[Ardour-Users] Motherboard hints and tips?

[Mark Knecht]

On Jan 31, 2008 10:01 AM, Mark Greenwood <fatgerman at ntlworld.com> wrote:
> Wow! What a helpful and rapid bunch of responses, you've all helped
> clear up most of the confusion that was in my head.
>
> I'm afraid I'm still not completely convinced about the practicalities
> of 64-bit systems. I completely understand the technical arguments why
> they're a good thing, and if I was building a system entirely for audio
> I'd go straight for a 64 bit system without hesitation. But as I said,
> I'm building a compromise system which has to do everything, and do it
> without great hassle. From reading the Mandriva forums I'm not going to
> be able to get things like Flash player and the like to work without
> using a mixture of 32-bit and 64-bit apps, and that just sounds to me
> like a whole load of hassle I can do without.

The performance is not noticibly higher for 64-bit when using stuff
like Ardour. It's not until you start doing really memory intensive
stuff that the 64-bit stuff really shines.

I don't want to start any distro flame wars but it is relatively easy
to run both 32-bit and 64-bit using Gentoo.  You can make either one
bootable and run the other in a chroot if you choose. I don't believe
there is anything distro specific about this, nor do I believe that
they really have to be the same distro.

My real point here is that you don't *really* have to make a hard
choice. Put two installations on your hard drive and use them both.
Make a decision which one to use later. Keep your /home and /audio on
separate partitions so that everything is available to both. Be
prepared for a few issues with things like Gnome config files in your
home directory, but even that's not too bad.

As I say, if I was going to build a new machine I'd go 32-bit in a
second and possibly build a 64-bit chroot later. After 3 years I see
no purpose in running 64-bit for recording audio and it gets in the
way of too much web-based media.

Cheers,
Mark