Article Preview - Synergy Audio PC

Digital Village enjoy an established reputation for their custom music PCs, and are clearly looking to build upon that with their new Synergy range...

Martin Walker

Synergy is defined as 'the simultaneous joint action of separate parties which, together, have greater total effect than the sum of their individual effects', and Digital Village have chosen this name for their new PC range carefully, to highlight their close working relationship with OEM providers and DAW developers such as Cakewalk, Digidesign, M-Audio and Steinberg. Each of their systems has been put through its paces with all the major DAW packages and aims to be powerful and reliable, yet very quiet. While there are entry-level models, overall the range is aimed at the mid- to high-end market and with ex-Carillon expertise on board, I suspect DV are hoping to gain some of the previous customers of this well-respected range, now that it's no longer available. Let's look at the parts and see how the total stacks up!

What's In The Box?

The Blofelds DSP40 benchmark test result for this 3GHz CPU at the higher 512-sample buffer size shows the 25 percent improvement in performance that you'd expect over a Q6600 2.4GHz processor.

The ATX Tower case of the Synergy review PC is one of the largest I've reviewed to date, and it certainly looks sophisticated in a black, hi-tech sort of way, while its hinged front door and blue LEDs add plenty of class. Although there are already six USB ports and a Firewire port 'round the back', I also approved of the hinged panel at top front of the Synergy case, which conceals an additional Firewire port and another two USB ports. These are ideal for plugging in occasional devices such as mobile audio interfaces, RAM sticks or dongles (many cases provide USB ports on their lower front panel where smaller devices can easily get broken off).

Inside the case, the wiring is a model of neatness, and there's also plenty of expansion potential if you need to install additional hard or optical drives later on. Talking of drives, both of the 500GB Seagate Barracuda models installed in the review PC were housed in Scythe Quiet Drive silencers — aluminium cases lined with foam rubber to damp vibration and reduce both airborne and structure-borne noise.

The motherboard in the review PC was from Asus (a popular company with DIY builders, and with some, but not all, system builders), and is a P5Q Deluxe running with a Front Side Bus speed of 1333MHz and featuring Intel's new P45 chip set. This was released in mid-2008 and is similar to last year's P35 chip set but adds native support for Intel's 45nm processors and support for the PCI Express 2.0 standard. Neither are earth-shattering improvements, especially for musicians, who are unlikely to need the extra PCI Express bandwidth for their typically modest graphics cards.

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Article Preview - Synergy Audio PC

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