welcome fritz, a few comments ...

i'd rather consider to setup 2) than 1) the noticeable difference for the DAW would not be as big as for the sampling machine (altiverb instances might have to be added to the math)

there is no big difference with server boards - except you need a 64bit OS for more than 4 GB RAM and XP64 is almost the same as XP32. do not forget server RAM, especially if you want more than 16 GB will become the most expensive part of the hardware.

from what i heard and can say the Pro Fire works better on win than on mac (and i'd assume you should put each on a seperate FW-controller ...)

but why not looking after an apogee - best choice for a mac IMO regarding latency - in any case a solution which sits directly on the PCI bus instead of having again FW between (adds unwanted CPU load)

christian

Thanks for sharing your ideas.

Christian, I didn't know firewire added more CPU load, but in some way I always had a better feeling towards pci audio - now I know why! That makes the pro fire worse than RME HDSP 5628, doesn't it?

I completely agree with you in terms of apogee. That is great indeed! The only problem is with multiple PC/Mac sollutions the costs explode when you use them to stream over many adat/AES EBU channels. Also: Apogee Ensemble works on firewire, too. Apogee is just missing a costeffective way of expanding digital I/Os (or am I missing some thing here?).

The minimum configuration for 8 Track recording + 3 x Adat for VI Mix will be:

APOGEE SYMPHONY PCI EXPRESS - 789 Euro

APOGEE ROSETTA 800 (2-5 Out for monitoring + 8 In for analog In -3000 Euro

+ Premp (I never had a dedicated preamp but I guess it's nonsense to take a cheap one, if you spent so much in the other equipment??)

+ Wordclock to improve the ADAT signal (RME HDSP) - 1500 Euro 

+ 2 x RME HDSPE (Host and slave) - 1000 Euro

 Together: roughly 7000 Euro without the second daw! Whooo!!

(Has somebody got a similar setup and in addition an RME HDSP 5628 (or similar) for adat? Does it work fine?)

This price makes me thinking abut RME more carefully.

Considering the mix: Yes, I want to use altiverb. But I thought about using it on the DAW, not on the VI Machine. That is why I want so many ADAT I/Os - to be able to mix all instruments seperatley along with composing and be able to add other elements or bounce ready instruments inside Logic.

Both of you agree that option 1) is worse than 2). So what about 2) and 3)? Is server Ram more expensive than ram for a Mac pro? I have no idea about servers, so I would appreciate every comment from somebody, who already built such a system.

Fritz. 

the most expensive RAM yu can think of is the one ordered from apple, up to 8 GB RAM some motherboards allow (cheaper) unbuffered memory, but generally i'd say ~100.- EUR per GB - the more GB you need in a single machine the more expensive is certified memory and you will notice a significant step at 16 and 32 GB

christian

 Fritz had a really good question.... Has anyone successfully loaded anywhere close to 16 gigs of samples on a G5? If so, is it functional?

-AG 

i doubt there are too many users out there having 16 GB in a G5 and IMO this wouldn't make too much sense for sample streaming because you're getting already close to the limits of the machine as such with 8 GB (loaded _and_ playing) ...

however with a macPro it seems possible though you have to design your setup carefully until a native 64bit version of VI/VE will be available and then i'd assume you need to pay high attention to harddisk throughput.

christian

Ok, now that it seems like putting 16Gb into a G5 seems like a waste of money. And since I will use the vienna slave only for that purpose and mybe in the future other sample players like Gigastudio a server seems to me like the better sollution - and a little bit less expensive I think.

My idea of a future proof server would be one, where you can install 16 Gb in 4 Gb modules, wich would give me the option to upgrade at a later time to 32 Gb, wich should be enough. What I don't know is how the other hardware should be like in order to be as cost effective as possible but still enabling me to use the full power of the 16 Gigs and play many voices in fast speed at the same time.

To be more specific:

1) What about the motherboard? Herb's said his new Slave would be a supermicro. But what about Dell, or cheaper ones like pyramid? Can somebody give advice, who recently built the same thing?

2) What about the processor(s)? Herb's system was to be quad, but christian said Quads would be wasted money. I don't get that. And how many GHz /singl enough, or double?

3) What about HDs? Sata II, SCSI, SAS, Raptor ...? Raid, or not and if so, wich one? 

4) Anything else, that could be important?

I'm going to spend a lot of money and I siply don't want to spend it on a system, that turns out to give only half the power. On the other end I neither want to spend money in the slave's power that never gets used...

Fritz. 

I think that the Fritz's question could be very useful.

When I bought my first PC I followed the vendor advises and it was a nite-mare. Then  I spended a lot of time through FORUMs and my second one was very good (4 years of heavy working without a single problem). There are many good example all around about PCs working set-ups but very few news about Workstations and Servers. As they cost a lot of money more specific examples of working set-ups should be appreciate.

I PERFECTLY KNOW that 2 computers made of the same pieces could give very different behaviours and so nobody would be guilty for suggesting!!

For example, I don't understand why 2 core CPUs and 4 core CPUs with similar speed differ so little in price (maybe because they differ so little in performance, but if it is so, why they made them,? Just to text them on our shoulders??)

Another idea, would it be a good idea to buy the same processor and everything you can find in a MAC Pro and instead to build a Xeon W XP64  PC saving a lot, (some 1000 euros) for buyng more Vienna Intruments?

Sergino

fritz, it looks like many of the pyramid machines _are_ supermicro (what else), you will find supermicro systems in many OEM products ...

i personally don't use dell because they don't provide sufficient information about the used motherboards and i don't like surprises too much.

regarding 2) i mentioned 4-core CPUs (along with intel 5000 chipsets) don't add the awaited performance increase compared with 2-core CPUs, but clearly a 4-core system (2 proc x 2 cores) is more performant than a 2-core system (1 proc x 2 cores)

for sampling only 2 x 2,66 GHz XEON should be already sufficient, even with 16 or more GB RAM - how much the harddisks will turn up as bottleneck with 40 or more instances has still to be found out (chipset, drivers, configuration, harddisk model, raid modus adds to the overall performance).

SAS and SCSI (up to 15.000 rpm) is really expensive, flash not yet available with the needed capacity, so sATA II looks like the preferred choice, again raptors are more expensive than 7.200 rpm drives but add significant performance (eg. average seektime is 4,5 ms whereas normally it is about 8.5)

christian

For what it's worth, I cannot play Chrstian Kardeis' Special Edition demo on my G5 Dual 2.7 (8GB ram) without overloading the processors at the piece's most heavily orchestrated points.  Frustrating.

I am about to build a multi-cpu system to hopefully run a nice big template with lots of flexibility, but I have my doubts, as I never seem to get the jump in performance that I expect when upgrading.   Maybe the jump to MacPros with Penryn processors (or comparable PCs) will be different.  Well see what happens this month

aplanchard, this really should be irritating - the demo runs definately on much less powerful computers without problems (AFAIR actually on a 1,8 GHz iMac), i'd recommend to check your machine and/or setup ...

christian

this sounds like we have more than a bit of fun ;-) ...

SCSI host adapter in a breakout box - i wouldn't do that, because those breakout boxes have limited throughput (usually 1 PCIe 1x spreads to 5 PCI slots), i'd rather consider to use a *real* PCIe or PCI-X SCSI host adapter to stick it directly in the macPro. i have also seen a IOI adapter with SCSI + FW800 on a single expansion card.

additionally: any new penryn motherboard should be able to access SAS disks (which is the TLA for Serial Attached SCSI) which would be the more modern and performant (and internal) solution to hold sample data (and finally less expensive than a SCSI host adapter + SCSI disks + enclosures + a lot of cables)

christian

Hi aplanchard,

Yes, I also had to freeze some percussion tracks while creating this piece. I did this on my G5 Dual 2,5 (6 GB Ram) and without the frozen tracks also my machine cannot playback this piece.

The irritating thing is that an Intel iMac or an Intel macmini with 2 GB Ram plays back the demo without all the hiccups and overload messages known from the G5 :-(

best

christian 

Hi Christian, 

 Thanks for the info.  Perhaps it is not unreasonable to expect a big performance boost when I upgrade my setup.  Fingers crossed.

The reason for the SCSI is that I already own them. All my VSL samples are on a RAID with 300GB 10K SCSI drives with my current G5 setup.  Putting the SCSI adapter card in one of the PCI slots of the Mac Pro (and not the expansion chassis) is a good idea. It will be dependent upon how happy the RME MADI interfaces for Mac Pro1 are in an expansion chassis. I should look into the possibility of repurposing these drives using SAS. Perhaps you might know this.

did you mean repurpose the SCSI disks using SAS? not possible ... SCSI = 68pin parallel, SAS is the same (serial) connector as sATA, so you had to keep them in an external enclosure connected to a host adapter.

christian

Yes, having never seen a SAS card before, I now realize that that wouldn't work.

The new Mac Pro came out today & does have SAS - but at a pretty hefty Apple-type price. I might put SAS on one machine and leave the SCSI on another just because of cost.

The other issue is that I'm waiting for the PCIe expansion chassis to become a viable product. However I could just start with the single Mac Pro for the time being.

CM, do you see any VSL issue with how I'm vizualizing the loopedback playback on the Mac Pros?

yes, SAS disks are in a similar price range than formerly SCSI - they are typically used in high performance servers.

btw: the RME MADI is also available as PCI express ... and maybe you should ask someone who tried this setup, but possibly the internal routing (VE out - MADI - logic in) can be actually done in the internal RME mixer, so leaving the 64 channels (external in) free for routing audio from macPro-2 to macPro-1

look at the specs ... Three open full-length PCI Express expansion slots One PCI Express 2.0 x16 slot Two PCI Express x4 slots

looks like you could even insert 1 SCSI hostadapter + 2 x PCIe MADI (in case the brackets/wordclock modules allow)

christian

 Well, if this turns out to be the "who-builds-the-most-expensive-system" thread ... I enjoy[H]

Since I look into building a server now, I stumbled over this:

 http://www.da-x.de/PC-Audiosysteme/8-Kern-Systeme:::844_949.html

Anybody bought one of those and wants to say something about them?

One question I asked (I know - I asked to many) is still not answered for me:

I really would like to go for an apogee sympony! But right now all I need is the Analog I/Os of Rosetta - wich leaves me with only one ADAT I/O. Is there any way to add more digital I/Os to a symphony card? If not - would it be practical to add a RME card to the G5 (in additon to symphony)?

Or would you rather go for a RME madi system then? How is latency and sound with the ADI converters compared to apogee symphony? 

CM,

My understanding from the US RME rep is that it is necessary to use the hardware i/o for the loopbacks. In other words, you can not use 64 channels for software loopback and 64 channels for audio i/o simultaneously. Each software loopback track eats up a hardware track.

Also, I haven't yet been able to find via Google any 15K 300GB SAS drives on the web. Although Apple is already offering them at $800 each. Apple's SAS RAID card is $800 also and is required if you are using the SAS drives. So that would be $3200 for a 900GB RAID. A little steep I think - especially considering the cost of the Mac Pro, monitors, 16-32GB of RAM, etc. Using an UltraSCSI, three 10K drives and an enclosure would be about half that price.

For my setup, I'll need more than the two PCIe 1.0 and one remaining PCIe 2.0 slot. So an expansion chassis is unavoidable. Unless I stick with only one Mac Pro. Then I would have only one MADI card, one SCSI card and an extra FW card for the audio interface to the G5 reverb machine.