I have a pair of Noctua DH-15s air cooling my 10th gen i9 CPU with no issues whatsoever when running 100+ tracks. They are super quiet and the only time they ever spin up is if I use my onboard graphics for something intense rather than my graphics card.

 

Don't. It's a stacked-cache chip, specifically designed to leverage more gaming performance. I've heard multiple times since the 3D's release that in multithreaded creative applications it actually loses out to its regular counterpart, and the non-3D is more ideal for a production and design scenarios. Neither chip will be bad per say, it's just not even close to being worth the price jump in your use case.

 

3D CPU not worth it...neither is AM5 unless you're living on the edge and have cash to burn.

For what you're paying for the B550 MOBO, I highly recommend getting an X570/X570S board for the same price. Better build quality, ports, and chipset for media applications. I use the Gigabyte brand because it has been flawless for me in two recent builds.

Everything else looks okay. I'm not sure if the cooler is going to be much better than the stock (if CPU comes with one). Maybe you can offset that cost toward a 2TB NVME.

One of my PCs was dedicated to be an audio/visual workstation for today and yesterday....meaning keeping the combability of my last decade of work until I stop doing "new" things with it. I learned from using Macs, that having a powerful legacy machine will save you brain cells in the long run. Get new laptops for new things....keep PC healthy to preserve the older, yet valuable things. I think you're on the right track to make this last 8 years...hopefully more because at that point, VST2 might not be supported anymore....and many will wish they maintained a good legacy machine.

 

You can forget about base clock, if cooling is ok it will run 5.2 on the p-cores.... single thread is on par, multi-core intel is a bit faster and cheaper overall - for the cache, lv3 might be less but look at lv1 and lv2

if you would want to overclock then the i5 would be about 20% faster than the ryzen

 

Last edited: Apr 24, 2023

I've been building my own music production PC's for 20+ years. This is what I do (too lazy for links but the info is there):

1) in comparing CPU's look no further than Passmark (cpubenchmark.net). The only numbers you need to compare are:
a) floating point math (most important for audio)
b) single thread rating
c) overall score (multithread rating)

the ranking of b) vs c) above depends on your DAW workflow.

2) DPC latency is more of a laptop issue since you're stuck with whatever they give you. There are some forum threads which suggest NVIDIA GPU's have worse DPC latency but I doubt that's accurate anymore and/or there are solutions for that by now. It's the least important issue for PC builders because if a certain GPU gives you bad DPC, just return it and get another one. Whereas if you bought a poor heatsink that causes too much noise or throttling, it's a pain to swap that out.

3) I like my machines to stay cool/silent so I usually find parts info at the silentpcreview forums. It was easier when the site itself was more active and kept lists themselves. I will sometimes cross-reference with shops who specialize in quiet builds (silentpc, quietpc, etc.) just to see what parts they use and then find more test comparisons about them myself (often unfortunately from gamer sites but I'm only looking at power consumption + noise measurements).

4) don't get caught up on thermal paste varieties. this is where many people make mistakes getting their info from gamer sites, because most of those pastes only last for a couple years. gamers switch/tweak their hardware often so they don't care, but music producers need something that lasts long. just stick with the Arctic MX series, it performs well and lasts for 8 years.

5) overall RAM latency (nanoseconds) is generally more important than what Mhz its running. calculators are easy to find online or some parts search engines have filters for this.

6) if low latency work is important (I'm talking 10ms and below), then you can check TAFKAT's thread in the Music Computers subforum on GS for DAWbench CPU comparisons + audio interface benchmarks

I personally like to work with energy efficient CPU's for the reasons above, which is why I prefer AMD's 65w CPU's for the best bang for buck in performance vs. efficiency.

 

Oh, I didn't know that. I thought Turbo referred to overclocking and that they would only ever run at base clock unless overclocked.

Yea, I think the Crucial Ballistix was recommended to me originally because of its 10ns latency which I hear is pretty good.
I don't think I've seen a DDR5 RAM below 12ns or 13ns. But then again, I haven't been looking much.

 

Yea, after days of research I had actually arrived at a build that was using the 5900X instead. It was this one:

-------

Yea, but I already have the 1080ti which I recently received as a gift from a friend so I wouldn't actually be spending money on one anyway.
It is currently in my old PC and LatencyMon has only ever recorded very high DPC latency from the drivers while playing games, not while producing, so assuming it stays that way it should be fine.

After much research and discussion in this thread and in other forums, this is the build I'm currently considering:

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/FN3nbK
Intel i5 13600KF
Dark Rock Pro 4 CPU Cooler
Asus TUF Gaming B660-Plus Wifi
Undecided OS SSD
Kingston KC3000 2TB SSD
Crucial Ballistix 32GB (2x16GB) - I already have this part
be quiet! Straight Power 11 650w - I already have this part
Asus Rog Strix 1080ti 11GB - I already have this part
PC Case Undecided, but maybe I could just reuse my Corsair Carbide 300R from 2014?

How's this looking?
There are still some open questions though:
- Is the Dark Rock Pro 4 overkill or is it a good pick? The 13600KF is pretty power hungry, so I'm assuming it'll get pretty hot.
- I don't know if you can turn off the Wifi on this Mainboard. If you can't then it's probably a no go, as Wifi causes DPC latency afaik.
- Regarding SSDs, am I going to lose performance/run into issues if I use a (smaller) SATA SSD as my OS drive and then use the M.2 drive(s) for everything else? If it's fine, what would be a good pick? Otherwise I'd probably just go with two Kingston KC3000. One 1TB, the other 2TB.
- The PSU is 650w, as far as I know the 13600KF goes up to 230w when overclocked, and the 1080ti can reach up to 400w (Both data I found on the Internet). Will I be fine? I've heard the estimated wattage on the PcPartPicker website is unreliable.

This quest for a nice music production PC is pretty exhausting. I'm currently on an i5 4670 lol.

 

Last edited: Apr 25, 2023

Welp, turns out that unless you have 12th Gen Intel CPU laying around, you can't actually update the BIOS of this MB to be compatible with the 13600KF because there's no BIOS Flashback feature. Back to the drawing board, I guess.
Now considering ASUS ROG Strix B660-A Gaming WIFI D4, or the MSI Z690-A Pro WIFI DDR4, both of which supposedly come with a BIOS Flashback feature, but between VRM and all those other misc. stats, I don't know which one I should pick.

Help would be appreciated.

 

it has 2 fans, so can be much louder than something like Noctua NH-U14S or NH-D15S

 

Good to know. From what I've read it's actually somewhat quieter than the Noctua at lower/mid RPM, but the difference is pretty marginal.

Any thoughts on the rest of the components?

 

yes you NEED a motherboard with BIOS flashback feature in order to use 13th gen cpu on 12th gen chipset motherboard,
you can see a button on its I/O panel which performs the update from usb stick put into certain USB port, without any processor installed in the actual socket,

ASUS ROG Strix B660-A Gaming WIFI D4 would be good choice, but you pick overclockable "K" processor and so you want Z690 (or Z790) chipset motherboard to actually make use of that additional performance benefits of unlocked cpu, so something like ASUS ROG STRIX Z690-A GAMING WIFI D4 would be my recommendation (also has flashback feature, also has DDR4 memory support)

 

Why that one over the MSI Z690-A Pro WIFI DDR4? I don't know shit about motherboards tbh. They fluctuate so highly in price and I don't know what features make them expensive or cheap. That one's nearly 100€ more expensive, so at that point I'd maybe be better off just buying a DDR5 board with new RAM.

 

just because local availability and local pricing in my country, no big difference across brands once you settle down on features you need

 

While overclocking might be accepted practice for gaming, for a media production tool it can cause nothing but problems. My newest build is a gaming board that has a full compliment of BIOS tweeks for overclocking everything - it all remains UNUSED. The little performance gain obtained from overclocking a CPU or GPU is not worth sacrificing stability and having to deal with overheating causing fans to kick up speed making more noise etc... As a result the board has been solid as a rock.

 

Stay away from overclocking. Just get a CPU that works good at stock setting. 5800x is good.

 

Interesting. I've never overclocked anything before, so I didn't know it had drawbacks outside of when it's done to the extreme.

 

Last edited: Apr 26, 2023

yep, you don`t need ultra high clocks for music production, any ryzen 7 from 5000 series will have enough ipc to run any music production system

 

i'd get an intel i5-13600K instead of the AMD. (If you can afford it, go for an i7).. Anyway, the i5-13600K has built in graphics.
With motherboards, it's hard to get bang for buck, cos u want a good one. Dont buy a gigabyte board! Ever!
I just built a MINI-ITX system thats practically silent. I got a COOLER MASTER ELITE 130 case and put a BEQUIET liquid cooling system in. The condenser mics dont pick up any fan noise! The case takes a standard ATX power supply which saves a bit of money.
Make sure you get fast memory chips! The specs can be misleading..

 

I'm not going to tell you what to get but I built my audio computer like I was building the fastest, quietest, FPS gaming computer I could for the money without overclocking, while making sure I got all the ports/features I would need. I'm also running a lite ver of Windows.

For that I went to the big gaming channels on yt and picked the best builds I could find for the time. There's people on there building computers often in these channels and they even put the machines through the ringer to see what they can handle.

Give it good consideration but not too much because it's a never ending rabbit hole. I spent ridicules months researching, rather wasting time, because newer and better builds keep coming.

 

that is true for sure,

but on the other hand "overclocking" also lets you adjust CPU frequency policies more thoroughly,
what I always recommend for any audio workstation is, to have consistent performance across all cores, means to have (boost) clocks configured on all cores the same, not having individually boosting clocks as it's seen by default (which results in performance fluctuation, particularly undesired for I/O workloads)