Looking forward to UE. Recently the question came up, “how much computer horsepower do you need?
Good question. I’ve built 2 new computers recently, and will probably build another shortly. I had to update my kids’ pc. The oldest is 10, so they don’t need much horsepower. (Sorry, no FPS games yet. High end graphics not an option!) I ended up reusing my older pc parts, an athlon 630 quad core, 4gb of ddr2, a samsung 1gb (back when they were $50 bucks. Whatever happened to those days…?) This represents a low end platform. Absolutely fine for office and Dragon, internet surfing. Fine for my kids. Interesting to see if UE3 runs on this well. I’m not expecting 10 channels of 192khz audio, but a much older dual core athlon runs 2×3 stereo through the delta 410 without a hiccup, so this should be more than adequate for a stereo setup 2×4. Question is will it support 2×4 at 96 or 192k?
The next system is my new system. It’s a core i5 overclocked to 4200, 8gb of ddr1600 memory, crucial m4 SSD. I need the speed for pshop and lightroom, but it should have no problem with an HT UE3 setup. (PS I migrated SE v 17 to the new win 7 machine just by copying the Bodzio folder and installing the dongle driver-works without a hitch.)
See the screenshot below. Double click the image to see the full screen shot. I know, Windows experience index is not at all the bomb, but it’s still a ballpark estimate of speed. sorry about the pedestrian graphics. This is with the on board hd3000 video. I don’t game, so I haven’t decided if I want a separate graphics card. Yes, some of pshop filters use the graphics engine. Whether it’s really worth it or not is unclear.
PS yes it’s hot, but intelburn on max settings is brutal. Try it on your machine on max setting with a real time cpu temp monitor and well, see what happens. Do it at your own risk however… The system will run fine, apparently at 4.4 and even boot at 4.8 but isn’t completely bulletproof at those speeds.
Virtually every i5-2500k will oc to 4ghz without difficulty. Even if you aren’t into overclocking, this is an easy one. It would be very unlikely a system like this would have trouble with 10-20 high res audio streams.
The final system-my wife now wants her home office pc updated-will probably be one of the llano chips, maybe an i3. Both very nice and reasonably priced. The i3 has better cpu horsepower, but the llano is a very nice integrated solution. i3 and llano systems are seeing a lot of use in HTPC’s, and based on their architecture, they should do high res stereo bitstreams without a hiccup. Could a quad core llano do 2×4 192k, or more? Don’t know.