I'm now officially an ex pc user, after nearly 30 years using dos and then windows.

My nice ryzen machine sits under my desk unused except for using a vm to visit here and the sister site.

I bought a new mac mini m1 recently and its changed my life. ;)

I only bought it because i couldn't believe the reports of how good it was and i thought i'd give it a quick try fully expecting that it would turn out to be all hype and i'd give it to my partner to use for her email/websurfing.

I love it now, runs eveything i throw at it and it never gets even warm, no matter what i ask it to do. Thats the thing that sold it to me, its completely quiet and uses fuck all electricity as well, lol.

I've only got the lowest base model and i'd probably get the 16gb ram if i bought it now. I've also got a 2TB nvme thunderbolt 4 external drive which runs a little bit faster than the mac internal ssd. So any ram swapping is so fast i dont notice if i use more than my internal ram, but i dont use huge sample libraries really so they may be a problem.

Just thought i'd throw a spanner in the works.

 

id say get the 5900x instead of the 5950x as 5950xs are still hard to get. save yourself a little cash, and you can actually buy them now. in tearms of daw perfomace theres not that much difference,
as yes the 5050x has more cores but the 5900x has a ghz boost over the 5950x so in terms of daw performance its minnimal. plus you can overclock the 12 core to 5ghz easy where as you cant with the 5950x.And with the money saved get a m.2 thats runs on pcie 4.0.

 

Last edited: Apr 23, 2021

My pc is awesome
RTX 3080
i7-10700
Memory 64GB
Project Drive 2TB
Power Supply 700W

 

I got 5900x the day it came out and can confirm all this. Price vs Performance its a real winner. It doesn't miss a beat or stutter even in my heaviest projects with multiple instances of DIVA, etc. No need for freezing or bouncing.

 

HP Z8 G4 @ $71,235

• Dual 28 cores, 2.7 GHz Xeon 8280
• 4.0 GHz with Intel Turbo Boot, 38.5 MB cache
  
• 3TB (24x 128GB) of 2933MHz DDR4 ECC Memory
  
• 2TB NVMe M.2 Solid-State Drive
  
• NVIDIA Quadro P600 2GB

LINK: https://ebay.to/3vf3kKw

 

Easy one... API 1608 for tracking, SSL 4000G for mixing, Studer A800, ton of outboard (usual suspects) and not a PC/MAC in sight.

 

I don't know shite about computers, but this desktop works for me...

 

This..

But bigger, more like this size..



And yeah ofc, after the 64/128GB of RAM, the SSDs and stuff..
I'd get the most tough, rock solid, industry/military-grade possible MoBo, and the best Ryzen I could find/afford,
but maybe a regular one of the X kind, no Threadripper which seems to offer less upgradability over the years..

 

Would it not be better to stick the cash to one side and then buy all the components at the same time in case of new developments, or your mind changes on one component and then there is a compatibility issue?? (I know, it’s not 1996!!). Prices for what you are after are only going to drop, so maybe you get a better price buying all at once.

 

Pretty happy with my current build:
MSI B550 A-Pro
Ryzen 5900X
32GB CL16 RAM
RTX 3070
800W Corsair PSU

Thankfully I got most parts in late 2020 so the prices weren't that insane. I had to pay 200€ above MSRP for the GPU though. Fucking Miners.
The only thing it's missing is some fast NVME storage. I'm waiting on the prices for that to go down though.

 

Awesome man thanks you for the info.. ill a bunch of heavy hitters omnisphere, diva, kontakt libraries so that good info

 

Yeah I gave issues with saving I bought a house .. and have a kid so there is always something that needs money towards.. but I get what your saying

 

Yep, I get what you are saying completely, just trying to think of how you get best bang for your buck.

 

There isn't much philosophy about a new computer for audio production.
The processor is the most important part. Ideally, the core count shouldn't compromise the single thread performance and price.
Unfortunately that's usually not the case. More cores means lower single thread performance, higher energy draw and heat. More heat means lower operating frequencies for AMD CPU's which are the only meaningful investment today.
As of now, the AMD 5000 series are the absolute winner for music production for many reasons.
Everything else is down to usual stuff like checking up on reviews of motherboards, SSDs and HDDs.

Intel is not an option because of their business model.

 

Because you stated "DREAM"

Storage: - 10x 100TB Nimbus SSD's ($40Kea) - in RAID 5 config (so there would be 20)
Boot Drive: Samsung nVme 980Pro 2TB SSD, mirrored to a Samsung 860 EVO.
CPU: - Intel i9 11900K
GPU: - Geoforce RTX 3090
Monitor: Samsung 49" Qled (arc)
RAM: - 4x 128GB modules
CASE: - It would have to be a custom-built one to accommodate something so over the top.

The keyword was 'dream'
- You'd need nearly a million dollars just for the storage and backups would not be a lot of fun.

 

Last edited by a moderator: May 21, 2021

Man, if you can afford this desktop PC I just listed, you'd have the best combination of interface(s) on the market, not to mention the best combination manual/automated mixing desk, the best microphones and instruments money could buy, you'd have a custom designed studio tested by the best acoustics engineer in the world and more.
You would disable all onboard audio and video completely.

 

I was fortunate enough to get almost my dream PC a couple months ago. Not quite but close enough. Only thing missing is a new GPU, but it really doesn't matter as I don't play games that much anymore and do only some 3D rendering and video editing. Specs:

Spoiler

CPU: AMD Threadripper 3970x
GPU: Asus Strix Nvidia 980 Ti (old af but still runs all of my 4 monitors simultaneously at around 50c, which for now is enough)
PSU: Corsair 850W 80 PLUS Platinum
Motherboard: Asus Zenith II Extreme
Case: Fractal Design Define 7 XL
CPU Cooling: EK-Quantum Kinetic D5 + EK-Coolstream Rad CE 420 + EK-Velocity
Memory: G.Skill Trident Z 3600Mhz C16 @ 3733Mhz (4 x 16Gb)
Boot drive: Samsung 970 Evo Plus 2TB
Other drives: Samsung 860 EVO 4TB mainly for Kontakt libraries + ~23TB combined in external and internal HDDs

This only answered your title. You seem to plan on building a computer with AMD processor and all I can say that you really can't go wrong with it. Better bang for the buck than you would get with Intel processor (unless you only play games). In music production, you kind of also benefit from higher clock speeds, but the difference is not really that much. AMD is much wiser choice if you plan on doing some other stuff too, like video editing, 3D rendering, or anything else productive.

 

get a mac then