new mainboards

[philippz]

If you?re thinking about buying an AMD CPU for music purposes, you shouldn?t forget that more and more software, for example Logic Audio and Cubase VST are already or will be optimized for the Pentium III?s SSE instruction set. This is a great advantage to AMD CPUs.

Bye, Philipp

[b_dirk]

I have a Pentium now, but many people say Athlon runs perfectly with Cubase and many plugins. They say Athlon has better FPU performance and Intel-Penium-SSE is not used with every plugin.

My thought buying a Pentium was to have better compatibility, but I never checked a Athlon. Maybe it was a stupid waste of money. I remember I never had problems with my old fast 133-AMD-486 processor only with my Cyrix-P166+ (I sold it after one week).

[KKu]

Whoa, didn't know that logic was also going to use PIII's SSE code... Hm!

Gotta check this from Emagic, but AFAIK there currently are no problems using Athlon with LAP. 900 MHz should be enough for a while AND it's much cheaper than PIII/900. (hm. who said 640kb should be enough for everyone... ;P)

.KKu

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[philippz]

Logic Audio doesn?t support SSE yet, but I remember that I read somewhere that SSE is going to be supported in one of the next revisions. Maybe 4.7??

CU, Philipp

[Beta-Decay]

This is a problem for me too. I need a new computer, the one I have is waayy too slow.
I have been trying to decide between Intel and AMD, one day P3 seems better, the next day I want AMD.

The lack of ISA in new boards is a problem too. The Abit KT7 seems like the best AMD choice, but it seems too aimed at gaming and overclocking. Does anyone have experience with this board and the EWS?

[Arnoud de Jong]

Hi all,
As manufacturers already started working on PCI-X, I wouldn't be surprised when the ISA bus is gone in about a year. Many of you seemed to feel limited in the choice of a new mainboard, because you want to keep using the EWS. In my opinion it's better to buy that new computer if you want to and keep the old one for use with the EWS. This gives you the opportunity to make this a dedicated system for the EWS. When you make a clean install on it, it's possible that it even performs better than in the old situation, when the computer also had to deal with a lot of other stuff (games, all kind of internet programs, whatever). I think with a fair amount of memory, a Pentium processor and a reasonably fast graphics card e.g. Cubase + the EWS will perform better than you ever expected. Cubase was already designed for Pentium MMX processors, so it should work ok.
This way your old gear still can do a very good job and, as others already said in this thread, you can always connect to other systems through digital interfaces (optical or coax).
When I look at the direction Terratec is developing it's high-end audio cards, I don't think it's very likely that we get a PCI successor of the EWS. TT aims at audiorecording nowadays with good digital interfaces. So no more synths on the card. Just have a look at the EWS88MT/D or EWX24/96 and you know what I mean. But you never know :-)
Arnoud

[b_dirk]

I think on the next upgrade of my system I will buy a more professional soundcard.
I mean the only reason the EWS64 was build for ISA was to support DOS Games.

A completely wrong decision as we know now. I think, if it would be PCI we could have 'perfect' latecy-timing for the crystal-chip.

Now allmost every soundcard for PC supports directX, thats all we need.

So, if the latency timing is better soft-synth (and soft-wavetables) can be substitute for an external wavetable or low-quality-samplers (like the ews).

Maybe companys like terratec will create soundcards that will use wavetables in system-memory like the SB-Live does in a better quality.
This would be all I need, I am sure we will see such souncards in the near future.

Dirk

[philippz]

I don?t think there will be any new soundcards with dedicated samplers in the future, maybe except of systems like the Creamware cards. As CPUs are getting faster nearly every month and RAM is very cheap nowadays, software based sampling will be the future. A good audio card with sampler hardware on it is too expensive in comparison to software. One more reason for software: the number of voices is only limited by the speed of your CPU and maybe the size of your RAM.

Bye, Philipp

[This message has been edited by philippz (edited January 28, 2001).]

[b_dirk]

Yes, thats what I said.
Just like the SB Live using Software for Midi, Terratec's EWX 24/96 is sold with a Soft-Sampler: a Light Version of Gigasampler.