Well, as you might know, the more data the computer has to deal with the more processing is needed to do the same thing. A typical situation when the computer really needs much CPU power is if you record many tracks simoultaneously at 192 KHz@24 at the same time as you playback a lot of tracks. This has to do with multitasking and command queuing. Since I have so far only recorded a few tracks simoultaneously I haven't noticed any problems with my 2,8 GHz CPU. But what I have noticed is that the problems immediately enter the picture when I start editing, which is something you do very often. The thing is that Cakewalk pushes the computer to do something with a lot of data (4 times more data than CD). The computer is smooth as long as the CPU doesn't need maximum power to get the job done. But when some complex intructions are told to the CPU and this involves a lot of data to process it soon just can't process the data fast enough because the computer is pushed to process more data and processes than it can handle at once. But there are different reasons for why the number of processes become too high. For instance if the RAM memory is too small it gets much extra instructions to process disc activity (so called swapping). When you add effects it is rather complex processing that is done. Millions and millions of loop iterations are carried through, often in a multithreaded fashion. It needs to give instructions to read a lot of data from the disc, apply a lot of processing on it and finally also give instructions for writing the processed data back to the disk.

If you go with a fast SATA hard drive and a 512MB RAM memory I would say you need something like a 4-6 GHz Pentium if you record at 192 KHz. But if the RAM memory is higher, let's say 2,5 GB, 4 GHz might be enough, because this means the wait time for instructions to be executed are becoming smaller and the number of disk processes are fewer. It all depends on the kind of editing you do. If you plan on recording a lot of tracks simoultaneuosly at 192KHz sampling rate I would choose as fast a CPU as I could get my hands on, at least a 4GHz CPU. As I have experienced, 2,8GHz is not enough for editing at 192KHz.

It will be interesting to see how the 2,5GB RAM memory will affect the editing at 192KHz. I hope it will make my CPU fast enough for what I do.