Help Building Tyan K8WE (S2895) Workstation

[jwpeer]

I want to build a digital audio workstation. At first I was going to go with an nforce4 ultra setup, a regular pc (Something I'm familiar with and have no trouble deciding on really) But lately i've been doing some research and become really interested in the K8WE with Dual Opterons (Potentially Dual-cores) especially since i'll being working primarily with softsynths (very cpu intensive)
My problem is I know NOTHING about workstation class cpus and mboards, and really need some information on how to build them properly: ram selection (I know ECC, but what kind is best?), hard drive selection (SCSI or SATA?), Best price for performance on the processor itself.

I also have a major question about the PCI interfaces on that particular board.
It has one legacy PCI slot, however the Audio Interface i plan on using (EMU 1820M) has a daughter card. Is there an adapter for the PCI-X or the Extra PCI-E slot for me to put the daughter card in. Will they work as well using that adapter?
(Edit: I looked at it again, and the daughter card doesn't require a pci slot, just a bracket, which there'll be plenty of room. Sorry for not checking before posting)

Any information I can get on the subject of building a personal use workstation (Mostly for Digital Audio, but maybe occasional gaming and movie viewing hooked up to an hd-tv) would be greatly appreciated.


EDIT: Also with that board, would a regular ATX case work, or do I need a specific style of case?

 

[peleejosh]

You will need a e-Atx capable case. Those dual cpu mobos are bigger than the normal atx spec.

 

[ProviaFan]

Many workstation motherboards have multiple PCI-X buses and yet another PCI bus for legacy usage. You should be able to plug the vast majority of PCI cards into a PCI-X slot, but it will cause that entire PCI-X bus to drop down to PCI speeds (the other PCI-X bus, of course, remains at full speed).

Seconded on the advice that you need a larger (Extended ATX) case. You'll also need to ensure that your power supply has the 24 pin connector and all of the other connectors needed to power the motherboard properly.

RAM must registered ECC modules, and you'll need a minimum of two (one for each processor), but ideally four modules so you can have dual channel for each processor.

For hard drives, get whatever you would have gotten anyway; SCSI really isn't necessary for what you'll do, IMHO. I'm not sure how much you need to worry about it being quiet, because all of the other stuff above is going to need cooling as well.

 

[jwpeer]

That would be the other thing, internal sound is somewhat of a concern, which is probably the main putoff of the dual-opteron setup, however I keep looking at how powerful it would be for what I want to do, especially if I get dual-core as well. I know it'd be expensive, but it wouldn't really get outdated for a LONG time (I hope?) and is upgradeable since Socket 940 should be around forever, right?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: jwpeer
That would be the other thing, internal sound is somewhat of a concern, which is probably the main putoff of the dual-opteron setup, however I keep looking at how powerful it would be for what I want to do, especially if I get dual-core as well.

Don't get me wrong, it can be made pretty darn quiet. But you're still going to be a little ways yet to "silent," and you're probably not going to want it in the same room as a nice sensitive condenser mic and high-quality pre.

I know it'd be expensive, but it wouldn't really get outdated for a LONG time (I hope?) and is upgradeable since Socket 940 should be around forever, right?

Wrong. In a few years, Socket 939 is going to socket M2 on the desktop, and Socket 940 will be replaced by something else in the server/workstation realm. Still, if the dual dual-core Opteron idea solves a few problems for you that an ordinary and much less expensive single CPU dual core (Athlon 64 X2) setup would not, and you think you can get more than a few years' usage from it, then go ahead and buy now. If you always wait for the "latest and greatest," you'll be waiting forever!

 

[jwpeer]

It's really a tossup between the dual opteron and the dual-core single processor 939 setup. They each have advantages...my biggest problem is I've heard of some problems with the pci-express boards making the pci bus less effective, which would be a serious problem being that I want to go with a pci-based audio interface.

I'm not sure how 100% true that information is, and if it is, would going with an sli setup that has two pci-e slots offset that?

Those are things I'm not real well grounded in, the pci-bus architecture.

 

[ryanv12]

If you want to quiet your CPU's, get a couple of These. I have one similar in my Pentium 4 Northwood system and I can barely hear a thing from it unless I open the case panel and put my ear nearby it. Cool pretty well too, and I'm already assuming there's no overclocking involved, so these are a good choice :thumbsup:

Go to that site to get your case fans as well. I didn't see any eATX cases there, but I'd look around for a nice quiet one. Samsung hard drives are also the quietest I've heard, so I'd get those.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: jwpeer
It's really a tossup between the dual opteron and the dual-core single processor 939 setup. They each have advantages...my biggest problem is I've heard of some problems with the pci-express boards making the pci bus less effective, which would be a serious problem being that I want to go with a pci-based audio interface.

I'm not sure how 100% true that information is, and if it is, would going with an sli setup that has two pci-e slots offset that?

Those are things I'm not real well grounded in, the pci-bus architecture.

I'm not really familiar with the peak PCI performance of various chipsets. With that said, how many channels of audio do you typically push (in both directions) at what bit depths and sample rates?

One channel of 24/96 would require around 281KB/sec, and 8 channels in and out would require a whopping 4.4MB/sec of PCI bandwidth - which is an incredible amount compared to the 133MB/sec theoretical peak bandwidth of the PCI bus.

 

[uOpt]

I'm not sure you are on the right track here.

For audio work, there is no PCIe equipment available, nada nil. You really want some PCI slots, not just one, or at least PCI-X.

Are you sure your main application is multithreaded? If not you dual CPUs go mostly unused and won't speed up the application at all.

From your comment "I've heard of some problems with the pci-express boards making the pci bus less effective" I also figure you mix up PCIe and PCI-X.

 

[jwpeer]

Well yes, all the hardware is going to be pci, not pci-x or pci-e. That I do know. What worries me is that my graphics card is going to lower the effectiveness of the regular pci-bus in a normal board (Like the Tyan Tomcat K8E or the Gigabyte GA-K8N)
That's just something I read when looking for as much info on DAW motherboards as I could find, so I'm not sure of it's veracity, but would love to know if that is true.

Sorry if it seems I'm confused, as I am somewhat. I want to avoid any slowdown running softsynths (I'm mostly going to be doing sample work and such, and vocal recording, no other instruments, hence why I want more processing power) So I thought the workstation setup might be superior?

I'll probably end up back at the single processor solution, as it's more cost-effective and I'm more familiar with setting it up.

Oh, and Cubase is multi-threaded, so it could use both cpus, or a dual-core cpu.

 

[uOpt]

The AGP card activity will not mess with your PCI bus too much (how much exactly I cannot say), at least if you have SMP or hypterthreading.

If you have all PCI 32bit/33MHz cards, then you still benefit from a server-type board since a board with 1x PCI, 2x PCI-X 133 and 2xPCI-X 66 still has three independent PCI busses. Even if you just plug in 32 bit cards then cards on different busses will not mess with each other (too much). They won't share bandwidth. Two card in the 133MHz slots will share bandwidth, they are on the same bus.

Still, the K8WE is mostly PCIe which messes up everything.

So, how many PCI cards will you have?

Also, just because something is multi-threaded does not guarantee they did a good job of distributing CPU load between threads. Threads might (and often are) just used as a way to keep interaction with the user up and/or to wait on I/O devices if the program is braindead enough.

Is Cubase that CPU-intensive in first place? Is that actually generaly waves and/or doing fast Fourier transform?

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: MartinCracauer
Still, the K8WE is mostly PCIe which messes up everything.

Two PCI-E x16 (the extra can be used for another PCI-E device besides a graphics card in the future if necessary) and 4x PCI(-x) total. How this "messes up everything" I still don't understand. Care to explain / link?

So, how many PCI cards will you have?

If PCI cards <= 4, then things will be fine...

Also, just because something is multi-threaded does not guarantee they did a good job of distributing CPU load between threads. Threads might (and often are) just used as a way to keep interaction with the user up and/or to wait on I/O devices if the program is braindead enough.

Is Cubase that CPU-intensive in first place? Is that actually generaly waves and/or doing fast Fourier transform?

I don't know how they work, but in my limited experience with soft synths, they can be very CPU intense. "Playing" a single large sample of a grand piano was very stressful on my Athlon XP 1700+. Assuming that Cubase is properly multi-threaded, there would be great benefit from dual cores or dual processors.

 

[uOpt]

What I meant with PCIe is that it is useless for audio work right now since there are no cards available.

If you are running the full synthesis on the main CPU, isn't there a PCI card or an external synthesizer available to offload it to?

 

[jwpeer]

Thanks for all the help, to clear up some questions.

I plan on only having one pci card to start with and potentially upgrading with DSP style cards in the future (UAB cards) so having regular pci compatible slots is fairly important, although there is the very real possibility that there will be pci-e audio hardware at some point (Would make a whole lot of sense)

Cubase and all softsynths/sequencers are ridiculously cpu intensive, especially if you start running a bunch of plugins, and do the entire process on the same computer, it can slow a lesser computer to a crawl. I'd rather hardware synthesizers as well. They can be very good, but you can get similar quality for less price in software, and they tend to be far more complex.

As long as those Pci-x slots can be used as regular PCI the K8we is probably the most ideal board for what I want, but I might end up going with something lesser that can still serve my purpose.


Sorry I'm not more knowledgeable about some of this stuff, server/workstation boards are something I have zero experience with, so I feel very clueless.