I've been looking into buying a 6 core or similar machine with a minimum of 3.0 ghz processor and have been mulling over the AMD vs INTEL / Dual Xeon vs i7... as NOVICE at purchasing hardware can you advise me what I should take into consideration when building a Digital Audio Workstation for multitrack recording via an external firewire sound card ?
You will probably be able to do just fine with a single socket machine at 6 cores and that clock speed. I don't think DAWs are particularly core-scalable unless you are running a ridiculous number of VSTs and channels. Instead, invest in a quality audio interface (to keep latency down and noise low) and solid state disks to make loading sets and samples as fast as possible.
Veeery nice workstation. Question: what do you think about running videogames on this machine with Windows? It mounts an nVidia Quadro so it shouldn't create any problem, doesn't it?
If you want to run video games, it will do fine. The Xeon CPU is very fast. Unless you have tons of money to spare, get the cheapest Quadro card they have and then buy an aftermarket gaming card or two and put them in yourself. That will keep you in the competitive price range of gaming systems. The expensive Quadro cards are quite powerful but priced very high as well.
@LordHawake The Quadro cards are not especially suited to gaming. Most of the optimizations in the Quadro line are in the drivers and for OpenGL. You'll see significantly better performance on a proper gaming card that is far cheaper.
@LordHawake The Quadro cards are not especially suited to gaming. Most of the optimizations in the Quadro line are in the drivers and for OpenGL. You'll see significantly better performance on a proper gaming card that is far cheaper. The Xeon processors are also not really optimized for gaming, you won't see a dramatic improvement over the i7 consumer processors and again they are a lot more expensive.
I was told my a tech guy that SUN Workstations were like, for massive computing, lots of users, hard work. Stuff like that. Is SUN really that heavy duty?
Back in the late '80s/early '90s having a Sun meant you had a real network computer with a network operating system (UNIX). These machines had larger memory, faster CPUs, nice video cards, high resolution monitors, fast disks.
These days workstations use x86 chips so they aren't a lot different from a high end PC. A workstation is just a word used to describe a computer optimized for speed and stability whereas a gaming PC might be optimized for speed and price or purely speed.
great clip .. keep it up thanks
georginaeichenlaub 3 months ago
A nice system, but if you don't intend on running it with Solaris there are better options available for x64 systems (Dell Precision for example).
cnoyes72 8 months ago
Just curious, is it "Made in China" like everything else these days?
ireylo 11 months ago
Thanks for posting
I've been looking into buying a 6 core or similar machine with a minimum of 3.0 ghz processor and have been mulling over the AMD vs INTEL / Dual Xeon vs i7... as NOVICE at purchasing hardware can you advise me what I should take into consideration when building a Digital Audio Workstation for multitrack recording via an external firewire sound card ?
FlamingCuntLips 1 year ago
@FlamingCuntLips
You will probably be able to do just fine with a single socket machine at 6 cores and that clock speed. I don't think DAWs are particularly core-scalable unless you are running a ridiculous number of VSTs and channels. Instead, invest in a quality audio interface (to keep latency down and noise low) and solid state disks to make loading sets and samples as fast as possible.
kev009 1 year ago
Veeery nice workstation. Question: what do you think about running videogames on this machine with Windows? It mounts an nVidia Quadro so it shouldn't create any problem, doesn't it?
LordHawake 1 year ago
@LordHawake
If you want to run video games, it will do fine. The Xeon CPU is very fast. Unless you have tons of money to spare, get the cheapest Quadro card they have and then buy an aftermarket gaming card or two and put them in yourself. That will keep you in the competitive price range of gaming systems. The expensive Quadro cards are quite powerful but priced very high as well.
kev009 1 year ago
@kev009 Thank you for answer. Wow, with such a machine you can do almost everything! :-P
LordHawake 1 year ago
@LordHawake The Quadro cards are not especially suited to gaming. Most of the optimizations in the Quadro line are in the drivers and for OpenGL. You'll see significantly better performance on a proper gaming card that is far cheaper.
gh02t 1 year ago
@LordHawake The Quadro cards are not especially suited to gaming. Most of the optimizations in the Quadro line are in the drivers and for OpenGL. You'll see significantly better performance on a proper gaming card that is far cheaper. The Xeon processors are also not really optimized for gaming, you won't see a dramatic improvement over the i7 consumer processors and again they are a lot more expensive.
gh02t 1 year ago
@gh02t Thank you for answer. Mine was just curiosity. :P
LordHawake 1 year ago
Wow, Sun does not make cases as well as they used too..
Kevitivity 2 years ago
I was told my a tech guy that SUN Workstations were like, for massive computing, lots of users, hard work. Stuff like that. Is SUN really that heavy duty?
GameCubeFan99 2 years ago
@GameCubeFan99
Back in the late '80s/early '90s having a Sun meant you had a real network computer with a network operating system (UNIX). These machines had larger memory, faster CPUs, nice video cards, high resolution monitors, fast disks.
These days workstations use x86 chips so they aren't a lot different from a high end PC. A workstation is just a word used to describe a computer optimized for speed and stability whereas a gaming PC might be optimized for speed and price or purely speed.
kev009 2 years ago
Thank you for that info :)
GameCubeFan99 1 year ago
RIP Sun :'(. Hopefully Oracle is a good steward of this legendary company.
kev009 2 years ago
LOL you have an IBM sticker above the monitor.
Considering they're competitors, that's irony.
Both make great products though.
Dms12444 2 years ago
HAHA i got this workstation, it rocks :)
dpostuk 2 years ago
Best review ever! I want this desktop so badly.
zhaozhou1 2 years ago