VO-BB - 19 YEARS OLD!

[voicejones]

I'm just about to go shopping for a new PC. I promote myself as a voice studio...not a production house....and Sound Forge works great for what I do. Fan noice etc is not a consideration as the old windows 98 machine is behind a sound proof wall with long cables. Any thoughts from those who've recently upgraded hardware?
JJ

[Jeff McNeal]

Yes, buy the biggest hard drives, fastest processor and the most RAM that you can afford.

Also, stay away from those Maxtor drives that Costco sells. I had two fail on me, exactly a year after their warranties ran out -- two years in a row. After the first failure, I thought it must be a fluke and bought two more drives -- one to use as a backup. Massive crashes, data loss and extremely expensive data retrieval expenses -- twice. The second time, my backup drive was also failing. Also IBM Deskstar drives are to be avoided. They're not called Deathstar drives by techs for nothing. While you're at it, pick up a 160 gig or larger external drive and a copy of Norton Ghost and make backups of everything you don't want to lose on a regular basis. I went with Seagate Barracuda drives this time around (since that's what the pricey data retrieval techs fancy) and haven't had any problems for a year and a half of 24/7 operation (knock on wood).

Hope this helps.

[kgenus]

The most cost effective solution today is a Symmetrical Multi Processing (SMP) chipset - or - dual core. Essentially, it's like haveing two cpus in your computer. The AMD X2 4200+ and 4800+ are their low and high end offerings. If you've never used one, you're in for a treat. Products like Nuendo take full advantage of this technology and I'm sure the other audio software developers are along the same path as "Native" audio production becomes an ever increasing reality. Be sure to verify that the NForce 4 chipset works with your audio hardware. If you do not know, get the NForce 3 chipset.

Intel advertises their "hyperthreading" technology, which is an amazing technology for enhancing the speed of a computer at the desktop. Historically all of this was saved for "server" class machines, but with the advent of Linux and companies using desktops as servers, the entire landscape has changed. Unfortunately, if you are using this primarily for audio, you'll have to disable this funcationality as most DAW reduces the effectiveness of much of the audio software.

You may also want to find drives that use SATA connectors - SATA is a new hard drive standard that does uses a new thin 7-pin cable. Only one cable per device is used to connect the drive to the controller, there is no master/slave drive concept. The power connector is also different (although some SATA drives also provide an older power connectors).

Lots of RAM on motherboard and video adapter
That's a start....
_________________
Genus

[Frank F]

You just might want to add a good high quality sound card... just a thought....

Even though you "...promote myself as a voice studio...not a production house...", some consideration might be given to such things as multitracking and/or multiple inputs/outputs.

The best thing to remeber when shopping for a computer is to buy the one that gives you the most "bang" for you buck, large power supply..(550 watt if possible), lots of RAM, lots more HD space, lots of I/O's, and is within your budget.

Frank F