Want To Build a Good Audio PC

Simple questions rarely get simple answers around here, sorry 😀.

If it will be your primary workstation, I’d go for a Core 2 Quad, or a Core i7 if you can afford it. Price/performance wise, Core i7 is actually almost as good value as the Core 2 Quad, even including the (much) more expensive motherboard.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net is an excellent site for CPU benchmarks. Divide passmark score by the price of cpu + motherboard to determine value (price per passmark-point) and pick the best value one that you can afford!

Example (using newegg.com for price reference):

Celeron E1400 is $50, score 1072
Pentium E5200 is $70, score 1612
Core 2 Quad Q8200 is $160, score 3186
Core 2 Quad Q8400 is $185, score 3343
Core 2 Extreme QX9775 is $1550, score 4887
Core i7 920 is $280, score 5458
Core i7 950 is $570, score 6735

So. Assuming we’re going with ASUS P5KPL-CM ($53, personal experience = fine board) for the Socket 775 CPUs, and MSI X58 Pro for ($185, no personal experience), we get the following Price/Performance values (excel formula for the E column: =ROUND(D1/SUM(B1:C1),1):

This tells us that the Core 2 Quad 8200 is the best value (performance per dollar), but the others aren’t far behind, except Core i7 950 which is too expensive, and qx9775 which is a lousy deal — does anyone actually buy those at that price?? (Although, I’m sure someone will — I keep teasing a friend for paying $1000 for a Core 2 Extreme dual core a couple of years ago) 🙂.

Of course, things change dramatically when we consider the whole package. So far, we only looked at motherboard and cpu, nothing else. Assuming we’ll be spending another $500 in parts for the system, like ram, case, monitor, vga card, sound card(s) etc:

Suddenly, the Core i7 920 is by far the best value. The q8200, which looked excellent before, is now quite a bit behind. Raw computer performance did not increase just because we added a monitor, sound card and all those other things!

So. It’s all about building a balanced system. Don’t spend too much money on ONE part — it will be wasted, unless you have a special need.

For example, do you need a dedicated system just to run BBP? Buy the Celeron E1400 (it’s PLENTY fast enough for BBP — in fact you can run two instances very comfortably), 512mb ram, the cheapest non-crap brand motherboard you can find, use a USB flash drive for booting so that you don’t need to buy a hard drive, etc.

On the other hand, if you’re building a workstation, make sure to include the estimated cost of other parts when making your calculation.

Have I confused you thoroughly yet? 🙂

Best,
///Leif

Great information about how VALUE works in the computer market, and actually a very simple way of putting it. I made it sticky. 8)

Hey Leif, how do you make a PC boot from a flash drive? 😕

hola didac, veo q sos de valencia asi q no vas a tener problemas con el idioma, tenes el valor del tilt para la Juli@???

great, butt lief tell me, dont have this tilt value, are you shure??

Didac ,Have a msn??

Thanks

[quote author=”Modman”]Hey Leif, how do you make a PC boot from a flash drive?[/quote]

I believe there are distributions available from dubious sources online that can do it, for example TinyXP usb edition (no personal experience).

Me personally, I use Windows XP Embedded. It’s a pain in the neck and takes several hours of trial and error while learning it, but it’s nice because you can make such a nice and slim windows installation.

One really important component in XP Embedded is called EWF — Enhanced Write Filter.
It redirects all disk writes to memory, and only flushes it to the usb drive on shutdown, and only if you have told it to.

This yields SEVERAL important advantages when booting from a cheap USB flash drive (UFD):

• UFDs read fast, write slow. Performance (boot speed) skyrockets if all they have to do is read.
• UFDs don’t have wear leveling and the flash memory inside wears out if you keep writing to it. If you stop it from writing completely, this doesn’t happen.
• No need to shut down properly. Just pull the power plug, no worries. It wasn’t writing to the disk, I guarantee it!
• Virus? Deleted an important file? Cruft? Just reboot the machine, back to new.

Of course, if nothing gets maintained during reboots, how do you save settings?
The answer is two partitions. Normally you can’t put partitions on a USB flash drive, but when you’ve booted from it, you can! So, assuming you have a 2GB flash drive, start by formatting the drive as 1.5GB partition with UFDPREP (command line utility included in windows xp embedded).. When you’ve booted from it, open the logical disk manager (which you hopefully included in your XPE image) and create another partition. This partition won’t be protected by EWF, so you just save your settings to it, and they’ll stick. In the case of Breakaway you’d just run the exe from that 2nd partition.

Other than that, using UFDs themselves also has several advantages:

• PRICE. A hard drive is at least $50, a UFD is under $10.
• No moving parts. What’s there to wear out if you’re using EWF mentioned above?
• Easy to manage. Just unplug the UFD from the back of the target PC and plug it in your main PC, and you can copy files to and from it, clone to other drives etc.

I’ve spent MANY MANY hours fighting with XPE and figuring out some of its quirks, and it’s working extremely well for me now. It’s really nice to be able to boot in 31 seconds flat (turn on power to passing audio), but this result is not typical — not all PCs spend that little time in bios, it may take a while to init certain hardware etc etc.. 31 seconds flat is the fastest I have been able to do. Certain machines take almost a minute — but 55 seconds still ain’t a bad bootup time compared to what XP usually takes. For comparison, make sure you start your stopwatch at the same instant you actually press the power button.. Not at the end of the power-on self test!

Best,
///Leif

Work with booting from a $10 USB flash drive? Yeah. Computers have been able to do it for about as long as USB has been around. 🙂