Photos: Mark Ewing

Digital Systems' PCs are claimed to offer low acoustic noise and excellent performance with music applications, without breaking the bank.

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Martin Walker

Digital Systems may not be a familiar name to everyone, but for the last six years this Derby-based company has supplied leading music retailers with various PC systems built to the special requirements of musicians. With an impressive client list including Academy Of Sound, AMS Neve, Jigsaw Systems, Raper & Wayman, Sounds Live and Studiocare Pro Audio, there's a good chance that you've already seen one of their PC systems in a catalogue or SOS ad. However, from now on you can also buy them direct. Like all specialist music PCs, Digital Systems' machines are built to order, with the musician's choice of soundcard and music software along with any special custom requirements such as additional hard drives or DVD writer. Prices are likely to be similar whether you buy direct or through a DS client, and their PCs are always delivered by courier direct from Digital Systems, although display systems may be available to try out in music shops.

Digital Systems offer several completely different systems for the musician. All feature motherboards with the Intel 845E chipset along with an Intel Pentium 4 Northwood processor, Zalman Flower cooler, 512MB of PC2100 DDR RAM, an 80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA100 hard drive enclosed in a SilentDrive sleeve, and Windows XP Home Edition. The DS Tower System reviewed here is intended for the 'price-conscious' musician, and uses a fairly inexpensive Midi Tower Case with a quiet 300 Watt power supply, along with a 2.0GHz CPU, for a bare-bones price of £799. For the 'professional and serious home user', the Whisper PC range is available either in a larger black Midi tower or 4U rackmounting case, complete with matching keyboards, mice and monitor screens. These cases are made of thicker material for even lower acoustic noise, while their PSU is a specially sourced 'Ultra Quiet' model. However, both ranges offer four 5.25-inch and four 3.5-inch drive bays in total, which should be ample for the vast majority of musicians.

The Whisper PC 2.0 is supplied with a 2.0GHz CPU like the review system, and the same ATI Rage 128 32MB graphics card, and costs £899 with the tower case or £999 for the rack version. As its name suggests, the Whisper PC 2.2 has a faster 2.2GHz CPU; it also boasts a Matrox G550 32MB dual-head graphics card for those with more ambitious display requirements. It costs £1099, while the rack version is again £100 dearer at £1199. All systems can be customised by adding additional hard drives, expansion cards and software, and all prices include VAT.

Overview

Although the review system uses a low-cost Midi tower case from Advance, rather than an expensive aluminium or acrylic case, its internal components are of high quality: items such as the Zalman Flower heatsink/fan combination and Molex SilentDrive sleeve for the hard drive are popular with musicians who value low acoustic noise.

Digital Systems PC £799 pros Excellent performance for the price. Low acoustic noise. A generous six USB 2.0 ports. Plenty of expansion potential. cons System partition might benefit from a smaller cluster size. Keyboard's Power button might be a little risky for the ham-fisted. Some musicians might prefer to have a modem installed. summary The Digital Systems DS Tower System uses a clever combination of quality components and a standard beige case to produce a fast yet quiet PC at a bargain price.

The motherboard in the review PC was the BD7II from Abit, one of the most respected manufacturers, which features an Intel 845E chipset along with Socket 478 CPU support to house a Pentium 4 processor. The BD7II is highly regarded for its stability and overclockability. Although most musicians won't be exploring this latter aspect, its Phoenix Award BIOS 'SoftMenu III' lets you fix the PCI and AGP buss frequencies at 33MHz and 66MHz respectively while you independently adjust the CPU speed, which can make for much safer overclocking, since many PCI expansion cards don't like the PCI buss going above 33MHz.

It's also notable for integrated features such as an on-board LAN connector from the 10/100MB Fast Ethernet controller, for linking to other machines in a network, and an ALC650 six-channel audio codec. However, these are unlikely to be required by musicians, and both had sensibly been disabled in the review machine's BIOS.

The BD7II provides a fairly standard two IDE sockets supporting up to four devices running Ultra ATA/33, 66 or 100 modes. The review model housed a roomy 80GB Seagate Barracuda hard drive as Primary Master, and a Lite-On CD-R/W drive as Secondary Master. This combination is perfectly adequate for most musicians, and exactly the same configuration was featured in both the Millennium and Digital Village PCs I reviewed recently. Only if you want to achieve a huge number of simultaneous audio tracks, or simultaneously run a powerful application like GigaStudio, would adding a second audio-only hard drive be advisable. In this case it might be preferable to use the more expensive Abit BD7II-RAID version of this motherboard (DS are happy to supply this as an alternative, with a slight price increase). This has four IDE sockets supporting up to eight IDE devices. Its additional IDE sockets use a Highpoint IDE Controller chip that supports Ultra ATA/133 mode, but as pointed in these pages many times before, musicians rarely benefit from the higher burst speed capability — it's the sustained transfer rate that's important for hard disk recording, so I don't see the lack of '133' support on the review motherboard as a limitation.

The BD7II supports Intel's socket 478 processor range, and the review model was fitted with an Intel 2.0GHz Northwood 'A' CPU, exactly like the Digital Village PC I reviewed recently. The Northwood 'A' front-side buss runs at 400MHz (100MHz quad-pumped), but the motherboard also supports the 533MHz system data buss required by the latest Northwood 'B' version, which is currently rather more expensive.

Sockets & Slots

Up to three 184-pin DDR DIMM modules can be fitted, supporting up to 2GB of either PC1600 or PC2100 RAM, and the review model was fitted with a single 512MB stick of the faster CAS2 PC2100 (DDR266) RAM. There are five PCI and one AGP expansion slots; some boards do offer six PCI slots, but few musicians will ever fill the five available, so I don't see this as a particular disadvantage either. In the AGP slot Digital Systems had fitted an ATI Rage 128 graphics card, which has a good compatibility record with music applications and hardware — I used one myself until I moved to a dual-head model. The only other filled slot in the review PC was occupied by one of M Audio's popular Audiophile 2496 soundcards, installed in slot four. No internal PCI modem was fitted, but I'm personally much happier buying an external USB one for around £30 and leaving another IRQ free.

Review PC Specification     Case: Advance Midi Tower case. PSU: 300 Watt, with temperature-controlled fan. Motherboard: Abit BD7II socket 478, with Intel 845E chipset running 400/533MHz system buss, and DDR266/200 SDRAM memory interface. Processor: Intel Pentium 4 2.0GHz 512kb cache (Northwood), 4 times 100MHz front side buss. CPU heatsink and fan: Zalman CNPS 6500B Pentium 4 Flower Cooler, 92mm Ultra Quiet fan with Fan Mate variable-speed controller. System RAM: 512MB PC2100 (DDR 266) CAS2 SDRAM. Hard drive: 80GB Seagate Barracuda ATA IV, model ST380021A, 7200rpm, Ultra ATA/100, mounted in Molex SilentDrive sleeve. Graphics card: ATI Rage 128 Pro Ultra GL AGP 32MB. Floppy drive: 1.4MB 3.5-inch. CD-ROM drive: Lite-On LTR-40125S, EIDE, 2MB buffer, 48x read, 40x write, 12x rewrite speed. Monitor: Hansol H520 15-inch diagonal, 1024x768-resolution TFT colour. Keyboard & mouse: Genius Comfy KB10X with optional palm rest, Samsung PS/2 optical wheel mouse. Installed operating system: Windows XP Home Edition. Installed soundcard: M Audio Audiophile 2496 with version 5.10.0.5026 drivers Installed audio software: Steinberg Cubase SL version 1.02.

Unlike the more typical USB 1.1 ports offered by the Digital Village PC, the Abit BD7II supports the latest USB 2.0 standard, although this won't benefit too many users at the moment, since according to the Abit web site, suitable motherboard drivers are only just becoming available. However, it's good to know that this support is built in at the hardware level, and that the motherboard supports a generous six ports — these are now needed more than ever as music software developers adopt USB dongle copy protection. Two USB ports are mounted on the motherboard itself, while two more pairs are each connected via Port Header sockets to dummy backplates. The case design incorporates an extra dummy slot beyond both PCI and AGP slots in the 'seventh' position, so only one PCI slot becomes obscured. However, even in the unlikely event that you need to fit more than three additional PCI cards, it would only take a few seconds to unplug and unbolt the second dummy backplate and revert to four USB ports.

In fact, the motherboard provides quite an array of back-panel sockets. In addition to the usual two serial and one parallel ports, a pair of PS/2 sockets for keyboard and mouse, and the pair of USB ports mentioned previously, there are five further sockets that were all disabled in the review PC — four for the sound chip (Line In and Out, Mic In, and a MIDI/Gameport socket) and one LAN connector from the integral 10/100MB Fast Ethernet controller.

Cooling arrangements were impressive for such a modestly priced PC. The CPU had been fitted with one of the popular and effective Zalman Flower heatsinks, along with a Fan Mate Speed Controller. This provides a small rotary knob that can be used to raise or lower fan speed, which is the very best way to keep noise levels down — you start it at the slowest and therefore quietest setting, and then only raise the speed if temperatures rises too high, which hadn't had to be done for the review model. Meanwhile, the Seagate Barracuda hard drive had been fitted with a Molex SilentDrive sleeve, to drive its already low acoustic noise levels down even further.

Other Components

The Genius Comfy keyboard was comfortable enough to use, although I didn't personally get on with the optional palm-rest. It had the seemingly obligatory cluster of extra non-standard keys that often require special drivers to do anything useful, including three alongside the function keys labelled Power, Sleep and Wake. The first of these did exactly what it suggested: powered down the entire PC after first shutting Windows down correctly. This could be handy if you keep your PC in a cupboard, but disastrous if you press it by accident after a tiring session. However, it's easy enough to reconfigure in the Advanced page of the Power Options to ask for a confirmation if this makes you nervous, or to set up the Sleep key to automatically enter the safer Hibernation mode.

The Samsung optical wheel mouse worked beautifully on almost every surface I tried, including my knee, and is ideal for any musician who doesn't want to be restricted to a mouse mat. Digital Systems install Windows XP Home Edition as standard, and this is the obvious choice in any new system, as it's proving to be the most stable platform for multimedia work. Also supplied with the review system and soundcard were a Hansol H520 TFT colour monitor, which like my own 520F provided a pin-sharp picture with no distortion, and Steinberg's new Cubase SL version 1.02, which is considerably cheaper than its SX stablemate but still has the majority of features that most musicians require.

Dummy backplates bring four of the PC's six USB 2.0 ports to the back panel.

Powering Up

Powering up for the first time, I was pleased by the Digital Systems PC's low level of acoustic noise. Its temperature-controlled PSU fan was commendably quiet for a standard device, and the Fan Mate-assisted Zalman CPU fan and SilentDrive-encased hard drive also helped. Even when I subsequently ran the PC with its side plate removed, it didn't make a huge difference to the noise level, since so little sound was being generated internally.

Before I explored Windows I had a peep into the BIOS to see what if any tweaks had been made at the hardware level. As is appropriate with many motherboards whose integral extras aren't always the most suitable for musicians, several features had been disabled in the Integrated Peripherals page, including the AC97 Audio, the LAN controller, Game port and MIDI port. The only one of these you might want to reinstate is the MIDI port, as onboard ports can provide low latency and reliable performance.

I wasn't expecting to find the SoftMenu III being used to overclock, and it had sensibly been left with standard settings of 2000/100 for CPU Operating Speed, while the Advanced Chipset Features page confirmed that the faster CAS2 RAM had been fitted. I also spotted an interesting 'Enhance DRAM Performance' function, but when I tried enabling this more aggressive RAM timing it only made a 0.3 percent improvement to memory bandwidth.

Windows Setup

Like several other specialist music retailers, Digital Systems have installed Windows XP Home Edition in its Standard Mode, to avoid any possible complications with ACPI, such as audio stuttering with some makes of soundcard. However, this is the first time I've reviewed a PC that still manages automatic power-down in this mode — most (like the Digital Village model reviewed in SOS October 2002) need to be switched off by hand using the front-panel power switch once Windows has declared the machine safe for power down. The secret is APM (Advanced Power Management), in which power management is controlled by the BIOS, and the implementation and amount of support varies from motherboard to motherboard. It certainly worked on this one.

Hibernation had not been deactivated, but although various musicians have reported issues on awakening such as audio stuttering, as well as random clicks and pops, these tend to disappear when ACPI has been disabled, and no-one with a 80GB hard drive is likely to worry about the 512MB hard drive file created to accommodate the RAM contents while 'asleep'. I didn't have any problems using it, and it's certainly most convenient if you want to continue from where you left off.

General settings proved eminently suitable: System Restore, Automatic Updates, System Sounds and Task Scheduler had all been disabled to prevent untimely interruptions to an otherwise perfect musical take, while Processor Scheduling had been changed to favour Background Services to give audio the best chance of emerging unscathed with low soundcard buffer settings. Virtual Memory had been fixed at a generous 766MB, which is probably larger than needed except when running complex video applications, but then who knows what a musician is going to install after buying a PC? The System.ini file had been edited to provide a fixed Vcache size of 16384, along with a switch for conservative swap-file usage so that the system uses RAM more often than virtual memory. The first tweak is probably unnecessary when running under Windows XP, since its file I/O is a lot more efficient, and the latter switch is redundant, although neither will cause any problems.

On the visual side, the PC was set up to use Windows Classic theme with no desktop image or screensaver, while the custom settings for Visual Effects showed just two ticks for 'Show windows contents while dragging' and 'Smooth edges of screen fonts'. All of these help to minimise extra CPU overhead due to graphic fills. Graphic Hardware Acceleration had been left at Full, which seems the best setting for nearly all situations.

Plenty of Windows XP Hotfixes had been installed to keep the OS fully up to date, but as far as I could see the Services had been left well alone. This is probably the wisest approach, since disabling specific functions is only sensible if you know exactly what the customer is going to do with their PC.

I was initially disconcerted by the regular once-per-second flashing of the hard drive activity indicator, and after some investigation I discovered this to be due to the CD-ROM Autorun function, which had been left active. Although some users prefer to have their CDs automatically opened, I personally prefer this function to be disabled. However, since this DS Tower system only has a single CD-R/W drive connected to the Secondary IDE channel, leaving it enabled won't interrupt the hard drive.

Technical Support     One of the beauties of buying a system specially configured for music hardware and software is that you know it will work well from day one. However, this can only be guaranteed if the manufacturer also physically installs the soundcard, along with its drivers and a suitable MIDI + Audio application. To this end, you can either order these with your system, or, if you already have a suitable soundcard, you can send it to Digital Systems and have them install it and the latest drivers free of charge. Each system has a unique serial number, and after it's been fully tested it gets the contents of its Windows partition backed up onto a total of three neatly-labelled CD-ROMS. You also get a bootable CD-ROM containing Norton's Ghost software, and a detailed A4 sheet with step-by-step instructions explaining how to restore the system to this pristine condition should you ever run into problems. There's also a one-year return-to-base warranty, but as always, make sure you keep your original packaging to keep your PC safe in transit. Digital Systems told me that they are also happy to supply and install new soundcards and PC upgrades for their customers if they arrange to return the system to them, and that they can then provide new System Restore discs and continue any remaining guarantee. They are also happy to install the customer's own upgrades if they are suitable, but of course it would pay to give them a call first to talk through the options.

Performance

Partition Magic showed that the single 80GB hard drive had been divided into a 20GB System partition with over 17GB still available, and a second 55GB partition labeled Audio. Both had been formatted as FAT32 with a 32k cluster size, but while this is ideal for the large files used for audio, I do think the system partition would have benefitted from a cluster size of 8k or 4k — with the current setting even the smallest file will occupy a minimum of 32k. There was already about 200MB of wasted space, although few would perhaps consider this important given the huge remaining drive acreage. However, DS told me that they routinely use 32k clusters to minimise any hit on swap-file access, so perhaps it's a case of swings and roundabouts again.

The Seagate Barracuda drive performed as well as expected — this is the third PC I've seen with one of these drives fitted, and they never fail to impress with their combination of speed and low acoustic noise, on this occasion forced even lower by the SilentDrive sleeve. Sustained read speed measured with DskBench was once again about 40MB/second for both partitions, with 64k buffers managing around 13MB/second for 150 tracks of simultaneous 16-bit/44.1kHz audio, while write speed was lower at around 33MB/second.

SiSoftware's Sandra 2002 Standard measured a memory bandwidth of 2033MB/second for integer calculations, and 2032MB/second for the float version. These results were very similar to those I got for the Digital Village PC, which used a similar array of components.

Partnered with Cubase SL and the Audiophile card, this PC turned in a good performance, with no audio glitches, a high track count and plenty of processing power, which is exactly the combination that a musician wants.

USB 2.0     The USB 2.0 standard ups the speed of the USB connection from the 12Mbps (megabits per second) of USB 1.1 up to 480Mbps — a 40-fold increase. This makes it far more suitable for peripherals such as external DVD burners, scanners, hard drives, digital cameras and video capture devices, but it's still compatible with older USB 1.1 devices. USB 2.0 has been available on PCI expansion cards for about a year, but recent PC motherboards such as the one used here by Digital Systems incorporate USB 2.0 ports as standard, by using the latest Intel 845G, GL or E chipsets. Most high-street PCs are likely to do the same over the coming months, and other chipset manufacturers have also announced integral USB 2.0 support in forthcoming products.

Buying A Music PC

Probably the majority of specialist music PCs now partner a Pentium 4 2.0GHz processor with 512MB of RAM and the same spacious Seagate Barracuda hard drive, but they each provide a different balance of performance, low acoustic noise, looks, and competitive price. Carillon's stylish rackmount case, with its special attention to low acoustic noise, gave PCs a new respectability in professional studio circles, but such custom engineering is reflected in the price. Millennium Music Software's use of the aluminium ATC Coolermaster case, along with expensive RDRAM, also provides a system with an excellent technical and acoustic performance, but again has cost implications.

Red Submarine use DDR SDRAM in their machines, which helps to keep overall prices lower, although they still using relatively expensive components like the Lian-Li PC60 aluminium case, an Ultra Quiet PSU and Radial Fin CPU cooler, and a SilentDrive sleeve for the hard drive. However, the Digital Village machine I reviewed in SOS October 2001 proved that it's possible to sell a music PC for £799 without cutting too many corners, again by using DDR SDRAM, and with four FireWire Ports and a handy wireless keyboard and mouse, but this time partnered with an attractive acrylic case that masks much of the internal noise, allowing specialist fans and sleeves to be omitted.

When this machine arrived for review with an identical low price of £799, it proved that yet another approach exists for those with a more limited budget. The Digital Systems DS Tower System uses quality components throughout, including a Zalman radial fin cooler and SilentDrive sleeve, but manages to keep its overall price down by using a standard beige case. If you want a more stylish and expensive one, Digital Systems can oblige, but if not, this is one of the cheapest ways to buy a bespoke music PC. While it won't win any awards for its looks, this PC is built from the ground up to suit the musician who wants good performance, reliability, and low acoustic noise.

information

Basic system without monitor, soundcard or music software £799; as reviewed but without monitor £1247; total system as reviewed £1576. Prices include VAT. Digital Systems +44 (0)870 743 9867. Click here to email www.digital-systems.net

 

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