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...

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.

However, the P5Q does feature three x16 PCI Express slots and two x1 PCI Express slots, plus two PCI slots, providing good expansion potential for those who are into all things cardy. It also offers six SATA 3.0 ports, two RJ45 LAN ports and a SATA port for external hard drives, so few users will ever need to install additional port expander cards.

The back of the case is where you'll find most of the Synergy's connections, but there are also two extra USB ports and a Firewire port on the top for easier access.Unfortunately, the Firewire controller is from LSI/Agere, and known to have various problems with audio interfaces from MOTU, Presonus and RME, among others (the same chip has also been causing problems for new Macbook Pro and iMac users). This isn't a major issue, since you can buy a suitable Firewire expansion card featuring the highly compatible TI chip for under £10 if you do run into problems, but it's nevertheless annoying on a dedicated audio PC.

Fitted in the review unit expansion slots were a modest Nvidia 7300 graphics card (I chose one for my own PC because of its low power consumption and passive cooling, both of which help to keep noise levels down) and an M-Audio Audiophile 2496 soundcard for testing purposes.

The most expensive component by far in the review machine was the CPU, since Intel's Core 2 Extreme Q9650 model contains four cores, each running at 3GHz, and currently retails at around £350! However, if your budget stretches this far, such a high-powered choice is a good one for running loads of soft synths, especially in combination with the higher 1333MHz FSB to ferry all the data about.

In a way, I was surprised to see that Windows XP 32-bit was installed, but many builders have stockpiled this now–discontinued operating system, as it still provides slightly better performance than the newer Vista at low latency.

One unusual choice was the total system RAM complement of 3GB (most builders opt for 2GB or 4GB, but in this system there are three high-quality 1GB DDR2 800MHz modules). As I explained in PC Notes August 2008, if you fit 4GB when running a 32-bit operating system you're only likely to see between 3GB and 3.5GB of available RAM, so this seems a sensible compromise. Sometimes, fitting an odd number of RAM sticks can result in all your RAM running in single- rather than dual-channel mode (resulting in half the theoretical memory bandwidth), but in this motherboard two of the three gigabytes run as dual-channel, while the third gigabyte will run as single–channel. Heavy sample users may not be able to run quite as many samples at low latencies as they might with 4GB RAM installed, but most musicians are far more likely to benefit from the extra 1GB of RAM than they are to notice this slight reduction in performance.

In Use

The inside of the case is a model of neatness, and as you can see, there's plenty of room for future expansion.Acoustic noise is an important issue for most of us, so I'm pleased to report that the quiet Seasonic 500W PSU, Noctua CPU cooler and associated 92mm fan, along with the Scythe Quiet Drive silencers, all help significantly in keeping overall noise levels down. I'd judge that noise was on a par with most specialist music PCs, although drive seek noise was still slightly audible despite the silencers, and the side panels rattled a little, both of which could be easily improved by lining the case with silencing material. The Synergy PC also ran cool — the idling temperatures of the four cores were fairly low at 42 degrees Celsius, and during my torture test they stabilised at a healthy 60 degrees Celsius.

In the BIOS, the High Definition Audio soundchip had sensibly been disabled, to avoid confusion with whichever high-quality audio interface you decide to install for serious work, and once in Windows I was pleased to note that all my 'essential' XP tweaks had been implemented (Processor Scheduling to 'Background Services', Power schemes to 'Always On', and Sounds set to 'No Sounds'), as had most of the ones I deemed 'useful' in my XP Tweaks feature in the September 2006 issue of SOS.

The first hard drive had sensibly been divided into 44GB System and 420GB Data partitions, so even if you ever have to restore the Windows partition you won't lose any personal stuff. There's also an additional 3.5GB partition holding the Acronis True Image backup file of the Windows partition as shipped, just in case of emergencies. The 500GB Audio drive had been left as one huge 470GB storage area for your projects. In my benchmark tests, hard drive performance proved to be excellent, providing a massive 100MB–per–second sustained transfer rate, and a huge theoretical 16-bit/44.1kHz track count of 700!

Sisoftware's Sandra measured the highest results of any SOS review PC to date, with Memory Bandwidth of 6.1 GB/second, CPU Arithmetic of 44.24 GIPS (Dhrystone) and 30.67 GFLOPS (Whetstone), and CPU Multimedia of 110 MPixels/s (Integer) and 62 MPixels/s (Float). However, the most appropriate test for any music PC is one that contains a representative combination of audio tracks, plug-ins and VST Instruments, so once again I turned to the Blofelds DSP40 benchmark test (www.dawbench.com/benchmarks.htm). I experienced some glitching issues at low latencies (even with 'safe' 70 percent CPU meter readings), but these could well be due to the audio interface, so I concentrated on higher values, to exclude the interface contribution and concentrate on PC performance alone. At a buffer size of 512 samples, the Q9650 turned in the impressive performance of 199 Cubase Magneto plug-ins, almost exactly 25 percent more than the 161 of the Q6600 processor, and perfectly in line with their relative clock speeds (see screen at start of review).

Final Thoughts

The Synergy PC is also available in a rackmount case — and for exactly the same price as the tower case version.Digital Village have been designing and assembling their specialist music PCs in house for quite a few years now, and they have already helped countless musicians seeking a reliable PC whose components have been thoroughly tested for their compatibility and performance with music hardware and software, along with technical support from people who know their audio interfaces from their E-bows.

Some Firewire audio interface users may have to bypass the motherboard's Firewire ports in favour of a £10 expansion card, but apart from that there's precious little to grumble about in this system. In the middle of 2007 I reviewed a similar specified PC to this one, except for its slower 2.4GHz quad–core processor, and it retailed at £2300. Here we are, 18 months later, and you can get 25 percent faster performance for £850 less!

To sum up, this Synergy PC from Digital Village is the fastest we've yet seen at Sound On Sound, looks elegant and has relatively low acoustic noise. What more could you ask for?