Suggestions for a SFF .

[scaryjim]

Hmmm, tricky - the extra 16GB RAM and a 256GB NVME SSD are very similar in cost, and I don't really know how much difference running a session off SSD will make if he's (essentially) only recording a midi drum line over existing music. Might be best to spec up with 16GB, a single SSD (maybe ~512MB) and a large storage drive (~3TB), then see if there's anything left in the budget....

[Phage]

Hmmm, tricky - the extra 16GB RAM and a 256GB NVME SSD are very similar in cost, and I don't really know how much difference running a session off SSD will make if he's (essentially) only recording a midi drum line over existing music. Might be best to spec up with 16GB, a single SSD (maybe ~512MB) and a large storage drive (~3TB), then see if there's anything left in the budget....

Pretty much my thoughts. I have a similar set up with a 512 SSD and a 2Tb SSHD. We can always add more later.
So an 512 M2 SSD and a big piece of platters and see how much we have left....

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Some DAW benchmarks in the TR review:

http://techreport.com/review/31366/a...us-reviewed/12

[Phage]

Heh, yeah, pretty much anything will do what he wants - since he's using an electronic kit and just adding a drum track to pre-recorded mixes it's going to take very little processing power. And I know he's set himself on the 2 SSD thing, but tbh I'd be tempted to drop an SSD in favour of 32GB of RAM. Getting all the samples & drum sounds into RAM is going to be a lot better than swapping them off a disk, although I suspect that even 16GB would be enough to load the samples for a virtual kit - each individual sample is going to be pretty small.

It's an interesting workflow/setup - Recording the rest of the band separately to the drums. Not entirely sure I approve, speaking as a musician But it doesn't sound like it needs anything particularly special in terms of processing (since most of the processing will be handled in the audio interfaces and the virtual instruments, rather than the DAW). I used to run my recording rig off a 45W triple core Athlon with a USB interface and that handled multitrack overdubbing and playback without any issues.

Thinking about the comparitive performance leaks we've seen, the R7 1700 should have similar IPC to Haswell E, and has a higher boost clock, more cores, and a much lower TDP than the 5820k. The upshot of that is that it should performance at least as well if not better, whilst producing a lot less heat so being much easier to cool (equals a lot less noise). I think he should be easily persuadable to Ryzen on that basis

he's sold on a Ryzen 1700.
Can you suggest some parts for the rest of the build ?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have been trying to get feedback on what motherboards to choose in the Ryzen thread over on OcUK forums.

The Gigabyte B350 Gaming 3 seems a candidate so far as do some of the ASRock motherboards.

Edit!!

The MSI tomahawk has also been suggested.

[Phage]

Is there a mATX recommendation ?

[scaryjim]

Is there a mATX recommendation ?

There aren't a huge number of mATX motherboards out there yet ... and looking back at the original spec he wants a PCIe firewire card, a dGPU and potentially a discrete sound card, so that's 4 slots-worth of expansions (although he might find that onboard sound is good enough, tbh).

I'd normally plug ASUS, but they only seem to do one mATX B350 board and it's arrangement of PCIe slots means you only got 2 if you're using a dual slot GPU. OTOH it looks like every other board ebuyer list is a pre-order.

Scan breaks its listing down into mATX boards. It looks like any MSI or Gigabyte board would do, as would the ASRock AB350M Pro4. Scan have A320 boards listed but they're almost all "call for pricing", which implies to me that they're probably not in stock...