PowerDAW spec advice please

[andygrim]

Hi there.

Am just speccing a new DAW to use with Cubase 5 & I want to take advantage of 12Gb of ram because I make a lot of use of Nebula vst plugin which is very memory hungry with some presets (it's impulse based).

I would probably run Cubase 32bit on the 64bit o/s for greatest compatibility with my other plugs & use Jbridge bit bridge to allow Nebula to access the full memory.

I might also set up a 32 bit dual boot in case I have any 64 bit driver problems at first...does the Windows 7 disc have both 64 & 32 bit versions if I needed to do this?

Have also selected an SSD along with 2 standard SATA drives as I assume putting my Nebula presets (impulses) on SSD will give me faster preset loading.
Does this make sense?

Mostly, I just wanted to get your thoughts on whether the below is a well balanced selection of parts & the most cost effective way for me to achieve this level of performance (this is really stretching my budget at £1761 plus delivery) & also wanted to check on availability as there seems to be some parts that have been mentioned in other posts as discontinued?

Thanks in advance for any advice (or simply confirmation that I'm heading in the right direction) you can give me.

Cheers
Andy


Case: Silverstone KL03B "Kublai Tower Series"
CPU: Intel i7 930 2.8Ghz 4.8GT s 8MB Cache
CPU Coolers: Prolima Megahalems Super 6 Heatpipe Tower Cooler (Fanless)
Memory: 6Gb (3x2GB) Corsair XMS3 PC3-10666 (1600) - CAS 9, 2 selected
NVIDIA Graphics: 512MB Palit XpertVision 9500 GT Super 800MHz GDDR2 GPU 550 MHz Shader 1350 MHz 32 Cores
Power Supply Unit: 650W Seasonic X-650 DC-DC Ultimate Performance PSU Gold 90% Effic 4x PCI-e 8xSata Cables The Best!
System Drives: 500 GB Seagate ST3500320NS Barracuda ES.2 SATA 3Gb s 7200rpm 32MB Cache 9.5 ms NCQ
Storage Hard drives: 640 GB Western Digital WD6401AALS Caviar Black SATA 3Gb s 7200rpm 32MB Cache
Hard Drive Silencers: Scythe Himuro Aluminium Hard Drive Cooler, 2 selected
Solid State Drives: 80GB Intel SSD Gen 2 (Read 250MB s Write 70MB s)
DVD Writer: LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±R 16xDVD±DL DVD+RW x8 -RWx6 12xRAM SATA Black OEM
USB 2.0 Firewire Cards: Lycom PE-107 PCI-E 2 Port FireWire 800 (1394b) and 1 Port Firewire 400 (1394a) Card
Acoustic Sound Proofing: AcoustiPack ULTIMATE Multi-Layered Material Kit
Operating system: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium 64bit - Retail
Extended Warranty: Standard 3XS System Warranty - 2 Years (1st Year Onsite 2nd Year Return to Base)

[PeteG@Scan]

Hi Andy,

To try and answer your questions.

Only the retail version of windows come with both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions.

http://www.scan.co.uk/Shop/Computer-...7-%28Retail%29

The good news is that the home premium retail is only about a tenner more than the OEM one and that should do you fine.

SSD wise whatever you put on it will get sped up as far as load times go. I'm not sure how large the impulses are having not used Nebula myself so I don't know how much impact doing what your looking at would have.

What I do know is that Nebula is one of the few clients that can be sped up using CUDA so maybe worth looking into this side of things and seeing if you can use the gfx card a co-processor to obtain the performance your looking for.

The list as it looks seems fine for what you need it for. I don't know if the's anywhere on that list I'd want or advise to cut corners myself. I'm also not sure on which parts your refering to that maybe discontinued (I've not noticed anything on there going end of life) but if you can rememeber what was what i'll look into it for you.

Pete.

[vicar]

Which motherboard are you going for?

[andygrim]

Thanks for your responses.

@ Pete -I thought you had the graphics card listed as out of stock at the moment, but I see it's available checking again.

Only the retail version of windows come with both the 32 bit and 64 bit editions

Your configurator lists only the retail version of WIn7 so don't think that affects my quote.

What I do know is that Nebula is one of the few clients that can be sped up using CUDA so maybe worth looking into this side of things and seeing if you can use the gfx card a co-processor to obtain the performance your looking for.

I hope that if I'm running 12Gb of memory accessible by Jbridge then the extra afforded by CUDA is probably not going to make that much difference & not sure I want the extra headache of configuring it!!
I definitely want to stick with a passively cooled card too...but for the minimal extra expense I'll go with the 1gb gainward card just in case I do decide to try Cuda.......I also do some occasional video work using Magic Bullet which can make use of GeForce cards during rendering so it can't do any harm to have the extra.

The Nebula impulses range from a few Mb up to 200Mb & I'm sure that the SSD won't make a huge difference but every little helps...tbh the SSD is probably the least essential component so will decide if necessary once I finalise my budget & have cash ready in the next week or so.

@ Vicar - I was going with the default mobo for the PowerDAW which is Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5, Intel X58, Sok 1366, PCI-E 2.0, DDR3 1066/1600/2000, SATA II, ATX.

Any alternatives recommendations welcome as long as Scan are happy to build with it & they have the board available.

Cheers
Grim.