS if you don't need it.

Jon, please keep us posted and let us know if you run into any problems we can help you with.

[krofa]

Hi Allen, Hi People!

This is my first day of setting up my new 002. This is also the first day that I'm using PT ever. The first thing I did was to do the DAVEC test. I made a 32+16 on that which I guess is really good . I am quite happy although I am yet no match for the capabilities of this beast . Anyhow I am really greatful for the hardware recommendations here.

Well then here is my setup - promise it won't sound foreign...

Relevant Hardware:
MB: ASUS A7V600-X
CPU: XP 3200+ 400 MHz (32Bit)
RAM: 2*512MB TwinMOS
HDD: SAMSUNG SP0812C SATA 8MB

Settings:
Buffer Size: 1024
CPU Limit: %85
Sample R: 44.1
Bit Depth: 16

I hope I am doing things right here.

I have a question Allen;

I thought I might have made a mistake by going for XP 3200+ and not for 64 3400+. Well one can't go really wrong with either processors it seems. Maybe you don't even need the XP 3200+ compared with the performance of 2500+ but I thought I should go for the king of 32Bit computing. My fear was that once 64Bit really kicks in we are going to see freaky stuff happen with performance and software demand from hardware. Maybe then a forerunner 64Bit processor may even lag behind. Oh well, I am curious to hear what your thoughts are on these ideas...

Thanks a lot again for all the advice.

BTW I installed a great little program called BootitNG (www.terabyteunlimited.com) on my system harddrive. It's a hard disk manager and it works flawlessly. I can create as many primary partitions as I want to; format, manage and image them; hide or show them to however many OS installations there are; and it all works outside of all the OS installations with its own GUI at bootup. I recommend this to all users since we all pay so much for our beasts and then not being able to use them other than for music would suck IMHO!

Hello again to all DUC users...

[Tubthumper]

Greg: Yes, I've got that board - no problems with it at all. You can always disable the LAN in BIOS if you don't need it.

Jon, please keep us posted and let us know if you run into any problems we can help you with.

Thanks very much Phil, I really appreciate your advice. I've managed to track down most of the components for the top-shelf Allenstein here in Oz, except for the case (I'm going to go with an Antec Sonata) and the RAM. I checked out the price here for the Kingston Hyper-X you recommended last week. Crikey, it's $335 Australian for a 512 meg stick! I've decided that I'll order the Micron RAM from the Crucial website and get it imported here....it will cost me $360 Australian for 1 gig. Soon will be all systems go.......

Greg

[Tubthumper]

I'm about halfway through my build using the se deluxe with a 3400 amd64, when im finished ill let you know how things went. Ill reply with my parts list too, which is almost exactly identical to the current Allenstein.
Jon

Hey Jon!

Thanks for that. I'm interested to hear how you go. I wont be cashed-up for another week or so so it looks like you'll be done before me.

See ya, Greg.

[Mark Oblinger]

Hi allen,

Just had a local shop build me the "alternative original under $600 system" for my 002.

AMD XP2700+333fsb
ASUS A7V600
512 PC3200 DDR
Maxtor 80 gig SATA 7200 8mg cache for audio
Adaptec 4300 firewire 1394

It works fine (32 tracks + a bunch of Waves plugins per) on higher buffer settings (1024,512)
for mixing but crashes at lower buffer settings when recording eventhough the system usage monitor shows the cpu with pleny of headroom. As a test, I created a low res session (16/44.1) with just one track and tried to record a VO with the buffer set at 128 and I got huge amount of digital distortion and then I get the "adjust H/w buffer" error message. Won't even let me start at 64. I disabled the SATA drive and tried this test on my boot drive(IDE) and it still failed. I called Digi tech support and they said the SATA drives are not yet approved so they weren't too helpful.
I've had a 001 system for years and I'm pretty familiar with Protools so any thoughts on what fixes to try next to get this resolved would be welcomed.

Mark Oblinger