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Old 09-17-2018, 09:17 AM   #1
tdintbl
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Default Oh boy, I need some hand holding. (PC replacement)

Time to replace my pc, as it died. I do get my money's worth.

Been attempting to do my homework by reading older threads on here about building pcs for audio work. From there I'm trying to cross reference to what's available on my local Craigslist. I'm a janitor, money is non existent.

I've determined I'm not even sure what questions I should be asking. I used to know what's up, that was early 2000s. I'm pretty lost now.

Hold my hand please people. What should I be looking for to get a decent used computer that I can configure for acceptable latency when recording and enough power for building the mix? Or at least, what questions should I be asking?

My most demanding plugs are a few of the airwindows coloration plugs, not too bad, though my ancient computers could not keep up. Not doing much in the way of samples or live vsti. Neither M-Tron nor vb3 seem to be that intensive.

I have a firewire Firepod as my interface. I know I'll need an expansion port for a firewire card. I've heard that not all expansion slots in a motherboard are created equal, but don't know much beyond that. I'm definitely lost when it comes to chipsets, multi-core processing, etc.

Thanks in advance.
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Old 09-17-2018, 09:34 AM   #2
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What's your budget?
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Old 09-17-2018, 09:56 AM   #3
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I'm no authority (no firewire experience) but as a general rule I've found the following for audio production:
Processor speed is more important than number of cores, an old duo will be fine but research it to see that it's not a cheesy one.
You will have no problem with RAM as long as its 2 mB or more
SSD's > 7200RPM > 5400 RPM, & they don't have to be huge - 240 mB is enough for several big projects, you can archive remotely
Win 7 64 bit is probably the best all-around OS given the above, and the one most likely to be found installed.
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Old 09-17-2018, 10:36 AM   #4
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What specifically died on your current system?
Literally everything from power supply to logic board to every connected internal hard drive - thus needing to completely start from scratch?

Point there is you may not need to start over. It may however, still be a good excuse to upgrade just the same - so not ruling that out!

But if just one of your accessories - like a hard drive - died, you'd simply replace it (maybe upgrading to a SSD for the system drive if you didn't already have that). On the other side, if it's your logic board (the actual computer part itself) that died, there'd be no reason to replace any accessories like drives or graphics.
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Old 09-17-2018, 12:44 PM   #5
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Budget is about $300, which locally on Craigslist goes a long way.

What died is the mobo itself. I thought the drive was going to go first, but hey-o. Not that there was anything worth salvaging. Ancient Win XP system with some terrible chipset or something that made it unusable for recording audio. I could never get my round-trip latency under 150ms!! Yes you read that right.

I want to know enough that I don't purchase another such computer, has all the right specs, but due to cost-saving corner-cutting by the manufacturer it still isn't usable in real time.

Most of the old threads I'm reading talk the fine particulars between similar looking boards and cpus and I'm getting really lost. I thought a 2.6gHz processor was fast. I'm reading about 4 amd 8 core 3.1gHz systems. How far does that realistically go these days? Has the coding bloated ti the point that kind of horsepower is actually useful?
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Old 09-17-2018, 04:24 PM   #6
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Just went through this. I bought a used Asus desktop with 16 gigs of ram, a 250g ssd, a 1T second disk, and a four core i73770 at the local FreeGeek for $285 with a six month warranty. FreeGeek is awesome, and there are more and more of them around the country (they started here in Portlad). It's a non-profit. The only catch was that it came with Linux Mint installed so I had to install windows, but I'm so impressed with how far Linux has come I'm going to install it in the old, replaced PC.

It has taken a while to config everything, but it's all working now. I like it a lot...for a computer that runs Windows, anyway. :-)
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Old 09-17-2018, 10:13 PM   #7
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Can you reuse the case and power supply?

You probably have IDE optical drives and maybe even a hard drive; you won't find those on a replacement motherboard nor would you want them.

But you should be able to get a decent mobo, CPU, 8GB RAM, and a drive for $300.

What should you get specifically? I'd go with Intel as far as CPU, and then go from there.

I'd look at these:
https://fresno.craigslist.org/sop/d/...647206164.html
https://fresno.craigslist.org/sop/d/...691068765.html
https://www.amazon.com/ASUS-DDR4-115.../dp/B017E0MA8S

Not hard recommendations, just a starting point.

Quote:
You will have no problem with RAM as long as its 2 mB or more
Even assuming what was meant was 2GB, I'd consider 4 the bare minimum and 8 as a comfortable starting point.
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Old 09-18-2018, 07:32 AM   #8
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Well OK, that does sound like you need the whole system!

That used system Tyrannocaster mentioned above doesn't sound like the worst choice. Now with Linux becoming a thing for audio that opens up possibilities with some of the hardware out there previously only usable with Windows OS. Paying the cost of that system over again to purchase a copy of Windows doesn't make sense though. (But I'm a long time OSX user looking to migrate to Linux.)

I like the Macbook Pros made between late 2008 and mid 2012, and the 2009 & 2010 Mac Pros myself. Long time Mac user but I strongly don't recommend any of their recent (watered down disposable) models.

Install a SSD for the system drive in whatever you put together.

I'd also say 4GB minimum for audio. You may never see more ram used for audio work depending on what you're doing (and even if you had more installed).

Get a large enough SSD to have work space for audio projects (after OS/apps). This is your high performance work space. Archive old projects to an HDD when finished. (Or burn disks or use externals or however you manage that.)

Good time to be a scavenger these days. You can buy more powerful equipment used than you could afford new. And paying street prices means if anything breaks it still isn't a big deal.

Last edited by serr; 09-18-2018 at 07:37 AM.
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Old 09-18-2018, 01:47 PM   #9
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Long time Mac user but I strongly don't recommend any of their recent (watered down disposable) models.

I
Absolutely. I've been using Macs for decades but I won't buy a new one - of any model. For my daily needs (outside of music production, I mean), I'm switching to linux.
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Old 09-18-2018, 04:52 PM   #10
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To say that processor speed is more important than cores is a little bit misleading I think. Both are important. If I had to choose between a 3.2 GHz dual core or a 2.8 GHz 4 core I would choose the multiple cores. Depending on what type of plug-ins you are using memory is also important.

My suggestions would be to get nothing less than a four core machine of reasonable speed and make sure your motherboard can handle at least 8 MB if not 16 MB of RAM. And make sure to get something with a 64-bit operating system installed. In this day and age you should not run any DAW 32 bit IMO.
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Old 09-20-2018, 07:18 AM   #11
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I'm getting the jist of this so far. Thanks.

My thoughts are still turning towards my last system's unbelievably bad latency. It'd also have regular (every few seconds) audio dropout playing sd videos or watching youtube. It was useless beyond doing utility work, and despite working on getting the most recent drivers and tweaking asio, I never did fix it.

How do I avoid this in the future? What do I even ask? Is it a cache thing, is it to do with the front side buss, or some other buss? IRQ conflict? Obviously still lost on this matter.

In a related vein, are all pcie slots created equal? Are all firewire pcie cards created equal, at least in terms of latency and resistance to dropout?
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Old 09-20-2018, 07:56 AM   #12
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I'm getting the jist of this so far. Thanks.

My thoughts are still turning towards my last system's unbelievably bad latency. It'd also have regular (every few seconds) audio dropout playing sd videos or watching youtube. It was useless beyond doing utility work, and despite working on getting the most recent drivers and tweaking asio, I never did fix it.

How do I avoid this in the future? What do I even ask? Is it a cache thing, is it to do with the front side buss, or some other buss? IRQ conflict? Obviously still lost on this matter.

In a related vein, are all pcie slots created equal? Are all firewire pcie cards created equal, at least in terms of latency and resistance to dropout?
If you're looking to buy a used machine off Craigslist I would suggest that you download a copy of a program called Belarc advisor (https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor), burn it to CD and take it with you when you go to look at computers. This program which is free will tell you in 60 seconds or so most everything you need to know about a computer.

For starters it will tell you whether it is 32 bit or 64-bit (don't waste your time with a 32 bit machine). Next thing to look for is the bios date. This will tell you the approximate date of manufacture, or how old the hardware is. It will also tell you the speed and type of processor, how many cores, and how much memory is installed. It will also tell you information about the drives that are installed.

Something that can be hard to determine on a used computer sometimes is how much memory the motherboard will allow you to install. In this day and age, there's really no such thing as too much memory for a DAW application. But many older motherboards were limited in how much memory that you could install notwithstanding the capabilities of the operating system. I wouldn't want anything that didn't have the capacity for at least 8 GB of RAM if not much more.

As for latency, there are a whole host of factors that affect latency. Of course processor speed is a key factor. After a point however processors of gotten so fast that even an older computers should not give you serious latency issues, especially if you are in the 64 bit theater. Latency issues are more commonly caused by the I/O card and the associated drivers for it.

The front side bus speed is important in that it can control how fast information moves through the machine. The faster the better, but again this is probably a minor issue as it relates to your particular application.

Try to get something with solid-state drives. That may be a harder find. If not, the hard disks you use will play a fairly key role. Two things to note here are that in a computer that is set up for a DAW it is optimum to have two different physical drives, one for the operating system and one for your music files. You leave the operating system drive with nothing but the OS installed on it and install all your applications and data files on the second hard drive. This allows computer to process operating system functions without having to read right from the same drive is trying to read musical data from at the same time. It also makes backup much easier. You want drives that are 7200 RPM. Some drives have a larger cache than others. Again, the larger the better but don't get too hung up on that. You may have to use the numbers that Belarc gives you and do some research on the Internet to find out what the drives actual specs are.

If you want your DAW to run smoothly then I highly recommend doing a clean install of Windows when you get your machine. This will get rid of any hidden problems your machine might have that will interfere with proper operation of your DAW. It would be nice to think that you can just buy a working machine that's been in operation for a while and run with it but in the end since you have no idea what has been installed or how the computer has been operated it's much better to install a fresh system OS. This way you can make sure the OS is on a separate drive (something that is uncommon) and that only the applications you are going to use our installed. This will prevent any driver conflicts and get rid of any viruses or other bloat that could affect your system performance. There is an abundance of information on the Internet about configuring a fresh Windows installation for audio applications.

Most importantly, getting information in and out of your computer to and from the DAW is critical. Here what you want is a good I/O card or external interface. I recommend going external if you can because you will have less noise and more flexibility. Some might argue with me but I think FireWire is better than USB only because it would typically be the only FireWire device on a system where is USB has many things it's trying to manage starting with your keyboard, mouse, printer, headphones, etc. Stay away from depending on built-in soundcards. They typically have poor A/D converters. Cards in the machine like this also are inherently noisy due to the proximity to all of the other electrical activity happening inside a computer. Most of the time your cheaper soundcards will also not have drivers and capabilities that will provide the minimum latency you're looking for.

Finally try to find a machine where you're given a legitimate copy of a Windows install disk with a key if you can. Just because computer has a working operating system doesn't mean that you will never need the disk, quite the contrary. As for an OS I'm still using Windows 7 as I think it provides the greatest degree of compatibility and for many other reasons I loathe Windows 10. I'm sure there are others here that would disagree on that point. Either way you will need one in order to do a fresh install which is of paramount importance in my opinion with older machines purchased from a third-party.

Setting up a computer to run a Daw is no trivial thing unfortunately. If u download the program I told you and post the results of the computers you are looking at here I will try to help you evaluate the potential for being a good DAW and steer you towards a reasonable purchase.

Last edited by Steviebone; 09-20-2018 at 08:07 AM.
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Old 09-20-2018, 07:56 AM   #13
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To clarify, several people have mentioned how many MB of RAM you need, but I am 100% certain they meant GB. If you are only getting 16 MB of RAM (is that even possible?), you will not even be able to run your operating system.

Regarding PCI-e slots, there are different speeds for those but generally it won't make much difference when just using it for a FireWire card. The biggest thing to look for is which FireWire card to get as some don't play nice with audio gear. I believe you want one with a Texas Instruments chipset. That was the deal back when people still made FireWire interfaces, anyway...

Regarding longevity, the biggest thing is to look at reviews. Certain brands tend to be worse than others. I've had good look with Asus and Gigabyte in terms of motherboards, if you are looking to build from parts. In terms of pre-built machines... I honestly couldn't say, I've never bought a pre-built desktop so I really have no idea who makes good PCs. But someone out there should know, so do a bit of research and see what people are saying.

Regarding specs, honestly just about any machine can run Reaper. What you will run into is how much latency you are dealing with, which is really only an issue if you use a lot of virtual instruments or your interface doesn't have direct monitoring, and how many plugins you can use at a given time. CPU will probably be the biggest factor in latency, but anything relatively recent should do fine. RAM will be the bigger factor for plugins and I would not get anything less than 8 GB. I've got 32 GB in my machine, but that is overkill for recording (useful for video editing and gaming, though). 16 GB is good enough for just about everything, though.

Regarding OS, if it's got Windows 7, that's probably fine. But you will not find that on any new machines anymore. I've got Windows 10 on three different machines and I've not had any issues with any of them.

To put things in perspective, I have recorded (but not mixed) on a Surface Pro 3, which has an insanely slow (by modern standards) i3 CPU and 4 GB of RAM; recorded and done some basic mixing on a Dell laptop with an i7 (running at 2.9 GHz) and 8 GB of RAM; and done my real mixing on a beefy i7-7700k machine with 32 GB of RAM. Of those, I sincerely doubt I could get much mixing done on the Surface Pro, but I've recorded 12 tracks at once and not had any issues which is amazing to me. The laptop could probably handle both duties, but, seeing as I've already got the beefy desktop, that is my preference.
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Old 09-20-2018, 08:05 AM   #14
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One final comment, if you can afford to I would highly recommend installing new drives on whatever computer you buy. Drives are usually the first thing to fail and what you don't want to do is go to all the trouble of setting up and configuring a machine only to have one die on you shortly thereafter.

If your music is important to you beyond just being a hobby then I would seriously consider taking the time to set up your machine with mirrored drives and then getting a good backup system in place on top of that. The subject of mirrored drives is too complicated to go into here but I would be happy to help you with that when the time comes if you like.
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Old 09-20-2018, 08:06 AM   #15
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I feel your pain on your PC going down. I experienced the exact same thing with my Dell. It just up and died on me. After doing some research, I decided to take a gamble on simply replacing the BIOS battery on the logic board. My PC came back to life immediately. Try the battery switch before dropping coin on a new/used machine.
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Old 09-20-2018, 08:08 AM   #16
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To clarify, several people have mentioned how many MB of RAM you need, but I am 100% certain they meant GB.
Oops! Thanks BigMac for catching my typo.
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Old 09-20-2018, 08:09 AM   #17
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I feel your pain on your PC going down. I experienced the exact same thing with my Dell. It just up and died on me. After doing some research, I decided to take a gamble on simply replacing the BIOS battery on the logic board. My PC came back to life immediately. Try the battery switch before dropping coin on a new/used machine.
While a dead battery will certainly wreak havoc with a computer system replacing the battery will not solve any of the other latency issues/drop outs that he was dealing with
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Old 09-20-2018, 09:20 AM   #18
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MUCH appreciated everyone! I'll be doing further homework after work and over the weekend.
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Old 09-20-2018, 09:55 AM   #19
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To clarify, several people have mentioned how many MB of RAM you need, but I am 100% certain they meant GB. If you are only getting 16 MB of RAM (is that even possible?), you will not even be able to run your operating system...
Maybe they're still using their Commodore64?

I was able to run my live sound setup on a 2.8GHz C2D machine with 6GB ram (late 2008 MBP) FWIW. A 128 sample block size gave me under 10ms round trip latency. 36 channels of live inputs. Waves SSL channel strips on most channels. 6 channels of reverbs and delays. All channels simultaneously recording to multitrack.

The CPU use WAS in the 90s on that machine doing that. My current 2011 quad core i7 machine is around 30% CPU doing that. The Mac Pro idles around 15% with the same.

I still don't see any ram use above 4GB for audio no matter what I do. But Firefox will be crashing and burning through 12GB on the laptop sometimes. I don't notice any slowdowns whatsoever. I just know something's not right when an internet browser is doing that!
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Old 09-20-2018, 01:01 PM   #20
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Hello..Question if I may in this thread. How important would a power supply figure into this equation..?..As I see people use laptops all the time with huge track/plug counts, the power supply can't be but so big in laptops..Those Desktop/SSF PCs with 250-275 watt PSU be sufficient.?
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Old 09-20-2018, 01:03 PM   #21
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Maybe they're still using their Commodore64?

I was able to run my live sound setup on a 2.8GHz C2D machine with 6GB ram (late 2008 MBP) FWIW. A 128 sample block size gave me under 10ms round trip latency. 36 channels of live inputs. Waves SSL channel strips on most channels. 6 channels of reverbs and delays. All channels simultaneously recording to multitrack.

The CPU use WAS in the 90s on that machine doing that. My current 2011 quad core i7 machine is around 30% CPU doing that. The Mac Pro idles around 15% with the same.

I still don't see any ram use above 4GB for audio no matter what I do. But Firefox will be crashing and burning through 12GB on the laptop sometimes. I don't notice any slowdowns whatsoever. I just know something's not right when an internet browser is doing that!
Nah, that's pretty normal, sadly. Browsers are RAM hogs, especially Chrome where each tab is a separate process.

RAM use in a DAW really depends on what kind of work you're going to be doing. If you are mostly mixing real instruments where you mostly use EQ, compression, and things of that nature, you'll probably be fine with 8 GB (I say 8 because most RAM comes in 4 GB sticks). If you're going to be using lots of separate IR reverb instances, virtual instruments, guitar amp sims, and complex analog modeling FX, you can hit the ceiling real quick.
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Old 09-20-2018, 01:24 PM   #22
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I still don't see any ram use above 4GB for audio no matter what I do. But Firefox will be crashing and burning through 12GB on the laptop sometimes. I don't notice any slowdowns whatsoever. I just know something's not right when an internet browser is doing that!
It's been my experience so far that RAM above 4 GB really only comes into play when loading lots of plug-ins, especially sample based plug-ins. Audio alone if I'm not mistaken is streamed straight from the desk with a little bit of buffering and does not require a lot of RAM. However every instance of a plug-in that you use let alone open and edit will occupy its own memory space. So the more RAM you have the more plug-ins you can utilize up to the point of saturating your processors throughput.
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Old 09-20-2018, 01:34 PM   #23
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Hello..Question if I may in this thread. How important would a power supply figure into this equation..?..As I see people use laptops all the time with huge track/plug counts, the power supply can't be but so big in laptops..Those Desktop/SSF PCs with 250-275 watt PSU be sufficient.?
Power supplies are the fuel that touches everything in your system. It's way better to have too much power than not enough. But it's even more important to have a QUALITY power supply. All power supplies are not created equal. The best power supplies have all kinds of thermal protection, short-circuit protection and in some cases line regulation. A power supply that puts low-voltage out by just a small percentage point will not prevent you from using your computer but it will eventually destroy it. You will likely not know that you are doing long-term damage because your computer is running. But over time components on your motherboard and hard drives begin to fail because they have been operating outside of the design specifications.

Also power supplies are generally the number one failure in consumer desktop computers today, right up there with hard drives. As people move to SSD , the power supply is going to be the main culprit for potential sudden failure. Cheap power supplies don't last and they will fail on you at the most inopportune times.

The use of SSD also lowers your power supply requirements as well as cooling needs. Next to your processor which has a thermal heatsink, unless you are running a very expensive graphics card, Your power supply will generally put out more heat than anything else. In selecting a power supply look carefully at how it moves air. Does it have one or two fans? How do they situate in your case? Noise may also be a concern depending on where your boxes are located. Adequate cooling is the most important so try and find a power supply with two fans and make sure none of them are blocked by the mounting configuration in your box.

Always remember that your power supply is touching everything in your system with potential deadly force. When a cheap supply goes out it can put bad power to everything in your computer potentially destroying all of the components. A good power supply will fail without causing any damage to the rest of the computers components.

Bottom line: don't skimp on your PS.
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Old 09-21-2018, 08:14 AM   #24
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I'm no authority (no firewire experience) but as a general rule I've found the following for audio production:
Processor speed is more important than number of cores, an old duo will be fine but research it to see that it's not a cheesy one.
You will have no problem with RAM as long as its 2 mB or more
SSD's > 7200RPM > 5400 RPM, & they don't have to be huge - 240 mB is enough for several big projects, you can archive remotely
Win 7 64 bit is probably the best all-around OS given the above, and the one most likely to be found installed.
Perhaps you mean gigabytes? 2MB ram/240 MB drive is early 1980s...
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Old 09-21-2018, 09:05 AM   #25
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Perhaps you mean gigabytes? 2MB ram/240 MB drive is early 1980s...
Hey you can run windows on 2 GB of ram but not well and certainly not enough for any real world DAW.

The first time I ever became involved in the development of a musical project was in the mid-80s. I wrote code to develop something called a universal MIDI controller which can be compared to many of the controllers that are in use today. Back then our prototypes were based on reconfigured versions of "Big Blue". It took several minutes for the computer to boot up, ran from large floppies and as I recall we were probably stuck to a 640 K limit on memory. To be a programmer back then you had to be efficient. To accomplish anything of any consequence you had to code directly in binary or use very efficent C code with a better than average compiler.

Today there is so much processing power and virtually limitless memory and disk storage that programmers are no longer required to be efficient. In fact, most programs today are coded for maintainability and speed of development and not efficient use of resources. It's a different world.
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Old 09-22-2018, 12:29 PM   #26
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Power supplies are the fuel that touches everything in your system. It's way better to have too much power than not enough. But it's even more important to have a QUALITY power supply. All power supplies are not created equal. The best power supplies have all kinds of thermal protection, short-circuit protection and in some cases line regulation. A power supply that puts low-voltage out by just a small percentage point will not prevent you from using your computer but it will eventually destroy it. You will likely not know that you are doing long-term damage because your computer is running. But over time components on your motherboard and hard drives begin to fail because they have been operating outside of the design specifications.

Also power supplies are generally the number one failure in consumer desktop computers today, right up there with hard drives. As people move to SSD , the power supply is going to be the main culprit for potential sudden failure. Cheap power supplies don't last and they will fail on you at the most inopportune times.

The use of SSD also lowers your power supply requirements as well as cooling needs. Next to your processor which has a thermal heatsink, unless you are running a very expensive graphics card, Your power supply will generally put out more heat than anything else. In selecting a power supply look carefully at how it moves air. Does it have one or two fans? How do they situate in your case? Noise may also be a concern depending on where your boxes are located. Adequate cooling is the most important so try and find a power supply with two fans and make sure none of them are blocked by the mounting configuration in your box.

Always remember that your power supply is touching everything in your system with potential deadly force. When a cheap supply goes out it can put bad power to everything in your computer potentially destroying all of the components. A good power supply will fail without causing any damage to the rest of the computers components.

Bottom line: don't skimp on your PS.
Hello..Thanks for the reply..So what about the laptop PSU..?..Are they that good that they are able to run the huge plugs and session count with the onboard supplies..?..As I stated, I see this computer: Dell 7010 SFF quad , i5 3.20 ghz , 16g ram..Would these specs be sufficient for decent audio work..? Thanks..
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Old 09-22-2018, 05:17 PM   #27
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Hello..Thanks for the reply..So what about the laptop PSU..?..Are they that good that they are able to run the huge plugs and session count with the onboard supplies..?..As I stated, I see this computer: Dell 7010 SFF quad , i5 3.20 ghz , 16g ram..Would these specs be sufficient for decent audio work..? Thanks..
A plug-in will have no effect on the load of your power supply (I guess theoretically one might argue that a bunch of plugs make your CPU work harder but the increased load on electrical power would still be negligible). Power supplies are electrical so only your hardware matters. Things that affect the size of your power supply generally apply more to desktops where people are adding things after the fact. In particular, hard drives and heavy duty graphics cards are the most common upgrades that can have an impact on the size of power supply that is required. Since this is a laptop that doesn't really apply.

I'm sure the Dell power supply is decent and matched for the unit. Of course, the one downside to a laptop for an audio application is that they are generally not expandable or up-gradable easily and they tend to get hot and be more prone to cooling problems. If I didn't need my Daw to be mobile I probably would not put it on a laptop.

But... yes that computer would be more than adequate. You didn't mention the hard drive specs for the unit?
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Old 09-23-2018, 12:38 AM   #28
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If you're using a laptop for audio, take out the battery to stop any glitching due to powersaving,charging etc..
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Old 09-23-2018, 05:41 AM   #29
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If you're using a laptop for audio, take out the battery to stop any glitching due to powersaving,charging etc..
Actually... do the opposite!

Laptops are made to run off the battery. The charger is call a "charger" for a reason. It's made to charge the battery. While you CAN run a laptop off just the charger, the battery actually can deliver more power. You will get throttling to manage the lower max power from the charger alone.
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Old 09-23-2018, 08:17 AM   #30
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Actually... do the opposite!

Laptops are made to run off the battery. The charger is call a "charger" for a reason. It's made to charge the battery. While you CAN run a laptop off just the charger, the battery actually can deliver more power. You will get throttling to manage the lower max power from the charger alone.
beg to differ... It's not a 'charger'- it's an adapter/power supply that also charges the battery if required. It will be designed to supply enough juice to run the laptop and charge the battery at the same time.

https://www.quora.com/Does-removing-...top-in-any-way

from this link:
It is absolutely alright to power the laptop by AC/DC Adapter only, you do not need to have the battery connected.

To clear the terminology, I call the AC/DC power source as an Adapter (what you call as a charger), and when I say charger, I refer to the battery charger IC inside the laptop.

The way the power chain works is, the total adapter current is divided into 2 paths - one going to your system and one going to the battery. The system load is given first priority, it takes how much ever current it needs, and the remaining goes to charge the battery. When you are running your laptop on full load, it usually eats up the whole adapter current and leaves nothing for the battery to get charged.
When you disconnect the battery, it just means that the adapter current drawn in, is that which is drawn by the system only, and none of it goes for charging a battery.

Also, if you were wondering, the battery never connects to the system load directly. It is connected through a FET transistor - which acts both as a current limiter (to set charging current) and also as a switch to completely connect or disconnect the battery from system load. The FET switch is controlled by the charger IC.

When there is no battery, the BATsense of the charger detects the absence and simply turns off the FET switch. System load only sees the power path of the charger IC, which is supplied by the Adapter.

(And just FYI - when adapter is absent and only battery is present, the Charger IC turns ON the FET switch completely, so that the system load can be supplied by the battery alone.)

It's the only way I can use my lappy without drops and glitches...
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Old 09-23-2018, 08:29 AM   #31
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Yes, you can run a laptop with only the charger but it really is designed to be run from the battery and the battery really does have more power available than the charger by itself.

Now maybe there are some laptops that are genuinely different? I'm familiar with the Macbook Pros and this is very much how they are designed.

I'm not saying I agree with this mind you! I'd call it a sign of cheapness in a way to be honest. But it is what it is.
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Old 09-23-2018, 12:38 PM   #32
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Yes, you can run a laptop with only the charger but it really is designed to be run from the battery and the battery really does have more power available than the charger by itself.

Now maybe there are some laptops that are genuinely different? I'm familiar with the Macbook Pros and this is very much how they are designed.

I'm not saying I agree with this mind you! I'd call it a sign of cheapness in a way to be honest. But it is what it is.
Bottom line, laptops are poor choices for DAWS unless portability is a requirement. They have limited expansion options all of which are generally more expensive than their desktop counterparts, do not cool well, and as a general rule of thumb have limited disk capacity as most do not have space for two drives. They are also inherently more difficult to work on whenever there is a problem.

As for the power supply I'm no expert but over the years I've seen lots of laptops fail to work properly even when plugged directly into the wall if they didn't have a good battery or charger. What made matters worse is if the laptops were even a little dated it was hard to get an exact replacement, not to mention expensive.

Most laptops are designed to run from battery by default because they are intended as a portable device. However, I did own one laptop that I ran straight from the wall without incident for many years long after the battery itself was toast. I would imagine that it depends upon the particular laptop design but any design that would not allow it to run properly without a charger or battery would be negligent in my opinion. That said I'm sure there are a lot of companies that would choose manufacturing cost over what makes sense. I suspect that the laptops we had problems with in that regard were designed for cost-effective manufacture and not end user flexibility in this area. So at the end of the day it probably depends on the particular laptop.
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Old 09-24-2018, 12:33 PM   #33
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A plug-in will have no effect on the load of your power supply (I guess theoretically one might argue that a bunch of plugs make your CPU work harder but the increased load on electrical power would still be negligible). Power supplies are electrical so only your hardware matters. Things that affect the size of your power supply generally apply more to desktops where people are adding things after the fact. In particular, hard drives and heavy duty graphics cards are the most common upgrades that can have an impact on the size of power supply that is required. Since this is a laptop that doesn't really apply.

I'm sure the Dell power supply is decent and matched for the unit. Of course, the one downside to a laptop for an audio application is that they are generally not expandable or up-gradable easily and they tend to get hot and be more prone to cooling problems. If I didn't need my Daw to be mobile I probably would not put it on a laptop.

But... yes that computer would be more than adequate. You didn't mention the hard drive specs for the unit?
Hello. Thanks again..The harddrive is a 500 gb..I think the power supply is rated at 240 watts as of stock..This is the desktop Dell 7010. So it has a little more wiggle room inside..!
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Old 09-24-2018, 02:37 PM   #34
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Hello. Thanks again..The harddrive is a 500 gb..I think the power supply is rated at 240 watts as of stock..This is the desktop Dell 7010. So it has a little more wiggle room inside..!
500 GB is fairly small by today's standards but workable. 240 watts would not likely support additional hard drives. That's about as small as they come. Can you run Belarc advisor on it and post the results? That would give us some better info.

https://www.belarc.com/products_belarc_advisor
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Old 09-24-2018, 03:21 PM   #35
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Hello. Thanks again..The harddrive is a 500 gb..I think the power supply is rated at 240 watts as of stock..This is the desktop Dell 7010. So it has a little more wiggle room inside..!
That's a very very small power supply there FYI. My Mac Pro has a 980 watt supply FWIW and I hear some people replace that with larger.

Hey did you see Crucial 1TB SSDs are going for $150?
That's as low as it's ever been. SSDs use much less power as well FYI again.
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Old 09-24-2018, 04:40 PM   #36
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That's a very very small power supply there FYI. My Mac Pro has a 980 watt supply FWIW and I hear some people replace that with larger.

Hey did you see Crucial 1TB SSDs are going for $150?
That's as low as it's ever been. SSDs use much less power as well FYI again.
I have 1000 watters in most of my DAW machines. I would use a 750 minimum. However, SSD draws very little power so if a unit uses mostly SSD and doesn't sport a high dollar gaming graphics card you can get by with a smaller supply. Still, if it were me I would replace that supply right off the bat with at least a 500.

And that's a decent price for a TB SSD. Where did you see that?

There's a Crucial on new egg for $159 and a WD on amazon for same price. Good to see the cost of SSD falling. Not the fastest but better than a spinner. I wonder if the tariffs are going to impact the price of these?
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Old 09-25-2018, 08:05 AM   #37
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Hello. Thanks again..The harddrive is a 500 gb..I think the power supply is rated at 240 watts as of stock..This is the desktop Dell 7010. So it has a little more wiggle room inside..!
Dell 7010 SFF

SFF = Small Form Factor, so you likely won't be able to slap a standard ATX power supply in there. Definitely google it before buying any upgrades.
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Old 09-25-2018, 08:39 AM   #38
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FYI I've seen Mac G5 cases going for $50 on Ebay. Solid 1/8" thick aluminum enclosure built like a tank. You'd pay quite a bit more than that for half the quality new. Check it out if you're building your own machine.
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Old 09-25-2018, 10:22 PM   #39
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Dell 7010 SFF

SFF = Small Form Factor, so you likely won't be able to slap a standard ATX power supply in there. Definitely google it before buying any upgrades.
Hello..Thanks for the reply..Actually it's the 7010 DT ( desk top) which is a little bigger than the SFF I think..
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