Do your research carefully. Some boards reduce the speed of the memory, if you fill all the slots. Personally if your current template is 6GB, I'd think about bumping your memory up to 12GB, to give you plenty of headroom for expansion.

DG

 all i7 and XEON nehalem processors reduce memory bus speed to 1066 if more than 1 memory module is installed per channel - so only 3 x 4 GB would run at 1333 on an i7 board holding 12 GB RAM

john, for running the special edition with some addons one sample drive should be sufficient, running the super package is not.

12 GB is always a good idea if you'r planning to arrange for full orchestra, though 6 would take you at least somewhere - example: loading every single sample from the special edition (full library) takes ~ 3.8 GB memory

christian

How much will the speed of the RAM affect performance, is it primarily just load times or will it have a large affect on polyphony?

I had planned on running the SE on one drive and Appassionata I & II, Epic Horns, Fanfare Trumpets, Trombones and Sopranos on the other.  Assuming that I don't add any more than maybe SE+ and a few other download instruments you don't think I should spread the libraries out over two drives?

 basically both - but whereas the loading times would be recogmizable i doubt you would ever reach the poliphony bringing the 1066 memory to its limits ... harddisks would start to groan far before ...

without knowing your arrangements i'd assume for SE + appassIi+II (plus a few download libs) one drive would be sufficient.

however: you should not record to this drive then ....

christian

After a fair amount of research I've come up with these preliminary specs:

i7 920

Asus P6T

2 Kingston 6GB (3x2) 1066 Triple Channel kits

2 250GB WD Caviar 7200 SATA drives

Corsair 750W PSU

Asus HD 4350 PCI Express 2.0 x16 video card

Sony Optiarc 24x SATA CD/DVD drive

Cooler Master Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW Case

Vista Home Premium 64

I know some of this is kinda overkill for the libraries I have now but I'd like a decent amount of future-proofing for when my templates and libraries expand if the price gap isn't too big.  Any more advice or warnings would be greatly appreciated.

 i'd change the second harddrive to a 750 GB model .... price difference compared to more GB isn't significant ...

750 W is indeed overkill .... 550 W would be enough even for adding a third disk later

christian

Will do, thanks again cm.

btw: try to get and install the public release candidate of Windows 7 (64bit) and purchase a license when it arrives in autumn - it is so much smoother than VISTA SP1 - drivers from VISTA SP1 work all well so far.

christian

edit: ATI has already windows 7 drivers btw

Great thread guys.

On the Windows 7 RC; If I understand this well;

- it is free to download now

- it will work fine (at this moment) when using an ATI VGA card

- and VE3 works within this new win7 environment?

Thanks!!

whereas i had to face serious problems with the initial version of VISTA (both, 32 and 64 bit) and many issues have been ironed out with SP1 (ServicePack 1) the start actually with the beta and even more with the Release Candidate was overall smooth.

also i didn't find any (somehow current) software to be not running well (even cubase 4 on W7 64bit), VI, VE, MIR, Imperial ... all run well.

christian

 Super, thanks CM!