Music production PC build

[DanceswithUnix]

Think we need a reply from the OP on storage size, a 1TB ssd would blow the entire budget

I am guessing on the A10 that audio processing will use similar maths to video encoding. There are benchmarks on that, where saving £80 on the A10 costs you about another 50% in time. If that is 0.2 seconds becomes 0.3 seconds, then meh. If that means 2 hours encoding becomes three, then that may or may not be acceptable. If that means only mixing 20 channels of audio together instead of 30 in real time, that could be game over. With a lack of practical experience here I think we need more questions.

Wooda, I presume you have a PC already doing this stuff? If so, what sort of spec is it and how good/bad is it? If we can get an idea of what needs improving and by roughly how much then we should be able to tailor this better to your needs.

[wooda916]

Think we need a reply from the OP on storage size, a 1TB ssd would blow the entire budget

I am guessing on the A10 that audio processing will use similar maths to video encoding. There are benchmarks on that, where saving £80 on the A10 costs you about another 50% in time. If that is 0.2 seconds becomes 0.3 seconds, then meh. If that means 2 hours encoding becomes three, then that may or may not be acceptable. If that means only mixing 20 channels of audio together instead of 30 in real time, that could be game over. With a lack of practical experience here I think we need more questions.

Wooda, I presume you have a PC already doing this stuff? If so, what sort of spec is it and how good/bad is it? If we can get an idea of what needs improving and by roughly how much then we should be able to tailor this better to your needs.

I need a large storage unit for my sample library (thousands of 24bit .WAV samples takes up a lot of space). 1TB is probably more than I actually need but the price difference between ~500GB and 1TB isn't huge so I thought, better too much than not enough and not have to worry about it. 1TB SSD is pretty much out of the question for me ATM, I just can't justify plowing that much money into storage when you can get HDD for so cheap.

The CPU gets rinsed when a lot of audio processing is going on, long chains of VSTs and plug ins (EQs, compressors etc.) can get pretty intensive. My current laptop is now coming up to 6 years old, it's a Dell inspiron 1720, it has 1.6GHz intel core 2 duo processor and 2GB of RAM and it just can't handle complex projects with a lot going on, I have to bounce stuff to audio to get rid of plug in chains which a) means that I can't then easily go back and change plug in settings and b) slows down and interrupts the work flow which affects creativity.

As I haven't built a PC for nearly a decade I'm pretty out of the loop with components but the general consensus seems to be that AMD have fallen quite far behind Intel these days so I haven't looked into their processors all that much.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Aria has the CPU in stock:

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/...ource=googleps

[DanceswithUnix]

AMD were behind, they seem to be catching up again and their emphasis on lots of cores rather than single core performance seems to be lining them up well for the future.

Tried to find some DAW benchmarks for recent AMD chips, but could only find this:

http://www.gearslutz.com/board/music...at-my-hat.html

according to which the 8 core 8350 is a reasonable cost saving choice compared to a i7 3770. It would certainly eat your old core2 duo, but then 6 years on you would expect most things to I guess

Anyway, from what you said your original list of bits sounds like it would do the job fine. We could probably finesse it a bit faster or cheaper, but I don't think you are far off.

[Pob255]

Aria has the CPU in stock:

http://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/...ource=googleps

but the xeon has no onboard graphics so would need a separate graphics card, if he's doing VST stuff then AFAIK there's no GPGPU acceleration to be gained, so that's going to eat into the saving, probably better off with the i5-3570

[wooda916]

Right, based on the info i've made a few mods to the build and this is what I reckon I'm going to go with:

MOBO: Asus P8Z77-V LX Intel Z77 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard
CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K 3.40GHz (Ivybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor (77W)
PSU: Seasonic SS-360GP 360W Power Supply (PSU) 80+ GOLD
SSD: Plextor 128GB M5S SSD - Solid State Drive - PX-128M5S
HDD: Seagate 1TB Barracuda Internal Hard Drive
RAM: CORSAIR Vengeance 8GB*(2 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Low Profile Desktop Memory Model CML8GX3M2A1600C9
CPU Cooling: Enermax ETS-T40-TB
Case: Nexus Thrio 310 Acoustically Lined Case

All of which I calculate will cost about £560. Thanks for all the help and advice so far - really appreciate your input.

How does this build sound?

[Pob255]

Personally I'd go back to the Asus P8H77-V, it's a better board than the LX, all the z77 chipset gives you over the h77 is overclocking but the VRM's on LX board are too weak to run long term overclocking.
(I don't trust asus's LX boards anymore)

Same for cpu if you're not going to overclock then just get the non-K cpu, I'd probably look at the 3470 instead as 3.4ghz to 3.2ghz isn't going to be that noticeable

[Willzzz]

Yeah the 3470 is the sweet spot in terms of price/performance imo.

Plus you get to save on the MB and can ditch the CPU cooler entirely.

[wooda916]

Personally I'd go back to the Asus P8H77-V, it's a better board than the LX, all the z77 chipset gives you over the h77 is overclocking but the VRM's on LX board are too weak to run long term overclocking.
(I don't trust asus's LX boards anymore)

Same for cpu if you're not going to overclock then just get the non-K cpu, I'd probably look at the 3470 instead as 3.4ghz to 3.2ghz isn't going to be that noticeable

Good advice! Yea think i'll go for the H77 then, I was going to ask what peoples opinions on the LX series were.

The only reason I was going for the K version of the CPU was that I found an OEM which was only £10 more than the non-K version. The 3470 represents quite a large saving though (~15%) and certainly doesn't look like its 15% worse (5% less speed).

[wooda916]

Yeah the 3470 is the sweet spot in terms of price/performance imo.

Plus you get to save on the MB and can ditch the CPU cooler entirely.

Yea the 3470 does look like a lot of bang for buck. Would it really be advisable to ditch the CPU cooling? Would case fans be enough? I'd like to keep it running nicely.