The Logic Off Topic list

At 04:13 PM 6/11/01 +0000, you wrote:
>I seem to remember that there was a website that maintained lists of PC
>hardware (processors, drives, moterboards etc) and rated their
>(un-)suitability for audio applications such as Logic, Sound Forge etc.
>
>Can anyone point me at this, or any other source of useful advice on new
>PC hardware. I am particularly interested in the choice of high-end
>processor and mother board - does the Pentium still reign due to faster
>floating-point calculations? I am likely to use my Yamaha DSP factory
>card in whatever new machine I end up buying, if that makes any
>difference.

Athlon has much more efficient x87 type floating point performance than
Pentium III and P4 has relatively poor x87 floating point performance -- a
P4 1.5 is worse than PIII 1Ghz on these instructions.  The P4 has very fast
integer units though (Platinum Verb runs like hell on these) and it also
has new units for processing SSE instructions -- these can do SIMD on
floating point amongst other things. At present,  plugins generally are not
coded to take advantage of these instructions/units they use X87 and integer. 

This may change -- Logic 5 has been described by Emagic as being "optimised
for P4" so the FPU heavy plugs (Spectral Gate etc) may go better on P4 with
Logic 5. If you use Waves and other 3rd party plugs they may be revised to
take advantage of P4s new instructions but this has not happened yet AFAIK. 

A new edition of P4 (Northwood) on a .13u process will arrive in a month or
two and there has been some speculation that it may be better equipped --
x87 units were among the components ripped out of the original P4 design to
get it to market on the .18 micron process. Revisions of the P4 -- perhaps
later than Northwood -- might pick up some more X87 grunt at some stage.

As things stand, Athlon XP is the winner on price/performance and the Via
KT266A chipset is probably the best chipset but SIS and others have entered
this market. Have a look at  http://www.tomshardware.com/ for some tests on
the latest boards whichever way you go.

Regards,
Murray