[nycbug-talk] Would a G5 be able to handle it?

[David Rio Deiros]

Hi there,

Perhaps this is kind of off topic but I thought I would be interesting.
                                                                                
A friend of mine is planing to buy a G5 for his mini  
sound studio. He is planing to record cds for different music  
bands which are trying to start in the music world.
                                                                                
He doesn't know if he should buy the most powerful G5 (Dual G5 2.7G)
or to go for the cheapest one (Dual G5 2G).
                                                                                
I asked him what he is planning to run and he told me that he                   
wants to use a sound program (Protools if I remember correctly)
with a DIgi002 soundcard from digidesign to capture 24 sound 
channels. The sample rate for each channel will be 96Khz, 
having 24bits for each sample. Once having the samples,   
the program will apply some "effects" to them in realtime. 

Apparently the soundcard does not offer hardware processing so 
the CPU(s) will do all the sound processing. I read the 
protools requirements but they don't mention anything about the
# of channels/Cpu requirements. 

I calculated some numbers considering G5 speed, memory speed, channels
and data per channel, but they are pretty rough because I don't 
know exactly how many instructions/opcodes the CPU will trace 
in order to perform the sound processing for every channel.

Any advice?

Thanks,

David