[Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

Wed Dec 10 09:41:05 PST 2008

For video memory usage, the rule of thumb is to take the screen resolution and color depth.  For instance if you are running 1024x768 with 24bit color depth (3 bytes) then you would multiply them all together ( 1024 x 768 x 3 ) = 2359296 bytes or 2.3 Meg.  If you are using double buffering then you would double that amount to 4.6 meg.  Most of the video graphics memory is for storing bitmaps used in graphics intensive programs (like video games) where images need to be rendered often and as fast as possible.  Im not positive, but im pretty sure that XFree doesn't require that.  It may store your desktop background image in there, and the mouse cursor, and maybe even a few icons.  But that still wouldn't take the 1024x768x3 past 10 or 20 Meg.

--Brett

From: ardour-users-bounces at lists.ardour.org [mailto:ardour-users-bounces at lists.ardour.org] On Behalf Of Michael Bechard
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:08 AM
To: Ardor Users Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

I see, because the graphics cores use the Unified Memory Architecture. After digging around further (http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-graphics-media-accelerator-developers-guide <http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-graphics-media-accelerator-developers-guide> ), I found that for the Intel G43 chipset, the graphics core can use up to (and over?) 512mb of system memory.  I would be curious, though, how much of that system memory is used when running your regular non-3D-enabled XFree server environment.  I would guess not much at all...

Michael Bechard

________________________________

From: Michael Bechard <gothmagog at yahoo.com>
To: Brett Clark <brett.clark at zirous.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 11:07:25 AM
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

I see, because the graphics cores use the Unified Memory Architecture. After digging around further (http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/intel-graphics-media-accelerator-developers-guide), I found that for the Intel G43 chipset, the graphics core can use up to (and over?) 512mb of system memory.  I would be curious, though, how much of that system memory is used when running your regular non-3D-enabled XFree server environment.  I would guess not much at all...

Michael Bechard

________________________________

From: Brett Clark <brett.clark at zirous.com>
To: Michael Bechard <gothmagog at yahoo.com>; Ardor Users Mailing List <ardour-users at lists.ardour.org>
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 10:39:39 AM
Subject: RE: [Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

It could be because onboard graphics share memory with the system.  For instance, if you had 512 Meg system RAM and used the onboard graphics card configured to use 128 Meg then it would only let your OS access 384 Meg.  The thing is, unless you are planning on running games or a program that needs to preload a bunch of bitmaps into video memory then you really don’t need a lot.  Im currently running my redhat box with a 32Meg card and id bet that half of that is probably collecting dust doing nothing.

--Brett

From: ardour-users-bounces at lists.ardour.org [mailto:ardour-users-bounces at lists.ardour.org] On Behalf Of Michael Bechard
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 10:24 AM
To: Ardor Users Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

> Steering away from onboard graphics is important for music production unless you are going to pile on the RAM...

Could you explain this a bit more? Where did you hear this?

Michael Bechard

________________________________

From: "sonofzev at iinet.net.au" <sonofzev at iinet.net.au>
To: ardour-users at lists.ardour.org; Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at ntlworld.com>
Sent: Wednesday, December 10, 2008 12:10:55 AM
Subject: Re: [Ardour-Users] building a new machine for Ardour

I don't think any boards are immune from the slot usage issues.... 

unfortunately the good old PCI slot is in decline .. but there isn't much by way of PCI-e soundcards at the high end part of the market (except for MOTU which has all but declared war on the linux user, so I don't think that is any option... ).... and firewire support is very limited ....... so I guess looking for PCI slots is important... 

Steering away from onboard graphics is important for music production unless you are going to pile on the RAM... If the cash is available I'm starting to think that the SSD disks would be the best option... .for both speed and silence.. and from what I have read they scale very well in RAID configurations... but that is getting seriously expensive for the moment.... and would require some additional storage space (1TB USB drive as external storage that can be unplugged while working on music to reduce background noise....)........

as for CPU as Geoff said .. Ardour is very economical on gentoo.. the rest if up to plugins.. how many you want to use and which ones... I'm still not sure about the quad core vs less core argument.. 

As Paul recently pointed out on the forum as audio processes are mostly linear (not parallel) I don't think it shouldn't make much difference how many cores you have...... when running Gentoo more cores is definitely nice (all that compiling) ..... I would wait a couple of months and see how the core i7 pans out for linux and audio performance... original Nehalem write ups said you could disable cores for gaming to increase clock speed (I imagine via the BIOS)... which could work well for audio until everyone starts writing for multi-core ... 

maybe AMD have something new in the pipeline too.. but the triple core phenoms look like extremely good value... 

On Wed Dec 10 6:05 , Mark Greenwood sent:

I second the vote for Gigabyte boards as being reliable and linux-freindly. I bought one about a year ago after posting a very similar poll on this list! However mine has one slight isue which apparently is a common flaw - it would randomly and falsely think it had detected me inserting a CD into the IDE CD-ROM drive. Switching to a SATA unit and disabling the IDE controller solved this.

As others have said, think very carefully about the number and type of adapter cards you will want to fit. My board has a PCI-E 16x slot for the graphics card, and I duly bought a huge NVidia card with a great heantsink on it - only to find that this then obscures the slots either side because they're so close together. I would always assume now that if a board has a mixture of PCI-E and PCI slots, that you will not be able to fill them all. 

So, Gigabyte gets my vote as reliable and fast, but not for being particulalry cleverly designed. I hear great things about Tyan boards all the time. 

One thing to be really aware of is to steer well clear of anything with VIA chipsets on it. There's even a statement somewhere on the Ardour website saying this, and I can say from experience that if you have any VIA stuff anywhere on your motherboard then you are not going to achieve low latency however hard you try.

Mark

On Tuesday 09 December 2008 10:45:30 allan k wrote:
> Another one I'd like to throw out there.. as I'll be updating according
> to my lease plan in about 6 months.. at this stage does anyone know if
> it is better to go with a faster clocked dual core (or maybe triple AMD)
> or a quad core system?? 
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 10:44 +0900, sonofzev at iinet.net.au wrote:
> > agreed .. good ardour performance does seem to depend on RAM.... 
> > with your proposed setup this should not be an issue unless you are
> > running a large amount of plugins........ 
> > WIth regards to the drive setup i would recommend separate partitions
> > for system and home directories and a separate disk for recording
> > to)....... 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > On Tue Dec 9 10:09 , Paul Winkler sent:
> > 
> > On Mon, Dec 08, 2008 at 10:39:29PM +0000, david headon wrote:
> > > should i be using three drives (one for system, one for
> > swap, and
> > > one for storage)?
> > 
> > disclaimer: I'm not a "hardware guy". But I don't see how a
> > dedicated
> > swap drive would make any sense unless your usage patterns
> > were such
> > that you regularly need truly massive amounts of swap, so huge
> > that
> > it's impractical to just buy enough RAM instead.
> > 
> > -- 
> > 
> > Paul Winkler
> > http://www.slinkp.com
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ardour-Users mailing list
> > ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
> > http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org
> > )
> > 
> > _______________________________________________
> > Ardour-Users mailing list
> > ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
> > http://lists.ardour.org/listinfo.cgi/ardour-users-ardour.org
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Ardour-Users mailing list
> ardour-users at lists.ardour.org
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> 

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