FWIW, Ardour won’t benefit that much from multicore, but then again I guess you wouldn’t be able to find a singlecore nowadays…
Hi pleasebeus,
looks pretty nice to me 
Two thoughts:
- Does DDR2 work on this board? I only read DDR3 support, not sure if this will work.
- The board has an onboard ATI Radeon HD 4200 with one VGA and ond DVI output, so you could also try this option out, depending on how good your old card is.
Ah, and you should add a CPU cooler, even if there’s ome shipped with the CPU it won’t be a real quiet one 
Best,
Benjamin
It’s definitely DDR3… so you need to revise the RAM. you don’t need to go for the highest spec though… I doubt the CPU can use much more than 1200 MHz RAM anyway… I use DDR2 at 1066 MHZ and the thing flies…definitely no RAM bottleneck…
on multicore… read this http://ardour.org/node/2863
I bought my Phenom II 720 partially based on advice here from Paul…
… and went 3 cores… due to ardour using 3 threads… I noticed a definite improvement in the UI response while recording at low latency and can even switch virtual desktops without generating an xrun (even when at stock speeds using PowerNow)… 4 cores won’t hurtl… …but I like 3… it’s kind of a nice balance between clock speed and the ability to run multiple threads… and was dirt cheap… unfortunately AMD has stopped producing them except for the low power model which isn’t really suited to overclocking so you won’t get anywhere near the processing power as the 720 BE…
my rent to own is up again (tax benefits outweigh increased overall cost )… … I have had my CPU mobo combo for 8 months and bought it on a 1 year rental instead of my normal 2 year… with a plan to upgrade again this year expecting
a) me to outgrow this CPU quickly as I keep increasing the number of plugins I use and
b) in the hope that Paul would have had time to get into his plan to get more “parallellism” into Ardour.
In the end it turns out I still have so much headroom on this CPU I’m going to keep it for another year at least and use the renewal… on a pair of SSD’s instead of doing a CPU/Mobo/RAM upgrade… (fingers crossed the supposed removal of HDD bottleneck will be noticeable as I don’t believe more cores will be noticeable for audio… only compiling)
Thanks for the heads up on the cooler Benjamin. I’d chosen DDR2 because although the CPU takes DDR3 it remains backwards compatible to DDR2. Somewhere I read that the increased benefit isn’t that great. Of course, now I can’t find that link… I get very confused with RAM. Is it better to get 6 GB of DDR2 than 4GB of DDR3 with this set up? Who knows? My supplier gives me a choice of
- DDR3 Tri-Channel - PC3-16000+
- DDR3 Tri-Channel - PC3-14400+
- DDR3 Tri-Channel - PC3-12800
- DDR3 Tri-Channel - PC3-10600
- DDR3 Dual-Channel - PC3-14400+
- DDR3 Dual-Channel - PC3-12800
- DDR3 Dual-Channel - PC3-10666
- DDR2 - PC2-8500+
- DDR2 - PC2-6400
- DDR2 - PC2-5300
And that’s even before choosing the brand. So little of the advice and recos out there relate to our linux a/v needs. Most people building boxes are doing it for gaming and the ram & gpu decisions all revolve around fps etc :-/ Appreciate your comments on 1200MHz, Allan. I can’t work out whether dual channel, tri channel etc will benefit me.
Hi,
I don’t want to annoy you with the DDR2/3 thing, but I’m still not sure if DDR2 will work. The CPU definitely can work with both, but the question is if the board can handle both or DDR3 only.
Best Benjamin
Hey, I’m certainly not annoyed Benjamin! I really appreciate your input and everyone else; it’s been invaluable so far. The DDR2 reference was here: http://cli.gs/rUY2r2 There’s a whole lot of info on Phenom II performance on Linux in that.
Even with DDR3, I’m still stumped by the dual channel tri channel thing. It seems optimised for Intel Core 7 and I can’t navigate my head around it.
I hope I can get this thing properly specced and ordered this week; build next week and then forget about it! I hope this thread will be useful to others thinking of building a Linux AV system around a 1010LT. I’m probably not the only one.
Here’s the latest spec. DDR 3 it is, but dual channel since the tri channel seems designed for Intel Core i7 processors. I’ve also added a Corsair water cooler (thanks for the nudge, vtech). It’s the 120mm fan that got me sold on that.
- Dell UltraSharp U2410 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor
- AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition 3.20GHz (Socket AM3)
- Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 10666C9 1333MHz TwinX Dual Channel (TW3X4G1333C9)
- Antec Sonata III Piano Black Quiet Case - Black (EarthWatts 500W PSU)
- Asus M4A785TD-M Evo AMD 785G (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
- Corsair H50-1 High-Performance CPU Watercooler (Socket LGA775/1156/1366/AM2/AM3)
Thanks to everyone for your help. Without the monitor, all this comes in at well under £500, leaving me a bit of room to get a nice keyboard.
I’ll use my existing
- M-Audio 1010LT
- dual head Geforce video card
- 500GB 3.5" Hitachi Deskstar SATA 3 GB/s
- cheapy V7 LCD monitor (to get twin monitors for tracks & edit screens)
Is there any point in building a 64 bit system with this or should I stick to 32 bit?
you got it … PhenomII’s are backward compatible to DDR2 but only in an am2+ board (this is my setup)… but DDR3 has reached the point where it is at price parity or even cheaper than DDR2 …
I keep flicking between 32 and 64 bit ever since the first amd64 chips… there is a theoretical performance boost on 64 bit or a boost too small to notice for me anyway with audio… with video compression the difference can be noticed…
However, there is still slightly more compatibility with apps in 32 bit but the main question will be do you plan to use VST’s … in which case 32 bit is much friendlier…
An update on my new setup. Most components bar the monitor arrived Friday and within a couple of hours of unwrapping the courier packages and plugging leads into their respective sockets I’d installed a zippy vanilla Ubuntu Karmic on the HD.
In the end I got the following:
- Dell UltraSharp U2410 24" Widescreen LCD Monitor
- AMD Phenom II X4 Quad Core 955 Black Edition 3.20GHz (Socket AM3)
- Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 10666C9 1333MHz TwinX Dual Channel (TW3X4G1333C9)
- Antec Designer 500 Case (EarthWatts 500W PSU)
- Asus M4A785TD-M Evo AMD 785G (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard
- Used Silicon Graphics PS/2 keyboard
- Hitachi Deskstar SATA 3GB/s 500GB HD
I decided to leave the water cooling idea and the graphics card until later. So far, the mobo’s onboard graphics seem plenty enough for my old single TFT monitor. We’ll see how it deals with the load of the new Dell Utrasharp on top. The case is super quiet compared to my old box and its fridge-white wrap makes for a brilliant whiteboard
I have the 1010LT hooked up to a old Quad 33/303 amp and a pair of Rogers LS4s for general listening and monitoring.
Everything worked out of the box bar the 1010LT which needed an easy tweak for Pulse to run it (described here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libao-pulse/+bug/447092)
I loaded Ubuntu Studio on top of the Karmic vanilla install to save the bother of going through all the individual items. It’s described here and went faultlessly: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Ubuntu%20Studio%20Upgrade%20from%20Ubuntu Ubuntu Studio seems to have got back on the rails following a trough six months or so ago.