Hi Hilevelt:
Lemme see what I can offer for you - since you were kind enough to invite me in the first place.
Subject: Configuring a New PC around Pulsar
From: Hilevelt
Date: 10-Jan-99
>Celeron 300a overclocked to 450: is it really worth spending the extra $30 to get a
>450-tested cpu from www.minotaur.com (also a hassle, they're always back-ordered), or
>can I pretty much trust any off-the-shelf cpu for overclocking? I'm using a fan-card II, so
>hopefully heat won't be a problem.
I have resisted the current rage to experiment with this possibility - regardless of how many "success" stories I read. Over-clocking, by definition, runs the chip faster than it was "spec'd" - theoretically. I have heard so many perspectives on this Celeron theme from so many different folks, I'm just going to sit back and watch them all. I sincerely hope that everyone gets a full measure from their efforts. Truly. For my own part, I'm going to save my dough for another month or two and go with whatever is the hottest, fastest, rockinest chip at the time. Lots of SDRAM, LVD SCSI, Cheetah arrays, hopefully DLT archiving, multiple monitors (maybe a couple of flat screens!)
>AGP video card: do extra's like TV-output or 16mb (instead of 8 mb) really matter for us
>musicians? Kilo has posted some "VGA kills" threads in the past about video cards
>slowing audio performance, does this matter w/ AGP?
It shouldn't. AGP is supposed to get out of the way of PCI. Whatever you do, you should try to strip your studio system to lean and mean and just a noise-makin' machine. TV tuners? Lose 'em.
>PCI-bus performance: since being on the pulsar-dsp list, I've read about several
>individuals having problems clogging up their pci buses (improved performance from ide
>drives than scsi, for example). Now I'm paranoid, I was hoping to run pulsar in tandem
>w/ my event gina, along w/ my pci scsi card. Should I spend the money on a
>motherboard w/ built-in scsi (so it avoids pci) and ditch the scsi card I'm already using?
There has been no indication from Creamware that there is substance attributable to Pulsar with respect to this situation. Appearances are not always what they seem. That said, if you have a system that accepts UDMA drives, I would definitely start with those and see what I could achieve before I started adding SCSI drives. Face it - 10 GB of UDMA for about 3 bills is tough to beat. That's about 1/3 the price of the drive alone for UW SCSI. It'd be worth it to look into "Promise" IDE RAID controller or equivalent as well. Then you could really look for some throughput on the cheap.
I'm not so sure I could recommend the built-in SCSI over the PCI card. PCI Bus Mastering should make these cards work fairly effectively. I don't think there's been any problem on my system, and I use a 2940UW. I have only a narrow drive hooked up to it at the moment though - so it's no where near to what it could be. I want several Cheetahs, ya know!! ;o)
I hope to spend a little time with some of the techs face to face during the next couple of weeks. Actually, I am flying up to Vancouver next week, and then driving down with the trade show equipment. So, I'll be in rare appearance for about three weeks. But, I expect to get some good information, too. ;o)
As far as using other audio interfaces... It is absolutely possible and part of the design intent of Pulsar. But, since those cards are dealing more with MME drivers and inherent latency derived from all of the software layers they must go through, they are recommended primarily to be reserved for things like mastering outputs where synchronous timing is not required. Effects loops are not going to work there.
>Does this matter if the card won't be in use while using pulsar (like w/ a pci modem, for
>example)?
If the card is not in use, it should have NO EFFECT WHATSOEVER on anything else.
>I've got more questions, but I'd like to see comments on the above first.
Well, I hope that was a good start, then!
Best of Luck!! And don't be afraid to contact Creamware for suggestions and info exchange. They should be happy to oblige!!
Jeff White
President - White Noise Marketing
http://www.whitenoisemarketing.com - - -New web content soon, but not yet.