Carillon Core 4

Photo: Mike Cameron

Computer specifications have changed radically in the three years since Carillon launched their first music PCs, but the company's signature metal rackmount case still sets them apart. Their powerful Core 4 machine offers support for three monitors, plus a huge 400GB RAID 0 hard drive array for audio data.

I first reviewed a Carillon music PC in SOS July 2001, and the 866MHz Pentium III processor, 128MB of RAM, and single 20GB hard drive of that machine provide a reminder of just how rapidly PC technology moves onwards. However, the company's custom-designed rackmount case has stood the test of time, and I suspect will still be going strong for many years to come, its 2mm-thick steel sleeve making it one of the most rugged designs available.

Carillon have recently expanded their range to include cheaper tower case systems from £599, miniature shuttle systems from £669, and both Centrino and desktop replacement laptops, but the core of their range is still based on the AC1 (Audio Computer) rackmount case. Models in the AC1 range start at just £699 for the AC1 LE and move up through the Core systems 1, 2, 3 and 4 with faster processors and more hard drives. There are also more specialised machines such as the blue-panelled AC1HD — the only Digidesign HD-certified audio-specific PC in the world — and the AC1X, fitted with dual Xeon processors.

Core systems can be supplied without music hardware and software, but you can also select these on-line to add to your system before it's delivered, or choose from various pre-configured solutions for applications such as sampling, beat and loop creation, and recording guitar-based music. The subject of this review is the Core 4, which is the fastest single-processor PC in the range, fitted with a 3.4GHz P4 processor, 2GB of RAM and three hard drives: an 80GB EIDE model for system use, and twin 200GB SATA models set up as a RAID 0 array for audio purposes. With a Matrox P650 triple-head graphics card, a versatile DVD-RW writer and the usual Carillon extras, it has an impressive spec.

Closer Inspection

The AC1 rackmount case was as impressive as I remembered it, and considerably sturdier than any PC tower case. Its aluminium front panel offers up to three 5.25-inch drive bays and two 3.5-inch ones; the three internal hard drives and NEC DVD-RW drive already fitted meant that only one of the (5.25-inch) bays was still free in the review system.

The handy extras are still there, including the modular front-panel options for transport controls or MIDI controllers, Sorbothane vibration-damped feet for desktop use, and the front-panel stereo jack Patch socket, which is routed through to an identical rear-panel socket so you can have permanent front-panel access to your choice of audio I/O. Carillon only sell this case as part of a complete PC system.

The Carillon AC1 case features built-in transport/MIDI controls, and an audio socket which is patched through to the rear panel.Photo: Mike Cameron

Inside, the interior was extremely tidy. Carillon are still staunch supporters of Intel's own motherboards, and while these may not have the range of overclocking features favoured by some enthusiasts, Intel boards are renowned for their rock-solid stability and reliability, which is far more important for the serious musician. The D875PBZ board fitted in the Carillon PC is well laid out, has a massive passive heatsink on its Northbridge chip set rather than a fan, and the various connectors are positioned such that there's still plenty of space left around the most critical component — the CPU.

In this machine a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 had been fitted, along with Zalman's popular Flower cooler. The cool air intake is provided by twin side vents, while a 80mm case fan sits adjacent to the CPU to extract the warm air via an adaptor tube to the 60mm exit grille. A 320 Watt version of Carillon's own Ultramute brand of quiet PSU completed the power and cooling arrangements.

The D875PBZ has one AGP and five PCI expansion slots. A Matrox P650 triple-head graphics card had been fitted in the AGP slot (see box) while PCI slot three housed a Conexant Systems 56k modem card. Many specialist music retailers don't fit modems to their music PCs, but Carillon rely on one for their Carillon Fix service (see Carillon Extras box). Slot four housed a VIA Technologies Firewire Controller with two six-pin and one four-pin Firewire ports, overcoming the lack of integral Firewire support that is this motherboard's only real limitation. Six USB 2.0 ports appear as standard on the rear panel, a total that's reached on many PCs only by installing a dummy backplate and thus losing a PCI slot. The motherboard supports eight USB 2.0 ports in total, and one of these was used for the optional RTM1 Transport Panel (£69) with its five large positive transport buttons and metronome clicker, which I described in detail in my original Carillon review. The remaining ports are one serial, one parallel, PS/2 mouse and keyboard, and LAN.

The Core 4 provides six rear-panel USB ports without using up a PCI slot, although there's no integral Firewire support on the Intel motherboard, meaning that a PCI Firewire card is included.Photo: Mike Cameron

The BIOS is proprietary to Intel, and while there are few overclocking options, there are still plenty of performance-related tweaks on offer for those who wish to delve deeper. Carillon had left hyperthreading disabled for maximum compatibility, but are happy for users to enable it if they wish, which I later did for my CPU tests. There's no onboard audio chip to disable on this motherboard, and for the review model Carillon had fitted one of Emu's new 1212M audio interfaces, with its 1010 PCI card in slot two and 0202 daughterboard in slot one. This left only slot five empty for future expansion, but the Emu cards do provide a Firewire port, so you could probably do without the separate Firewire card if necessary.

Drive-wise, there are two ATA100 headers and two SATA 150 headers on the motherboard. Carillon had fitted Seagate Barracuda hard drives throughout, with an 80GB PATA model connected as Primary Master for System duties, and a pair of 200GB SATA models connected as a RAID 0 array for audio work. All three drives had been fitted into Silentdrive sleeves inside a robust internal cage, using a small modification to accommodate the two SATA connectors.

In the topmost 5.25-inch drive bay a black NEC ND2500A DVD-RW drive had been fitted and connected as EIDE Secondary Master. This is apparently the first writer to manage 8x DVD-R and 4x DVD-RW speeds while also supporting DVD+R and DVD+RW formats for maximum compatibility, as well as providing good CD-R writing quality at a good price. Carillon had disabled the floppy drive controller in the BIOS, as no drive was fitted, and I suspect few users will miss one.

Finally, for the purposes of this review Carillon also provided me with three Viewsonic VP181b flat-screen monitors, along with Steinberg's Nuendo 2.0 software, so I could perform some practical tests of the P650 graphics card's triple-head capabilities (see box).

Performance

As expected, all the tweaks for optimum Windows audio performance had been carried out; with 2GB of RAM, the page file had wisely been set to a custom Initial size of 2GB, with a Maximum size of 4GB. SiSoftware's Sandra test suite measured 4765MB/second and 4763MB/second for Integer and Float memory bandwidths, showing the slight performance boost of Intel's PAT technology over Asus' Hyperpath equivalent, which it beat by just a few percent.

However, for most musicians running loads of plug-ins and soft synths, the single most important parameter is likely to be CPU performance, and this 3.4GHz P4 system measured 34 percent with the Steinberg/Fivetowers performance test with 23ms latency in Play mode, and 41 percent at 4ms latency. These figures dropped to 33 percent and 38 percent once I'd enabled hyperthreading in the BIOS, all of which tie in fairly closely with the expected improvement over my own P4C 2.8GHz system dictated by the 21 percent increase in clock speed.

Carillon's Pentium 4C 3.4GHz PC is the fastest P4 system I've reviewed to date, and its result sits exactly in line with other P4C systems of different clock speeds, beaten only by dual-processor setups based on Intel's Xeon.

With the HT left enabled, Sandra 's CPU Arithmetic benchmarks measured 10477MIPS Dhrystone, 3444MFLOPS Whetstone, and 7428MFLOPS for iSSE2, while CPU Multimedia measurements were 26074it/s integer and 37157it/s floating-point. Once again these results tallied quite closely with my own 800MHz FSB 2.8GHz system multiplied by 3.4/2.8, proving that the increased performance is solely due to the higher CPU clock speed — in other words, you get about 21 percent better performance than a 2.8GHz P4C system, and about 13 percent more than a 3.0GHz P4C system. If you want even faster CPU performance then Carillon now have dual-Xeon systems in their range.

The PATA hard drive had been split into a 10GB C system partition, with the remaining 65GB or so devoted to a D partition for audio sample data, both being formatted with FAT32. Dskbench measured 55.6MB/second sustained read and write speeds for C and a slightly slower 50.3MB/second for the inner D partition. However, on this system I was far more interested in the results for the SATA RAID E drive, where the sustained read performance was a staggering 124.2MB/second, and the write a still-amazing 95.0MB/second, giving a potential 412 16-bit/44.1kHz playback tracks with a 128k block buffer size, which equates to 126 tracks at 24-bit/96kHz. Real-world figures are likely to be rather lower than this theoretical figure, but you ought to get a hundred tracks with few problems.

To complete my findings, I got on well with the cordless mouse/keyboard pair, even up to distances of three to four metres away from the base unit, although I did find the scroll wheel a little 'scratchy' in use, and due to an oversight someone at Carillon had mistakenly stuck the wrong overlays on the left Shift and Windows keys.

Silk & Steel

Carillon's heavy-duty aluminium and steel rackmount case will never be a cheap item to manufacture, but it means that their PCs are undoubtedly among the most rugged systems around. They have achieved an excellent reputation for quality in the three years since their launch, yet their cheapest rackmount system is just £699; and while £2199 may sound expensive for a 3.4GHz Pentium 4 PC without monitor, music hardware or software, this Core 4 system features a huge 2GB of RAM, a powerful Matrox P650 graphics card and a versatile DVD writer, plus three hard drives totaling 480GB capacity. Where I managed to find any other specialist retailer who could offer a computer with a similar specification, the price ended up quite similar.

Although you can buy quieter desktop systems now that other manufacturers are using acoustic foam case linings, this Carillon Core 4 PC is an extremely attractive proposition for anyone who wants a reliable, desirable, and quiet PC to bolt into a rack, and it comes with an impressive list of extras including a 6GB sample library. It doesn't have the fastest CPU I've tested (that crown currently belongs to Red Submarine's dual 3.06GHz Xeon system), and it's fair to say that if your budget is over £2000 and you're aiming to run the maximum number of soft synths and plug-ins, rather than hundreds of audio tracks, a dual-Xeon system might suit you better. However, the Carillon Core 4's 2GB of RAM and amazingly fast and vast 400GB audio RAID drives make this system a perfect partner for someone who wants to run bucketloads of 24-bit/96kHz audio and sampler tracks, particularly with synchronised video alongside. Keep on tracking!