I do like loading large sample libraries, or at least many instances of small sample sets however one thing I find really nice about using x64 and a large amount of physical RAM is; you can leave the DAW open while doing other things like browsing the net etc., now some out there might be purist and say a DAW is not to be used as an office machine, run anti-virus applications etc but this can all be configured.
Saying this, one important point to note: having more memory and a 64 bit instruction set (CPU) does not guarantee joy, particularly when using older OS’s such as Windows 7 since now (post W7) Windows uses what is known as GPT volumes which allow for larger cluster sizes with respect to files, which in turn means you will also need to have a compatible hard disk.
Just some things to consider now that Cubase 8 has arrived.
Notwithstanding productivity and office softwares, more RAM is great since as there is no drag-and-drop on the VST Rack for Cubase, you can re-instance easily without hitting the RAM limitation.
Most people, I believe, are aware of the benefits having additional ram. I suppose you confused them by posting the obvious meaning I think they thought you had something new to share, but that was not the case?
The only “new” thing would be GPT volumes in Windows 8.
The basic thrust of my post was that while additional memory is great, there are other factors to consider such as data access, or as a 3rd point, RAM speed (I am using only 1033Mhz).
Bus speed is determined by the chipset but these 3 other factors can largely be determined by the system builder.
As far as I know you can use GPT disks/volumes with Vista and Windows 7 also (a bit trickier to install though). Only 64 bit editions of corse. It also works for Windows Server 2008.
You (sycophant) seems like someone with IT understanding enough to know that, so… So nothing new under the sun here at all.
Of corse RAM is important. Especially for those loading large sample libraries, and use of many plugins in large mixes etc.
Nothing new here either.
As I said earlier, a strange forum (or is it only a few?) and a strange thread indeed
Only thing new to Win8 is that you can boot from a GPT volume.
Anyhow win10 looks like something I could like, until then my 3 Win7 and 1 WinXP work just fine
On an UEFI v2.0+ compliant PC you can also boot from Windows 7, Vista and Server 2008 (only if the motherboard is running in UEFI and not legacy BIOS mode).
For all versions above, booting from GPT disk is only supported for 64-bit editions on UEFI-based systems.
It’s good info, no doubt there but one thing to note re: GPT is Windows 7 will format the fixed 4K clusters on the hard drive as logical clusters only.
And you can format your disks with larger cluster sizes if you like (up to 64K since XP).
We started to do that on our audio disks back in the day (efficient only on larger files, like audio files). I still do
PS. Drive compression under Windows NTFS will not work at greater than 4 K clusters. If you for some reason should want to do that.
All that said, I’m happy we are here. With more memory and all
Computers for DAW uses, pretty much works right out of the box these days.
PS. I sometimes wonder how we got any serious project going back when we started our studio 17-18 years ago (big chains of SCSI disks). We started with Logic 1.5/2 (on PC) if I remember correctly (don’t really remember the version nr). Bouncing, exporting, importing etc. like crazy.
Then went SX1 and Nuendo 1.6 when Logic 5.5 were abandoned on the PC.
“On a disk that uses 512-byte sectors, a 512-byte cluster contains one sector, whereas a 4-kibibyte (KiB) cluster contains eight sectors”.
Newer hard disks and OS’s such as Windows 8, use the latter 4-kibibyte (not kilobyte) clusters and format them as one sector, whereas older hard disks and OS’s use 512Kb sectors but will format a newer disk as 4x logical sectors, within the one cluster.
The advantages of using Windows 8.1 are obvious, so now is the time to invest some research into updating your computer system for Cubase 8!
Didn’t know that word kibibyte. but actually if you look around a little then you will notice it seems to be a correct definition.
The binary prefix kibi means 1024, therefore 1 kibibyte is 1024 bytes. The unit symbol for the kibibyte is KiB. The kibibyte was designed to replace the kilobyte in some computer science contexts. The kibibyte is closely related to the kilobyte. The latter term is often used in some contexts as a synonym for kibibyte, but formally refers to 103 bytes = 1000 bytes, as the prefix kilo- is defined in the International System of Units.
So i guess, most of us are using the wrong term (kilobyte) when talking about a kibibyte. And i did discover other outer world definitions too: Mebibit · Gibibit ·Tebibit · Pebibit · Exbibit · Zebibit · Yobibit. It looks like there are two options: the writer of the wiki article was drunk (hence all the “bibit” references (latin)) or things just got more complex in my life when i want to explain a filesize to someone…
