Mac Pro 4-Core or 8-Core for Virtual Soundcheck?

[timcorder]

Trying to decide which Mac Pro to purchase for our new rig. We'll be using PT exclusively for virtual soundcheck with track counts that could realistically reach 96 - the church has another independent rig in the studio for post so this system will be primarily a record deck rather than a mix system.

With this in mind, can PT take advantage of 8-Core or is Quad-Core the tipping point on the value curve? What does the extra 4 cores give me speed-wise if the machine is already loaded up with RAM? Just spent 15 minutes searching the forums and can't find anything definitive on this kind of question.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

Tim

[Geb]

Hi Tim,

To do a virtual soundcheck you need to be able to record & playback all your tracks at the same time. The requirement there is to have enough IO bandwidth in the most reliable way possible, which really isn't much of a problem for a well built HD system these days.

Typically, recording & playback aren't CPU demanding but IO hungry operations so I'd say that you don't even really need a dual core system (!), and should focus your dollars on getting better HD throughput and increase your margins there. Also, because it's an HD system, audio processing (if you decide to use plugins in Pro Tools) is best done on the DSPs, which also alleviates the need for a super fast multi-core CPU (which Pro Tools does support & take advantage of, of course). In your case, I'd focus my $ on the IO bandwidth (which includes RAM as a parameter) to get as much margins & capabilities as possible.

So I'd recommend that talk to your Pro Tools vendor and/or check the forums to find advice on how to maximize your HD bandwidth (both speed & disk space). So I'd take the 4-core rather than then 8-core (prefer CPU MHz & bus speed in this case), more RAM for big fat buffers, more HD space and more HDs.

I hope this helps!
-g

[Craig F]

if it is going to be truly just a record and playback rig in reality a G4 would work but a G4 would be old so I would configure as follows:

4 core Mac Pro
4 GB of RAM
add 3 identical SATA HDs to the 3 open HD bays (for Round Robin recording)
get a eSATA extender header to run the 2 internal SATA ports to the Vid Card's cooling space card mount for eSATA back-up/transfer to the edit/mix rig (FW would work)
PT HD 3 PCIe card set (32 I/O per card)

I hope this helps

[bmadix]

Originally Posted by timcorder

Trying to decide which Mac Pro to purchase for our new rig. We'll be using PT exclusively for virtual soundcheck with track counts that could realistically reach 96 - the church has another independent rig in the studio for post so this system will be primarily a record deck rather than a mix system.

With this in mind, can PT take advantage of 8-Core or is Quad-Core the tipping point on the value curve? What does the extra 4 cores give me speed-wise if the machine is already loaded up with RAM? Just spent 15 minutes searching the forums and can't find anything definitive on this kind of question.

Thank you in advance for any help you can provide!

Tim

My opinion is that the extra cores don't mean much here. If all you are going to do is play back through the Venue, you will never be asking the CPU to do much of anything. I think you'd find either machine would be plenty, if you've got 4G of RAM in it. It's important to remember that you will not be adding any plug-ins, automation, or anything else that might tax the CPU. All of that will be done by the Venue. Frankly, most of the DSP in a HD3 rig is wasted, but you need the IO to get your 96 tracks!

As for drives, I routinely (as in, on a daily basis) loop playback of 72 tracks from a single 1T SATA drive. Since there's never going to be any dubbing or punching in during a virtual soundcheck, latency is not an issue, and we simply wind the buffers all the way out. I'm sure you could do this with 96 tracks.

Brad