emusonacid!

Any issues with software such as Cubase or others in using dual cores-processors.?
WHat would the best be for Audio in the $200+ range? AMD- Intel ?
Mboard to go along with? Asus ?
Sturoc

It's nice to see so much activity on this forum however I dont think (although I hope I'm going to be wrong) that you will get much response on this forum about your question.

I've been lurking around the excellent Sound on Sound PC forum for quite a while now.

http://www.soundonsound.com/forum/postl ... oard=PCMus

There's a sticky at the top that forum where people have been listing dual core setups. In contrast it's worth taking a look at the thread that talks about using Celeron laptops just to see what people can get by on.

I'm going to resist the dual core route for the moment, mainly because all new motherboards are using PCIe. There seems to be issues with some pcie chipsets and some audio software. I'm going to wait until everyone else has been my guinea pig that's before I take the plunge

Yeah , I hear ya ill,
Actually had cked out the SOS forum and was pretty informative and i did notice when shopping around that the dual core MB are w/pci ex which i think i should stay away from as well.
Got an email from Steinberg saying AMD has good low latency but Intel is pretty stable, that for 24 trks max-24 bit/96khz a P4 3.4g would work w/ sata raid drives. as long as i don't run alot of plug ins, which i don't plan doing anyway.
I am in a malestrom of indecision for the cpu mb setup.
any encouragement ??
Stu

It's definitely a tricky time at the mo, especially as some pcie chipsets are problematic and others aren't. As I said before, I'm going hang about a bit and wait and see what happens.

If you're looking for track count withought many plugins then a dual core isn't going to help you that much. Apparently Martin Walker from Sound on Sound has squeezed 76 24-bit/96kHz tracks (before dropouts occurred) on Seagate Barracuda SATA drive. I'm pretty sure he didn't use dual core for that - if you have a sniff about you should be able to find his specs. The great thing is that since the introduction of dual core, all these older tried and tested boards have come down in price.

If you are desperate to spend some cash at the mo then I would suggest spending it on quality stuff that could be shoved onto a dual core at a later date. Like decent hard drives (external and internal slient with big speeds and huge caches ) and a CD DVD writer that can master properly etc.

Andrew