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The RME Reference PC - Hardware recommendations
The RME Reference PC Intel Standard consists of an elegant
chassis with a sliding door, a fast Intel Pentium 4 processor, a motherboard
with DDR memory interface, 256 MB RAM, IBM hard-drive with a constant data
transfer rate higher than 20 MByte, up-to-date 24-times CD-RW burner and
a dual monitor graphics card. The Case
Excellent manufacturing quality. Stable and nice lockable
handle to remove the side panel. Internal drive cages can be removed
easily without a screw driver. The Motherboard
Gigabyte's GA-8IRXP is an outstanding, fully feature packed motherboard at best price/performance ratio. Support for the latest P4 CPUs (Northwood) isn't surprising these days. 6 PCI slots, 3 DIMM slots for up to 2GB PC2100 RAM, integrated ATA-100 IDE controller and passive chip-set cooling provide a good basis for every DAW. Furthermore the Gigabyte offers the latest Promise ATA133 RAID controller, 4 x USB 1.1, 4 x USB 2.0, 100 Mbit LAN and a blaster-compatible soundcard - directly on-board! The CPU With the Pentium 4 CPU, Intel have trapped themselves up in the beginning. Much too high a price, much too high a power consumption and not at all convincing performance (the first CPUs ran only at 1.3 GHz) made many computer manufacturer's simply ignore the P4. On top, there was hardly any P4-optimized software, and the required RAMBUS memory was just not affordable.
The best value for money at the moment is the 1.8 GHz model. The performance difference compared to PIII processors is between 50% and 150%, depending on the measurement procedure. In practice, this is not only clearly noticeable, but allows especially for CPU-demanding applications like PlugIns, for a much higher number of those. The Memory In times of intense multi-tracking and virtual samplers, 128 MByte are by far not sufficient, there should at least be 256 MByte. For a long time, the PC2100 memory for the above mentioned board was only available with the timing parameters 2.5-3-3 (often written as 2533). In the meantime, 2.0-3-3 (2033) is available everywhere, but still far from being the optimum. First samples of 2.0-2-2 (2022) have been tested and should be available soon. The 2022 speeds the computer up by 4% to 10% in comparison to 2033, depending on the used benchmark, and thus provides another significant performance improvement. The Hard Disk Modern hard drives have become so unbelievable fast, even cheaper models are sufficient for the majority of multitrack recordings. Nevertheless we still recommend a top model: The IC35L040 Deskstar 60GXP from IBM with ATA100 interface, average data transfer rate 23,2 MByte per second (c't 12/2001). This hard disk raises only an eye-brow when performing 96kHz/24bit multitrack recordings. Further specs: 40 GByte, 7200 RPM, 2 MByte cache, average current consumption and thus no critical temperature reaction. Very quiet. SCSI? Never... The CD Writer
The Teac CD-W524E comes with 2 MB internal memory and Burn-Proof*. Besides 24x write CD-R, 10x write CD-RW and 40x read CD-ROM it also grabs audio with bit-accuracy and up to 30x. In contrast to some similar drives of other brands, it contains a UDMA2 interface and thus provides full compatibility with hard-drives working on the same IDE channel. Besides, it operates in whispers. The writer comes bundled with the latest Nero 5.5, a powerful, professional writer software, which excited us already after the first minutes of usage. *Even when the internal cache runs empty (Buffer
Underrun) and Windows freezes for minutes the writer will continue with
highest precision at the exact sector where it stopped. Thus this device
can guarantee to finish the CD-ROM writing and to produce a valid CD, no
matter what you do with your PC while in the writing process. A must have
for professionals. The Graphics Card
Please note: Although we have set up and tested everything
ourselves, we can still make mistakes. We would like to clarify that all
information included in this Tech Info is both our subjective opinion and
subject to permanent change. This Tech Info is not to be understood as a
do-it-yourself instruction, any request on this behalf can not be responded
to and will be deleted immediately. Retail source All RME Reference PCs are available completely assembled and pre-installed. Tillmann Computer Systeme in Hannover are assembling the systems strictly according to our instructions and test them prior to shipment. Even the drivers for all RME cards and DIGICheck are preinstalled. Note that RME digital cards are only available through authorized dealers, thus not included in these computer systems. Prices - Standard, parts as described above, incl. optical mouse,
keyboard and Windows XP Home: 1699 Euro incl. VAT
Copyright © Matthias Carstens. |
Copyright © 2002 RME. All rights reserved.
RME is a registered trademark. |
This
server case from Chieftec is available in several appealing colors, and
turned out to be the DAW solution:
Operated
with inexpensive SDRAM, the P4 suffers from big performance losses - one
of the reasons why this CPU has been avoided for such a long time. This
is changing with the newest Intel chip-set i845D, because using DDR RAM
yields much higher performance at moderate costs. At the same time, the
Intel chip-set provides highest compatibility and best performance for the
PCI bus and the hard-drives.
This
has changed. The latest CPUs with 512 kB cache (Northwood) are made in 0.13µ
technology, reach considerably higher clock rates, provide incredible performance,
even need less current as earlier models, and have become considerably cheaper
as well. The chip-sets are fully developed, the memory fast and inexpensive
when using DDR-RAM. And meanwhile many software packages are P4-optimized.
