Hardware / Software for X2

Apologies if this has been covered. I didn't see a thread on this, although I've twice been rejected from detective school, so maybe I didn't look hard enough.

I am considering a move from Sonar 8 to X2 and realize that the hardware will have to get an upgrade. I'm currently using a small diesel unit from 1979.

What is the consensus here for operating systems?  Windows 7 64 seems to the only real option. What about hardware? I'm thinking about a server.  Servers are inherently stable and geared for data transfer, which is the primary challenge with computer music. The server also has no built-in audio which means there's nothing to interfere with your firewire or usb asio sound. 

Has anyone else gone this route with a budget server as a workstation?

I see nothing wrong with the idea of going with a server (I suppose that means XEON processors with ECC memory?), but I think that's a bit expensive and not so necessary. Interrupt latency, I think, is more important for audio work.

The system I built a year ago (see the sig) works quite well and I use a lot of very CPU intensive stuff like Reaktor and Diva. I use 48kHz sample rate and a Firewire audio box.

Most modern motherboards allow you to disable the on-board components like Sound, Video, LAN, Bluetooth, etc. That frees up a bunch of PCI interrupts which helps reduce your latency. Also, not every 'most-up-to-date' driver is the best bet. I always check new drivers for latency problems. I run with fairly old NVIDIA drivers because of this.

Here are some results I get for overall latency (dpclat):





And from LatencyMon:


Overall:






... and by driver:

General purpose computing costs have come down so low that there are lots and lots of choices now that would work.

Windows 7 x64 seems to be a fine choice for operating systems.  There are lots of folks using both Intel and AMD.  AMD gives good bang for the buck, but is a bit slower.  Both are up to the task.

I would suggest a system with 8GB of memory and a couple of SATA 6.0/gbs on a motherboard with USB 3.0 support, and a decent video card in the $50-$125 range.  

To give you and idea, here are some current hardware component costs:

AMD Phenom II x4 965 3.7ghz Black Edition CPU: $89.99  (microcenter.com offers bundles for this chip where you can also get a nice discount on a motherboard to go with it - the bundle total ranges from getting a free motherboard on up to paying about $90 more for a top end motherboard - they have about 6-8 to choose from)

If you go the Intel route, anything from an i3 on up would do nicely.  These start at around $99 for an i3 3220 3.3ghz quad-core.  Lots of motherboards to choose from.

You can get a real nice Seagate  2TB SATA 6.0/gbs 7,200rpm drive for about $99, or you could get a bevy of 60GB solid-state drives, each would run around $40

8GB of memory (2x4GB) runs around $40, or 16GB of memory (2 8GB strips) runs around $99.

Case and a decent power supply will run around $50-$75 for a pretty good one

As you can see from component prices above, it is pretty cost effective to build one.  I would recommend a single licence WIndows 7 Home Premium operating system x64.

Optical drives run no more than $20 for a DVD burner

These will give you some idea of what's out there.

Bob Bone