Thursday, March 26, 2009

New era

(FYI: One for the nerds)

For the past something years i've been making music and doing all my day-to-day tasks on laptops, first a centrino-based acer from famicom connection to verao, a short stint with a dualcore vaio upto what i'm currently using as my main pc - an atom based msi netbook.

While the msi wind is great for mobility, it lacks power and ableton has a really hard time doing much with it even with a ram upgrade, so today i've bitten the bullet and for the first time in almost a decade pieced together and ordered a brand new desktop.

CPU: Quad Q6600 2.4ghz (can stock oc to 3hgz+ i'm told..)
RAM: 4GB PC6400
HDD: x2 500GB 7200rpm
GPU: 9600GT 512mb (will eventually swap this out for a newer card or SLI it with another 9600)
MONITOR: 22" Samsung LCD

With the case/mobo/psu and a copy of xp64 sp3 (will be banging win7beta on it too) it came to just over £550 which i'm chuffed with - Not cutting edge by any standard but it's definately something that's going to make a HELL of a difference to to my productivity and how well produced my stuff sounds. And er you know, I might even be able to see what all this fuss about crysis is :p

[/nerd]

18 comments:

Anonymous said...

Woei, better order me one =D

salman said...

Looks like a sweet rig man- yeah the Q6600 is a great OCer should comfortably get to 3.0 on stock cooling. 9600GT is a good card- what I'm hoping to upgrade to soonish from my 7600GS which is pretty ghetto in terms of gaming.

I'm quite liking the windows7 beta running nice and stable for me- i know some people (on the internetz) who are actually running is as there primary OS, including gaming.

:]

Luketha said...

Im no nerd, but I understood most of it, and for the price, you cant go wrong :) incredibly good buy I say :)

Ash said...

yeah I think I got a good deal overall!

@salman - I run win7 as my primary os on my lappy and apart from the odd driver problem with weird hardware it's a dream, really fast (makes a mockery of vistasp1) even on crap hardware. God knows what it's going to be like on my q6600!

It was a tossup between getting one now and finally being able to start laying down masters for the new album - or waiting a month or so and saving for a phenomII/i7 rig, which to be honest I wouldn't get the most out of anyway.

salman said...

Ah yeah nice one its been said to be more hardware efficient and less sloppy than Vista. I reckon the Q6600 was a good choice its fast even at stock- the I7s are a bit pricey at the mo imo.

Having 4 cores will def come in handy- specially for stuff like ReWire if you use that and having a load of power hungry vsts going on.

Enough of my nerdy ramblings looking forward to hearing the new stuff.

Anonymous said...

With that graphics card, you still won't be able to enjoy Crysis all that much.

Ash said...

according to popular opinion, there's not all that much to enjoy anyway :p

Anonymous said...

haha Well I myself thought Crysis was a fun game but never played it again after beating it.

White Tar said...

I know this is always said, but you can build a rig better than that yourself for around the same price.

Still, not a bad deal. And it will definitely help your production far more.

And as for Crysis - it's wank. Crytek however have developed what looks to be an astoundingggg engine for consoles. Take a look for some footage if you haven't seen it!

Anonymous said...

Bah...
I have basically the same setup and I can run crysis and warhead with no problems at High specs....
you should be fine.

Chrish said...

You should have pushed for a terabyte HDD, I don't think it costs much more than a 500gb does if you buy it at the right place. Future proofing :P

I was following this on twitter :) (exnunsdeaddogs)

Ash said...

@ Chrish - I did get 1tb, 2 500gb hdd's!

@ White Tar - believe me I tried, pricing up everything from ocuk/ebuyer/microdirect etc it came to around £600 for an identical machine, minus the screen and bits like the wifi/tv card that I wasn't expecting with the prebuilt one I got.

Loaded up crysis on saturday, runs everything on high and averages around 40fps - shame the game's pants :p

Ableton runs like an absolute dream though, it's already making a big difference!

Oh btw if anyone has l4d add me on steam! (aeskrett)

StarCitySecrets said...

crysis is a mediocre game, the graphics are stunning though, quite impressed you managed to hit 40fps on a 9600GT.

Ableton runs amazing on my new pc too, the 22" samsung monitor, is that the 1680x1050 one with the red detail at the bottom? i have that and it makes arranging stuff in ableton so much easier with all the room

tried adding you on steam, its not finding you though :S

salman said...

Hey Ash
I can't find you on steam either- could you post your name again please.

Oh btw which manufacturer did you buy ya comp from?- most of em lock your BIOS so you can't overclock :/

Are back in yorkshire btw- would great to see you play live nearby sometime.

salman said...

edit:
here's mine-
the boiler man

Unknown said...

You're going to want a really nice sound card if you're using this desktop for editing/production. I recommend the Asus Xonar series, the D2X in particular. It might be out of your price range at the moment, but it's wonderful (I have one and everything sounds stunning, even through my mediocre desktop speakers, and simply amazing through my Sennheiser HD555's) and something to look into in the future.

Ash said...

@darkenerofskies

Absolutely, aside from monitors a soundcard is the most important aspect! I need something portable with high quality inputs, i'm probably going to go with this:

http://www.dv247.com/invt/56571/

and these:

http://www.dv247.com/invt/51948/

HenryFTFX said...

L2 Accept Ash! we've got some zombie killan' to do tbh ;)