Using Windows mini PCs - minimum spec? What to look for?
Following on from Andrew Pask's blog post on setting up a tiny Windows based installation,...
I've been having a look on Amazon and it turns out that there are quite a lot of these little Windows computers. Eg, this looks like it might be quite good.. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B01AQGVP1U?psc=1
The thing is, I'm pretty ignorant when it comes to Windows machines and what spec will run how much Max. Can anyone offer any pointers/minimum spec for audio or whatever?
To help narrow it down a bit, the project that I'm considering doing this for is at the moment running on my MacBook Pro at 55% cpu. That's 5 players - sampler, fluid synth, vst synth, 3 LED lamps per player. But the way the project is shaping up, I would only have one "player" per Windows minicomputer, and run 4 of them. My guess is that one of these little PCs would cope with that (the only big issue I can think of (aside from having to reprogramme everything using only Windows 3POs) is that I would lose sync between the players. That might or might not be a problem. But I'm just exploring the idea at the moment. Also, I'd need a DMX box on each PC, but I think that the funding will allow for that.)
Thanks!
Yeah we haven't had much luck with Atom processors. I think Darwin tried one of the earlier Atom based compute sticks , it was just a little lightweight, and we only revisited the idea when we saw the i3 had been released.
You could probably do a lot of MIDI processing on it!
Cheers
-A
Ok, so avoid anything with Atom Inside.
As far as I can tell from the spec sheet, I'm looking for something with STK2 in the serial number - unfortunately all the ones I can find on Amazon are STK1xxxx. So maybe it's not available in the UK yet.
When it _is, do you think it'll cope with much audio processing? (I notice that most of your sound generation is happening in the outboard synth!)
Yeah I'm making sounds with my synth but all my processing is in Max in the compute stick.
Send me some example code and I'll run it for you and report back if you like - or if you have a fave MSP benchmark, I can never keep up with those
Cheers
-A