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?

It's not just data transfer. On a server, the load on the CPU is low, so the computer may have an old slow processor and is not optimized to do the processing you need. The delays you would experience would be particularly pronounced when using a soft synth or effects.

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:

Interesting stuff.

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