Building a new DAW need help with CPUs

the AMD is not even as powerful as the intel 760.
the 970 blows it away in a big way.
better off waiting a little and get the new Sandy Bridge 2600
which beat them both

yes you can buy the cpu now but you cant buy a board for it
they all got recalled by Intel.

need a P67 board. availability in mid to late march.

benchmarks here
http://www.adkproaudio.com/benchmarks.cfm
2nd test down
hard to read with so many blues...
@ 32 buffer

amd 1090T 80 RXC
750 104 RXC
2600 183 RXC
980x 201
OCed 2600 261 RXC
OCed 980x 270 RXC.

why is that? if on a tight budget Sandy Bridge is the only thing that makes sense.
the next closest is a 970 on an X58 platform.

I waiting for the 2600K, with luck middle April.

And the difference in price between 2600K and the 970 means more RAM, storage and maybe a quadro card.

Right now I fell like the guy in your avatar :)

Any advice in a good video card?

LOL i feel like that every day 
audio or video or both? 


I'm in the same boat...going to buy an i72600K and wait for the p67 MB's to come out in the next month or so. Looking for a good quiet (no fan) basic dual screen video card to run sonar x1 mostly with the occasional video work on small projects (transfer vhs to disk etc. no games) What would be a decent choice?
THX

I just built a DAW back in August of 2010. I too was faced with the "what do I want vs need" syndrome.

I looked around a few places to get ideas and settled on a "mid level" system.

Here's what I have determined in the time I have been in home recording. It's really cool to have the newest, fastest, shiniest, DAW on the block, but in the end, unless you really need all that power, it is a waste of money to go that route. For most people, recording at home, writing rock and roll, pop, or country songs and recording them with friends, or solo, for fun..... a decent smooth running DAW in the middle of the performance curve will be MORE than sufficient.

If on the other hand you are a professional, making a living scoring films, and working with huge symphonic projects, running lots of synths and FX in real time, producing tracks for film & TV, recording artists, and running a full time/working studio, yeah, you might NEED a high performance DAW.

I kind of bridge those 2 extremes. I work in my home studio, solo mostly, with some internet collaboration, and produce music that is being signed into major film/TV production libraries. I needed a smooth running and reliable DAW since my lappy was getting a bit stressed. So, after looking around, I settled on a custom self-build. I bought an ASUS mobo with the i5-750 chip. I run 4g of memory on XP.  Even my biggest projects, loaded with several synths and lots of audio FX all running in real time only get the CPU up to 25% or so. With lots of storage drives I plan to have this baby running for years.

I also keep it totally off line. No Internet on it at all. No updates, no upgrades. 

So unless you have the money to spend on a top of the line DAW (more power to you if you do) all you need is a middle of the curve DAW and it will likely be more DAW than you need.  It's totally up you you what you end up with in the end.

I would plan for upgrades. My system will upgrade to the i7 chip and 16g of memory with W7/64 should I decide to go that route in the future. I'm waiting for all the kinks and compatibility issues to get worked out with all the software. But since my DAW is running smooth, I'm not in a rush to make the move.

yup starting to pop up in the US... already have 30 of them on the way..
FYI i would not touch Asus with a 10' Pole..

Twigman, I think Scott is talking about reliability... there was a point where Asus boards were causing constant headaches, and had extremely high failure rates (also know from personal experience, as my computer had one of the Asus boards that failed).

It is virtually certain with a small sample size (i.e. one, two, or three users), any board could be trouble-free.  Nevertheless, when one is building computers for say 300 different users, and a major % of the boards fail, quality becomes a very clear issue.

Guitarhacker

...I too was faced with the "what do I want vs need" syndrome.

Inevitably, any activity classed as a hobby entails sinking far more money and resources into it than it actually warrants.

Wow, sorry to hear about ASUS!  They were the only Mobo's I would use in my builds...  Now that it's been a thousand years (in PC terms - about six in "real life"), I've been researching what to use.  Guess I'll cross ASUS off the list...

in all fairness they are probably better now. you cant keep having QA issues like that for too long without it getting out in the wild.

but i had that happen several times over the yrs with asus. it also tends to happen more toward end of life of the product.
and they like to use refurbed boards as new.. or send back supposedly fixed boards that are still bad :-(

we had to use them when X58 first released as all the others had serious memory issues and my fav manufacturer had issues with 6 sticks @ 1600 (1333 was ok) oddly this issue still remains on most X58. (over 2 yrs later) as does many ram issues.
at that time we only seen maybe 1or 2 out of 10.. (still too high) 
anyway my fav manufacturer fixed within a few months so problem solved.

when Sandy Bridge released and were once again testing boards.. one of my guys said if you get in asus i quit.... (support guy )
he was only 1/2 joking..

I have never had any experience with Asus.  My previous motherboards were Epox, but this company seems to have dropped out of the motherboard market.  I went with Gigabyte this time round after hearing good reports and I am not disappointed.

its seems no problem at all dude..