TECHNOLOGY REVIEW
dv-pal media and dv-pal quicklimes (subject to the limitation of quick times through a Mojo). The PTPC really has been
well thought out. If you are paranoid about viruses, the PTPC Windows OS has a virtual windows environment where you can surf with impunity as the virtual OS environment is closed when you have finished and you can kiss goodbye to any malware. The PTPC would easily
run a 5.1 DVD session that would have my HD3 choked, bussed out of existence with downmixed stems. My aged Mac Pro Classic would be straining along natively at 50 percent as well (with a 250 sample buffer). The PTPC was casually mooching along at 40 percent on the eight processors with a buffer of 128 samples. Video sync with the Mojo was tested with Syncheck 2 and was bang on.
I then disconnected the Mojo and fired up PT 11 and ran it with the Decklink Studio PCIe card. At the time of writing, most of my preferred third-party plug- ins, i.e. Sonnox and CEDAR DNS One, were not quite available for testing, but NuGen Audio’s ISL and VisLM and Revibe were 64-bit ready. I do not have an Avid Sync HD so had to run the Decklink asynchronously and found that it ran Avid DNxHD 1080i very stably – almost up to Mojo standards. I wanted to run the PTPC using OSX as a ‘Hackintosh’, as all my other business software is OSX, so I created a safety boot version of Windows on an optical drive using a free back up utility, and then backed up the full OS drive to the media drive. I had to scratch my head as
to how to download OSX 10.8.4 as my Mac Pro Classic
is ‘too old’ to run it and therefore cannot download it. About an hour later I was downloading Mountain Lion (10.8.4) to a 16Gb USB stick and a little publicly available program to enable OSX to boot from the USB stick. After booting into BIOS and making a couple of publicly documented changes to the motherboard BIOS settings, I re-booted into drive utility in OSX on the USB key and reformatted the system drive to be OSX friendly. I then installed OSX. One more little piece of publically available software was then downloaded to the desktop to ‘fix’ the OS and make it bootable. Job done. Two hours for a non-geek like me. Once everything was installed, I tried the same tests: Mojo in PT10 through the on-board Firewire and via the Apple Thunderbolt-to- Firewire adaptor. As with
Windows, they both worked seamlessly. I really liked having eSATA to hook up my Gdrive. Networking between my Mac Pro HD3 was super easy in OSX and file transfer via gigabit Ethernet from Mac SSD to the Hackintosh SSD was
blistering.The Mac performance results in Pro Tools were identical to Windows, so choose your weapon – it makes no odds. It soon became apparent to me that I was testing so much, and the one stable
THE REVIEWER MIKE AITON
was weaned at the BBC. But after breaking free nearly 25 years ago and becoming one of London's busiest freelance dubbing mixers, he can mostly be found in his Twickenham dubbing suite, mikerophonics. In his spare time he takes therapy for his poor jazz guitar playing and his addiction to skiing and Nikon lenses.
thing was the PTPC, which didn’t so much as hiccup throughout the tests. It was powerful, stable, and solid. This machine covers all
hardware bases, is very well specified and supported, and comes highly recommended by me in both flavours. It will be my weapon of choice when the upgrade fairies arrive at Mikerophonics.
INFORMATION Feature Set
• 4U rack mountable chassis
• Overclocked Intel Core i7 processor
• Water cooled for temperature and noise control
• Up to 32GB of fast 1,600MHz DDR3 memory
www.pro-tools-pc.com
www.audiomedia.com
October 2013 43
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