I might be about to upgrade my PC in the coming weeks. I will probably have about £6/700 max for a CPU, RAM and mobo.

What's the best bang for buck combo you would recommend now?

 

IMHO, If you go the intel way, a 9700K is a decent investment, motherboard depends on the amount of features you need and if you want to squeeze a few extra cycles out of that cpu. Im not very up on AMD sorry. When I'm looking at builds I usually have a look at what the pro audio PC companies are selling and see if I can build something similar and push it a bit.

I'm currently running a 8700K at 4.9 per core with an all in one liquid radiator, and it runs cool enough to keep the fan down. On a Asus Maximus Hero X, with 32 gig crucial RAM, a 512 intel m.2 nvme drive, its all fairly pokey... but wasnt too costly an upgrade from my old system when I did it last year. I also reused my old SSD and put Omnisphere on it.

New Desk, new PC, sounds like a fine spring clean

 

The price/performance value of AMD Ryzen 2700X is unbeatable. Working at 4.0 MHz (No overclocking as I never liked the idea)
MB: ASUS PRIME X370-PRO (using the AMD X370 chipset. The newer ones come with the X470 which is supposed to be better for the specific CPU).
RAM: RAM PATRIOT PV48G300C6K VIPER 4 SERIES 16GB (4X4GB) DDR4 3000MHZ
Windows on SSD disk (SSD LITE-ON PH6-CE480-L MU3 SERIES 480GB 3D NAND 560/520 read/write)
Audient iD4 USB2
Presonus Studio One Pro v4.1.3.50787
Apart from that if you use VSTi's like Kontakt, a large SSD disk is a must as you will need fast reading speed.

Still testing but so far it can handle everything I throw at it pretty well (Would have gone for the 8700K but I think it's overpriced).
Bear in mind that I tend to overdo it when it comes to the number of VSTi tracks (usually more than 50 with a fair number of VSTs)
Also, have a look at the following DAWBench results:

 

Last edited: Feb 8, 2019

@techdevil He said "£6/700 max". And then you propose a $370 CPU. He could go that route if he buys very low quality other components, and I would so advise against that.

I'd say go with either an outdated [but still incredible value for a audio/video ws] second hand Intel computer based on i7-4790K, or go with AMD 2400G based computer, or AMD Ryzen 2xxx, depending on if you're willing to spend more for a graphics card or not. I would go for the first one, but if I was keen on getting something new - the second one. If you manage to scrape just a tad more money you could go with a Ryzen 2600X or even 2700X based computer.

Tip: don't save money on the power supply. Buy a decent 500W+ one from EVGA, Seasonic, Corsair. A PSU tends to go first in every PC I've made. Even good ones can break after 5 or more years of use. Same goes for HDDs.

 

Last edited: Feb 9, 2019

Even though it's a few years old, your current system is still perfectly decent and IMHO I can't think of a cpu-mb-ram combo under £700 that'll supply any significant improvement on what you have now.

I see on your soundcloud page that you're leaning these days toward film music? In which case you might want to also consider taking the Vienna VEP route and treat yourself to something like this - which will supply (once you throw in a drive or two) exponentially more kontakt power over a local network setup.

ISPs etc are always upgrading their kit, so basically there's loads of genuinely high-value server tech knocking about, cheap. The catch is the noise... it is possible on the larger rack sizes (3U up) to quiten things down significantly, but essentially these pups (especially blade servers) are purposed to keep everything inside cool in a commercial environment, not snuggle close to you or anyone you care about... However, if you've a basement, utility room, cupboard etc somewhere out of the way, why not turn it into a micro machine room a furnish yourself (in this random-choice instance) to a 2 x 8-core xeon, 96Gb ram VEP slave server @ £684, inc vat... I took this route myself about 6 months ago and have no regrets whatsoever, though getting to grips with VEP demanded a slightly different approach i.e. templates etc, which i have found to be a good thing overall, albeit somewhat challenging initially and substantially ongoing...

 

Last edited: Feb 9, 2019

Be careful with using AMD CPU. They have latency issues, and they show their power when the buffer is high, like when mixing.

 

@SineWave your right bro. sorry did not realise it was so expensive, holy shit, would appear I have a bit of a distorted view of prices due to my job, where I buy components at cost + 1% woops...... and I didn’t need to replace my memory, my bad.

Also agree on the importance of a decent PSU and M'board, but disagree on the AMD front, I know they are making great headway into Intel's lead, but they have only really overtaken at the very top end, and many others point out there are latency issues. Also, I think it depends on the VST your running, if you run a copy of DIVA for instance it requires a certain amount of clock speed as soon as you switch on multi-threading in Diva you lose a percentage due to multi-core inefficiencies. So, it is better not to run multi core on VSTi if possible. I worry that many low clocks don’t always beat a high single.

To throw another thing into the mix, hyperthreading, Cubase has always been a bit iffy with HT and they used to recommend switching it off, still do sometimes. I wonder if it’s worth it sticking to the i5 range and avoiding the problems HT can bring to the table. Also question the need to pay the extra for the K chip, depends if you’re going to OC it.

As for using a 4 Gen chip, the gains in recent motherboards, like USB3 and nvme M.2, you might not find on a m'board that supports the 4 series and IMHO it would be a bad idea to back yourself into that corner.

After having a quick look on the online stores my money would be on a decent z370 mboard and a i5 8600 if you can get it under your price limit depending on what other components you need to replace.

As always, many pro and cons to consider, good we can debate. PaulPi may be right and the processor is not where your going to make huge grounds into but prehaps the memory speed and mboard is where you might make the biggest gains.

 

Last edited: Feb 9, 2019

Nevermind @techdevil, I totally misread Bunford's post, too. Didn't notice his configuration in the sig. #oldgit #fridaynightbinge

Indeed, with Cubase, having an octa-core+ multicore CPU isn't that important, as Cubase works not as efficiently as Reaper [for instance] with CPUs that have more than 4 cores. So probably i7-7700K, or i7-8700K would be a better choice than AMD 2700X. Pair it with a decent Asus Prime Z270 [or Z370, I'd get model "-A"] motherboard with enough features for your taste. Too many features on a mobo can be slightly detrimental to its performance. Kingston Hyper-X 3200MHz low latency memory is not that much more expensive, so I would throw a couple of these in the mix, but if the money runs short 2800-3000 memory can save you a couple of dozen quids there, and the difference isn't deal-breaking.

Cheers!

 

And really, that configuration you have, Bunford, is still pretty killer. You won't gain much with upgrading it. 10-20%, a bit more with i7-8700K. If you can afford i7-9700K or better, that would make even more bits of difference, of course. But IMHO, it's not worth it.

 

If I remember rightly I think Legotron is usually good at this kind of thing and he may just appear with a well-researched config at some point.

Hang on while I put my Cubase defender hat on , v10 has big changes to multi core performance I just couldn’t resist….

#oldgit #fridaynightbinge are both topics I have a full subscription to, I tend to be a bit more crazy and cranky the morning after though .

 

That's nice to hear about multi-core performance improvements in Cubase 10. I still haven't had a chance to read the C10 changelog. I don't use it, but most of my clients do, so I have to be in the know.

So maybe AMD 2700X isn't such a bad choice, after all. The slightly bigger latency between cores isn't that much of a problem. It can still reach low [32, 64 samples] latencies, no problem. And I would never mix or master at such a low latency anyway, it's just for tracking. It's a waste of CPU cycles to use it for mixing. 256 or even 512 samples uses the CPU properly for that.

Gosh, it was an interesting discussion last night in that "Vanilla" thread, eh? That's what I miss on AudioSex. Some turmoil.

 

LOL, yes there is an expression in Scotland called "getting the rise", we Scots are a thrawn misrable bunch sometimes (and are proud of it) and often just argue for the sake of it....

 

Where did you learn this from? I plan to build my next workstation with Ryzen, can't find and discussion about the latency on the web but perhaps I am using wrong search terms

 

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/info/audio-pc-processor
Just in case compare the purple one on the left with others




Do not buy AMD Ryzen, it has serious problems with audio! Mentioned all over the internet, unless you pay 2000$ to get a 1000$ Intel performance!
See here for customizing the originpc M-class
https://www.originpc.com/workstation/desktops/

 

Wow that's surprising! Thank you for the info.

 

In reality, the difference doesn't look nearly as drastic. Actually it's absolutely imperceivable.
Give me AMD 2700X any day, I'll take it with absolute joy.

But I'm also running Reaper. And that thing uses all the cores properly.

 

I've bought in january 2018 a new pc with intel 8700 cpu and 16GB,without any graphic card and it works very well with my DAW(S1),I'm happy with it.
It's cheap and enough powerfull to produce music professionnally in 44/48KHz with 70 tracks and tons of plugins.
I use Max 70% of its power.
The worst plugin on the cpu is the Korg ARP Odyssey,which is insane!
I just hear some crackles if I lower the latency under 96 samples(I don't know why) and most of the time my buffer is between 256 samples to 1024.

If you hear people around internet they say you need a computer for the Nasa to make music.
Yes you need a good computer;but you don't need a 1000$ cpu.

 

Last edited: Feb 23, 2019

Sinewave I have a i7-4790K from when it was first released. Now I can say the chip is a beast. Not one issue with it never handling all my tracks / vst I throw at it. It's water cooled and I have over clocked it a few times but honestly I have not had to. It's that fast.

Now for the second part and you can be the judge, I was having issues with about 10 tracks and cubase 7.5 and 8. The latency was high recording guitar and slow performance. I said wow are you telling me I need to upgrade my i7-4790K to a faster CPU to keep up. Well I thought out of the box and tried a different software. Yes it was Cubase bloatware that was slowing my system down. Now please note, I guess I could have gotten by by freezing tracks and stuff but I did not want to do that. For those who want ot know which software solved my issues it's Reaper. At that point I said hell after all the money I have spent on Cubase and there upgrades enough is enough and I moved to reaper.
There was no way in Hell was I going to keep upgrading a perfectly good CPU every 6 to 12 months.

 

wtfff

 

Yes SIR WTF. Is exactly what I said.