You don’t need a dedicated video card for a music PC, the onboard graphics of the CPU are plenty good enough (plus less components means lower cooling requirements).
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Yeah I know. But the impetus behind it is for my teen who wants to game and stream those games.
Another q
I’m trying to keep my SSD as clean as possible.
Can I put VST .dll files on the SSD and the “documents” or whatever on a seperate HDD? Would this be a mistake?
Slightly scattered thoughts here:
CPU Fans/Heatsinks - I am sure there are plenty of good ones on the market but I have been using Noctuas for years and I consider them as an excellent choice. Silent, heatsinks do perform and they are not too bulky.
Personally I would choose second hand I7 CPU instead over spanking new I5. I7 Gen 4 onwards provide adequate power for music making. I have recently seen second hand higher end I7 gen5 for £60 at CEX.
SSDs - they are tricky to choose right. If swapping regular HDD with SSD the performance difference between those is so huge that one does not care/think about how well SSD performs in itself. My personal favourite ones are by Samsung. They do what they promise nearly on any semi modern/modern config. However, they are not the cheapest. I found Gigabyte ones to be also consistent in terms of the performance but slower than Sams. SSD speed aside, the performance heavily depends on mobo and its sata drivers so it is important to check if/how the manufacturer supports them.
Capacity wise, i think 240-256GB is bare minimum. 480-500GB SSD are reasonably priced these days so this would be my choice. For sample libs (if required) I would get 7200/10000rpm high capacity hdd.
PSU: I got bronze cheap ones by Aerocool a few years back and cant complain. For the price difference between bronze and gold I would pay I got a mid class power conditioner.
RAM: I have been installing Timetec Ram modules for last two years in works CAD/modelling setups and they seem to be fine. Chips seem to be branded (in my case they were by Hynix) and pricing at amazon is reasonable.
Last but not least: PC case. It is worth getting something descent. This does note necessarily means expensive. Checking ebay or online shops may result in snapping a bargain. Planning what goes where inside the case, internal cable management and thoughtful positioning of case coolers should be enough to get a pc running quietly and efficiently.
I upgraded this year to a AMD plattform from the i7 2600k i had before.
The most boost comes from the nvm SSD.
I picked the ASRock Creator with 2x Thunderbolt Board, paired it with a presonous quantum interface, its running 16 Omnisphere Instances with a buffer size of 512 without glitches, 8 at 256.
I could further optimize my ram to lower it even further - running elektron overbridge at 256 is also fine. I think it comes also down to the drivers of the quantum, they are ok - not at the level of RME, but its only 1/3 of the price.
I am quiete pleased how the build turned out. 16 Instances of Omnisphere is much more than i personally need. (mostly 3-8 are enough for my type of music - and i can freeze parts.)
Im testing a new mac mini M1 for a week now. If you are working with logic, this might be something to consider, because its cool, quiet and fast. but not all DAWs are up to it just now and some Plugins wont run. But this will be a question of one or two months to be fixed. The M1 chip is for the intel chips what a tesla is for an old diesel engine.
reaper 6.18 (intel code) is running quite fine on the M1, the Arm-beta is struggling though.
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Good info.
I went with a 1200 socket cpu so that I could stay in the boiling CPU war for as long as possible. Now that the aforementioned M1 is out, Intel/AMD need to again up their game.
I would also go the used i7 route. They go for cheap and the difference is considerable.
So no problems with AMD compatibility compared to Intel? I use Intel at the moment, however hesitant to go AMD. Looking at Ryazan 5950x
Yes, so far - i could have picked a better graphics card, for gaming - the RAM runs stable at 3600 with minor tweaks (used amd ram calc for this.)
The quantum thunderbold interface is so far relatively stable when in music production mode, and in games, sometimes in youtube i have to reset the buffersize when there is an interruption - but that is a known driver problem of the quantum 2626 interface. It has no problems when there is a game open besides - maybe because the cpu dosent clock down during that time, which avoids this.
I did not run all possible optimization because i still wanted a somewhat ok system when idle. It consumes 100watt though - what is ok for me because its very powerful.
Which CPU would you recommend in 2022? i5 12600K or Ryzen 7 5800X or another?
I rebuilt my machine last year that I use for audio and video with an i9-10850K and it melts anything I throw at it, so the newer i5’s (which I find confusing, honestly it’s hard to keep up…) will smoke whatever you need.
However if I were buying something now and not then I’d probably be more interested in an M1 Mac.
Intel until 11 gen is fine.
12 gen introduce the slow core and fast core, and for latency sensitive applications I’m not convince right now. So I would go for the amd 5800x.
And the 8 core 16 thread of amd has a nice turbo boost near the 5Ghz which could be quite usefull.
On my side for daw I still use a really old E5-1680 8 core/16t 3Ghz and it’s not perfect but for my need it’s still completely fine.
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I have a 13900k 12th gen processor , 64GB ram, 4090 card. Are there any recent articles on how to tune this setup in windows 11 for a better ableton live 11 experience ?
doesn’t 13900k make it a 13th gen?
I just got a 12th gen i7 with a much crapper video card and less RAM and I’m finding it pretty difficult to make ableton hiccup tbh, are you having issues?
No i haven’t installed ableton yet but I wanted to know if there are special tunings I need to do. I haven’t used a music pc since windows 7 days so I feel a little behind. Then I guess I do have a 13th gen intel i9. Good to know how the numbering system works.
I don’t use Ableton or Windows, but a quick search shows this: https://help.ableton.com/hc/en-us/articles/209071469-Optimizing-Windows-for-Audio
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These specs should absolutely destroy anything you might throw at it in Ableton, without any optimization at all. The only thing I would do is make sure you always have everything updated, including your audio interface ASIO drivers. Also make sure that you set the “Windows Power profile” to “Performance”. This will ensure that the system can squeeze all potential out of itself. To be honest with those specs not sure that is even needed for anything less then a Hollywood movie scoring session.
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Agree with the above really - I use a an absolute sh!tload of effects in my projects, I haven’t even bothered to put a separate video card in mine yet and it’s refused to stutter once, I think the new chips/drives are pretty banging tbh.
The power management thing in that link is definitely important to keep it from throttling though.
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