Pro Tools

BAdD0gg

Hello I have been lurking around for a long time and I usually get some solid answers without even having to post, but I am now in need of some help. I am going to be building a pro tools machine here very soon and I am hoping to get something that will be able to handle both le and HD. I would like to be able to show up all these mac boys with a nice solid machine. If you dont know what it takes to run pro tools its quite involved but if anyone here has built a machine for someone recently or know anything about it I have some questions.

-Has there been any compatibility issues with any high end mobos and the hd cards?

-How has AMD been able to handle the processing it takes to run some of the plug ins?

-How does the PC handle the control surface latency issues?

-Should I go AMD or Intel? Im an AMD fan boy so its going to be hard to talk me out of that.

-I have been building alot of Animation computers. They are running mya and creative sweet. Would these specs work for Pro Tools?

I know protools has hardware but the issues that the computer needs to handle like all the real time stuff is important and can strain the pcu like crazy. I have run it on my very old rig but only le which is only 24 channels. I would like to be able to handle alot more. I need something that wont bog down when its getting cranked. I need something that wont crash. Money depends on it staying reliable.

dj_stick

Pro Tools LE 7 now has 32 mono channels, or upto 48 mono or stereo channels with the optional Music Production Toolkit. I'm primarily a Logic user, but i've got PT LE 7.4, and had it running just fine on Windows XP using a Pentium 4 340 (3.2ghz)/2gb ram.

But you want a HD system, depending on whether you choose the PCI or PCI Express options (for a HD1 system, PCI Express is a little more powerful) - you'll need to make sure the motherboard you choose has adjacent PCI/PCIe slots for a HD2/HD3 system, as the interlink cables aren't long enough to reach across an empty slot

Pro Tools HD is less dependant on a CPU than LE is, however if you're going to be using a number of RTAS plugins/instruments I'd recommend an Intel Core 2 chip, or even a Xeon based workstation, for the simple face that Digidesign has yet to "qualify" an AMD based system Pro Tools HD support page, and from what I've read on their forums, AMD chips just don't match up to Intel's offerings in terms of performance in Pro Tools

for specific compatibility/performance info i recommend checking out the official Digidesign forum - as I'm not aware of many Pro Tools users on DH.

Onto more generic system stuff - definately get at least 2Gb of ram, 3 or 4 would be ideal for larger projects(although you won't be able to use the full amount due to Win XP's 32bit nature - PT is not a 64bit app).

And I'm sure you know about hard-drive management, but I'll repeat here for the benefit of other users:
Keep one drive for the system and applications
second drive for your audio projects
a third drive if you use a number of sample libraries (such as battery or BFD)
And when installing PT, check the box for the "HFS+ option" so you can natively read/write to mac formatted portable harddrives in case you have to exchange projects between your machine and a mac based studio

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