Looking at ditching PC for home studio, but recording

Hi All,

This is my first post on this forum, so hi to everyone, and thanks for taking the time to have a look at my question - bear with me - it'll take a while to explain!

I've got an enquiry about the performance of Windows on Macs. I'm primarily a Mac user myself but currently use a PC for home studio recording with Cubase SX3 and various other software. I use an 8-channel firewire Alesis mixer/sound interface.

Now... my Mac is a G5 iMac, so I'm looking at moving upwards in the world fairly soon, and now the new iMacs are out, I've started to pay attention! Up until now, I havent even thought of running Windows on any Mac of mine, but the other day I had an idea.

If I could ditch the big-box PC (Currently a 2.3Gig Core 2 Duo with 2Gb RAM), and go with a new 2.1Gig Core 2 Duo iMac, dual booted with BootCamp and XP, I'd be a happy man. I'd love to get rid of a few things. Firstly the space gained would be fantastic. Secondly, with the iMac being a **** sight quieter than my PC, I could finally get rid of the background noise which bugs my quieter recordings.

What I need to know is people's opinions on how well the system would run Cubase and various plugins on XP. Recording requires a well-running system, with not much in the way of margin for error. What it doesn't require, however, is a massively meaty graphics card (though properly funtioning drivers are a must). Recording also takes a fair bit of Horsepower (hence me going with more horesepower-bang-to-the-buck PC hardware up until now).

Most of the discussions on this forum about performance tend to centre around gaming, and to be honest, that's the least of my worries! I know that in theory, with the Operating running natively, performance should be quite good. However, I'm really not experienced in using windows on Macs, so any useful snippets anyone has to give would be appreciated. Are drivers stable etc?

Changing over to Mac-based Cubase is not an option, as I have loads of instruments and plugins that it would be too expensive to re-buy, or are simply not available for the mac platform.

Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers!

Hi,

I'm just starting out on a MacBook Pro running WinXP Pro under Bootcamp.

The MBP firewire controller is a Texas Instruments one, which is what swayed me from buying a standard windows lappy.
Firewire controllers have been known to cause problems - especially in PCs. I'm not sure what the new iMacs have in them

S/W wise i'm using Sonar5 with Reason (under rewire) and Audacity.
H/W, I'm with an Edirol Fa-66 interface.


Initially i had some problems with firewire that were remedied by a Microsoft Hotfix, and things seem to be settling down. I've also disabled wi-fi and only enable the hardware when i need to register software.

I've just installed the NI Komplete 2 bundle and am going to see how that works out (needed a new PC and didn't want to upgrade NI to allow me to run on vista).
Unfortunately I've not run any of the NI stuff yet, which will no doubt need the most grunt, so can't really comment as to its stability yet. Fingers crossed.

You should probably check out the cubase forum, or soundOnSound if that doesn't help.
Might be worth looking for problems people might have had with copy protection - doesn't SX3 use a dongle?
You might also want to check out to see if anyone has been having problems with that particular interface under windows + bootcamp.
They might be good places to start.