Anyone have experience using the i5's this way? How well do they perform using VSL and audio over LAN? Should I strongly consider the i7's?
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i5 vs i7 for VSL host?
I'm considering grabbing a relatively cheap HP Pavillion (based on i5 2nd gen) and using it as a slave machine.
Anyone have experience using the i5's this way? How well do they perform using VSL and audio over LAN? Should I strongly consider the i7's?
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I recently built a couple of i5 slaves and found them more than sufficient for a sample streamer using VSL and LASS off of SSD's. Detailed benchmarks here: http://www.vi-control.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=22055&highlight=slave
As Paul says, if money is no object, it's better to go for the i7. But for what I do the i5 is more than sufficient when coupled with SSD's.
In fact, I lowered the Kontakt preload buffer down to 6 kB (it was at the default 60 kB in the data given in the link) and it performs just the same. I gained another 3.7 GB of RAM after doing that. Looking forward to having that option in VI :)
For what I do, the disk is the bottleneck, not the processor. Of course, if you run a bunch of plug-ins inside VE pro (I do not) then you might need the extra processing power.
EDIT: forgot to mention - the benchmarks linked above used 2 buffers for VE Pro but I switched to 1 buffer a few weeks ago and haven't noticed a difference in performance.
rgames