G5 powerful enough as slave machine?

[ppjmd]

Hey Guys,

I'm about to upgrade to an 8-core Mac Pro, and I plan to retask my current G5 as a sample-streaming slave. I know the Mac Pro will be super-powerful by comparison, but with all these libraries depending on disk streaming, I'd like to make the most of my G5 and keep as much orchestral stuff loaded on that machine as I can. Here's my intended setup:

G5 (dual 2.3, 8GB RAM) with 8-bay SATA chassis, loaded as follows (based on my usual projects):
disk 1 - Platinum Strings
disk 2 - Platinum Brass
disk 3 - Platinum Winds
disk 4 - Platinum Percussion
disk 5 - SO Choirs
disk 6 - VSL libs. 1
disk 7 - VSL libs. 2
disk 8 - EWQL Misc. (Ra, VOP, etc.)

The Mac Pro would house all my other libraries, especially percussive stuff that's more time-sensitive (meaning the latency from one machine to the other wouldn't be an issue).

Here's my question. Will the G5 keep up with big templates loaded - say a 64-channel Kontakt template and an 8-channel VSL Ensemble? Obviously not all those channels would play at the same time (!), but I'm wondering how it would work in a real-world situation as a slave machine. The whole idea would be to have a reasonably complete orch template loaded.

I've already tried loading my G5 with 64 channels of Kontakt (version 3) and an 8-channel VSL Ensemble. Everything loads no problem, and I'm left with 2.6 GB free RAM. However, I don't have all the samples spread out on as many drives as described above, so playback would be a bit smoother than it is at the moment ;-)

I plan to keep my Kontakt licenses for all my EW stuff and get PLAY when available for the Mac Pro, but again, it would be nice to offload as much as I can to the ol' G5.

Any thoughts welcome.

Thanks,

Jim

[A.Leung]

Originally Posted by ppjmd

Hey Guys,

I'm about to upgrade to an 8-core Mac Pro, and I plan to retask my current G5 as a sample-streaming slave. I know the Mac Pro will be super-powerful by comparison,

Jim

I think you just said it there. The MAc pro your getting is SUPER powerful. I dont know how your running your VSL (exs24's?) or ? but that machine will handle everything you have. Personally I'd use the FASTEST machine for all the goodies and when THAT starts to choke start off loading to your Slave(s) Honestly we have 5 machines running all the time here. If we have a small project we only turn on HALF of them or at times (rare) One of them. More machines is more to turn on - more monitors to watch more moving around to edit programs, bla bla. If one machine DOES the work and STILL has room to spare why deal with two or more... Unless of course your doing it because you dont want to REINSTAL everything on the newer machine? Or perhaps your thinking of dedicating the newer machine to a full blown Pro Tools TDM system?

But to answer your question the G5 should be able to handle what you have listed without too much trouble. But if you dont need it - why bother? Turn it into a dedicated server. Worked for me.

[ppjmd]

Allan,

Thanks for the response. Yeah, I know the 8-core would more than handle all that, but again, my issue is that I want as much loaded as possible when I start to write, and I don't want to bog my main machine down with a huge orch. template - I want that one free to do other CPU-heavy stuff like RAM-based synths and effects - like having a Waves SSL/Neve/API plugin on all my channels ;-)

Another problem with having everything on your main machine is that it takes FOREVER to load or switch cues. When the director comes in, it's nice to be able to switch quickly. With my main orch stuff loaded on the slave, that kind of thing goes much faster, and it can generally stay loaded all the time.

Like I said, i do plan on loading the PLAY versions when they're available, but who knows when that will be, and all this stuff works NOW on my G5...

Good food for thought though - thanks again!

Jim