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WTF do you want to do THAT!

Dave.

Agree, 24 bit at 44.1khz is plenty. Having individual tracks at such a high resolution is truly wasteful. It's like having 2000hp in a front wheel drive car with snow tires.

If you want to save an unmastered mix at the highest resolution for posterity then by all means.

I'm not aware of any incompatibility issues with either of the latest AMD and Intel chipsets, but you'll want to verify support with your audio interface and DAW manufacturers. In the past most benchmarks had Intel outperforming AMD clock for clock in most multimedia applications. But with the sheer power advantage inherent in the latest AMD solutions, it very well could make up any ground lost and then some. I certainly wouldn't shy away from AMD from a performance standpoint at the moment unless your audio hardware or software vendors tell you otherwise.
 
What the others said, mostly (not gonna take a swing at that 96/192 tarbaby). This is spec'd a little more like a gaming machine than one for audio. You don't need that much CPU or video memory for audio generally, but I would make sure I could run at least 2 HD monitors.

I'd double the memory if you're going to be using a lot of samples and/or plugins. Maybe get 2 smallish SSDs (256) and configure them for RAID 0 for just the OS, apps and other stuff or a larger pair configured as RAID 1 (slower, but less backup worry, though I'd still run them at least after s/w install/upgrades). An external SSD for projects connected via USB 3.0 would be my preference over using the same drive(s) as o/s & apps. If you use a pair (or more) configured as RAID 1 (or higher) you'll have better data reliability. But, still, make sure you've got a backup application running periodically on both when you aren't using the system.

What kind of interface are you using with this monster? I'd get one that can take advantage of the USB 3.0 ports if you're buying a new one.
 
I've been using a Ryzen 7 system as my audio/video machine for a few months now, and I really like it. But I went with Ryzen's high core count to aid in rendering video. It's not really necessary for handling audio. My i7 4770 did great for audio as well. But the Ryzen is a great CPU and works well. I did run into a compatibility issue with ASIO4ALL while trying out an entry-level audio interface. It wouldn't get below a 256 sample buffer size without severe dropouts. My RME works great though, whether with its own drivers or ASIO4ALL.

Places where you could save some money:
  • the 'X' version of the Ryzen. Are you really going to overclock it? If not, go for the non-X version and save a little money.
  • the liquid cooler. If you're not going to overclock, the stock AMD air cooler/heat sink will be fine. Just remember that Ryzen reports +20C temperature, so it'll look like it's running a little hotter than it actually is.
  • the power supply. 1000W isn't going to be necessary for a single gtx1050.
  • the glass-sided case. If this is your first build, or if you're no good at cable management, or if you don't have some flashy RGB stuff going into your build that you want to show off, you could probably find an all-metal case without the glass panel for cheaper.
  • the GTX1050. The Ryzen will be more than capable of driving multiple desktop displays. If you had a weaker CPU, I'd encourage a GPU. But it adds yet another fan that'll cause yet more noise
  • the 1TB SSD. You can get a smaller SSD to use as your system drive, and then a couple of 1TB or larger HDDs as project storage/archival. The price difference between a 512GB and a 1TB SSD is pretty huge.
For the memory: your board has 4 DIMM slots, and maxes out at 64GB of RAM. I'd deal only in 16GB memory sticks instead of 8GB. If you ever want to max out the system RAM, you'd have to get rid of the 8GB sticks anyways.

Also, put some consideration into your chassis fans. The case will probably come with a couple, but they usually kind of suck. Take a look at Noctua or Be Quiet!, and explore the fan curve settings in your BIOS or "helper" app that comes with your motherboard. A noisy computer is worthless in a home studio.
 
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Did I not read somewhere that raid arrays were a bad idea with SSDs?
There have been questions in the past, but with the current state of SSDs and RAID controllers I'm very comfortable, i.e., I sleep well at night, with a RAID 1 configuration for my projects. I suspect these kinds of concerns may have more relevance in a high-performance, 100% uptime environment, though, and not for your [even avid] home recordist. (I may be too comfortable since I practically never back it up, and I did have one failure early on using older HDDs, but in that case I lost no data because of the mirrored drive.)

I'm a fan of mirroring but the noise level of HDDs is something to consider, as well as the extra heat they generate. Of course, I'm using a MacBook Pro and Mini, so everything is pretty tightly packed. In a big case it's not as significant, and there the fan noise might be the loudest part. Mine almost never run, and the RAID enclosure if fanless, though I keep it actually unenclosed!
 
Did I not read somewhere that raid arrays were a bad idea with SSDs?

Dave.

Nothing in particular, but I wouldn't bother for performance purposes. SSDs can saturate a SATA connection on their own. I've not once in several years using SSDs had them hold up my work flow. It would seem reasonable that for most of us we would never actually see the benefit from RAID0 (striping) SSDs.

One SSD for OS and software, a large platter drive for project/general data storage, and one USB drive for backups of both of the computer's drives (using something like Acronis) still seems like a reasonable solution for most. Also happens to be exactly what I've been doing for a few years now.
 
Nothing in particular, but I wouldn't bother for performance purposes. SSDs can saturate a SATA connection on their own. I've not once in several years using SSDs had them hold up my work flow. It would seem reasonable that for most of us we would never actually see the benefit from RAID0 (striping) SSDs.

One SSD for OS and software, a large platter drive for project/general data storage, and one USB drive for backups of both of the computer's drives (using something like Acronis) still seems like a reasonable solution for most. Also happens to be exactly what I've been doing for a few years now.

Agreed. Plus, SATA is soooo yesterday when it comes to SSDs. NVMe is where its at now :D Out of pure geekery, I put an NVMe M.2 drive in my Ryzen system and it's insane. Before I made it my system drive and put the OS on it, it was actually reading and writing at 3500 MB/s. That's just ludicrous speed. I think that now it's more in the 2500 MB/s read/write range, which is still stupid fast.

And I agree on the SSD for OS, HDD for mass storage, and a good backup location for redundancy. A wise man once told me that "data that exists in only one place might as well not exist at all".

I'm gonna move to a proper RAID array NAS before long. Working with video has caught up to my 4TB WD MyCloud and I'm only months away from filling it to capacity. I've got my eye on a Synology 8-bay with as many 10TB WD or Seagate NAS drives as I can afford. That's gonna be a fun project once I can afford it ;)
 
Agreed. Plus, SATA is soooo yesterday when it comes to SSDs. NVMe is where its at now :D Out of pure geekery, I put an NVMe M.2 drive in my Ryzen system and it's insane. Before I made it my system drive and put the OS on it, it was actually reading and writing at 3500 MB/s. That's just ludicrous speed. I think that now it's more in the 2500 MB/s read/write range, which is still stupid fast.

Very cool! My nearly 4 year old PC (using a 4770 just like you were) has no such option. But I have to tell you - for an older machine I have no problem keeping up with the kids and their fanciest VSTs.
 
Very cool! My nearly 4 year old PC (using a 4770 just like you were) has no such option. But I have to tell you - for an older machine I have no problem keeping up with the kids and their fanciest VSTs.

That 4770 was a great processor. I only moved away from it because the Z97 board it was on fried in a static/shock incident as I was plugging a USB device into it. It really did a great job for audio. It never even broke a sweat in my largest projects.

Both of my Z97 boards (one from Asus and one from Gigabyte) had M.2 slots on them, but they were only PCIe x2 instead of x4, so there wouldn't have been much benefit to using an M.2 on either of them. The new X370 board has 4 PCIe lanes for the m.2 slot so it can really take advantage of it.
 
Agreed. Plus, SATA is soooo yesterday when it comes to SSDs. NVMe is where its at now :D Out of pure geekery, I put an NVMe M.2 drive in my Ryzen system and it's insane. Before I made it my system drive and put the OS on it, it was actually reading and writing at 3500 MB/s. That's just ludicrous speed. I think that now it's more in the 2500 MB/s read/write range, which is still stupid fast.
...
A gamer friend told me about those probably close to a year ago (?), but when I looked the prices were really stiff. They've come down some, but boy, that's a lot of $ for the OS and loading an app. It might pay off if you're bottlenecked on the system drive with big sample files and stuff, I suppose. Still, I'm going to wait a while. Can't hurt to make sure the mb supports it though!
 
Audio playback/recording alone requires VERY little processing power or bandwidth. One track at 24 bits/48 kHz needs 192 kilobytes a second. If you want to use a higher samplerate the number is a little higher but it's still next to nothing. For example 16 simultaneous tracks would be in the low megabytes/s bandwidth-wise. It would be very difficult to find new desktop PC's that could not handle that even if you tried.

In the past, I used a PC with a 733 MHz Pentium III, 256 MEGAbytes of RAM and an PATA/IDE hard drive to record 8 simultaneous tracks at 24/48, then play them back and do overdubs. No problems. Using simple plugins, like compressors, EQ's and even MIDI instruments? No problems.

One concern these days is that operating systems have become much more bloated than they were, unfortunately. You're going to want a reasonably powerful (and above all, reliable) machine but unless you need it for something else besides audio, don't waste your money on something where the CPU alone costs $1000.
 
Audio playback/recording alone requires VERY little processing power or bandwidth. One track at 24 bits/48 kHz needs 192 kilobytes a second. If you want to use a higher samplerate the number is a little higher but it's still next to nothing. For example 16 simultaneous tracks would be in the low megabytes/s bandwidth-wise. It would be very difficult to find new desktop PC's that could not handle that even if you tried.

In the past, I used a PC with a 733 MHz Pentium III, 256 MEGAbytes of RAM and an PATA/IDE hard drive to record 8 simultaneous tracks at 24/48, then play them back and do overdubs. No problems. Using simple plugins, like compressors, EQ's and even MIDI instruments? No problems.

One concern these days is that operating systems have become much more bloated than they were, unfortunately. You're going to want a reasonably powerful (and above all, reliable) machine but unless you need it for something else besides audio, don't waste your money on something where the CPU alone costs $1000.

Applying virtual instruments/effects is where processing power comes into play; not raw tracking, playing uneffected, or minimally effected tracks.
 
Applying virtual instruments/effects is where processing power comes into play; not raw tracking, playing uneffected, or minimally effected tracks.

Everything I said still stands, and my main point was the last sentence of my post. The computers of today are more than an order of magnitude faster compared to anything from let's say april of 2002. You won't need to worry about processing power one bit if you're getting a NEW computer for "home recording".
 
Everything I said still stands, and my main point was the last sentence of my post. The computers of today are more than an order of magnitude faster compared to anything from let's say april of 2002. You won't need to worry about processing power one bit if you're getting a NEW computer for "home recording".

As long as it has the processing power.... There are cheap models only good for email...

Computers having fast processors are not necessarily the best for audio recording. It has more to do with the ability of components to perform well together.

Mobo and graphics card as well as chipset and USB controllers have much to do with performance. I went through a nightmare build with an ASRock extreme 4 mobo. Supposedly the newest great motherboard. It's inability to communicate with my Steinberg UR824's caused dropouts every few seconds. It not about the power. It about what works for audio, and also the power of the PC for VST performance. Went to an older ASUS mobo and all worked.

Someone really needs to create a site that benchmarks computers for audio recording...

Maybe this will be helpful to understand what is responsible for audio. Hold on, gotta find the link.


Here it is:

LINK
 
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As long as it has the processing power.... There are cheap models only good for email...

I'm going to quote myself here, just for claritys sake:

spitzer said:
You're going to want a reasonably powerful (and above all, reliable) machine but unless you need it for something else besides audio, don't waste your money on something where the CPU alone costs $1000.

The recording PC (probably from 2004 or 2005) in my studio is quite close in processing speed to a super crappy laptop I got for free recently. The laptop is "only good for emailing" if even that, but it's over 4 years old. I doubt you'd find anything that slow now, in late 2017. Still, I wouldn't recommend going for the absolute cheapest thing.
Basicaly, I agree with you jimmys69.
 
Everything I said still stands, and my main point was the last sentence of my post. The computers of today are more than an order of magnitude faster compared to anything from let's say april of 2002. You won't need to worry about processing power one bit if you're getting a NEW computer for "home recording".

Sorry, but that is not necessarily true. Yeah, better than a 2002 PC, but configurations of newer PC's do not necessarily mean that it will be awesome. As my previous post will show. And this was a $2000 build that should have worked. It didn't because of a issue with USB controller and chipset or graphics card not communicating efficiantly. And many had issues with manufacturer built systems as well. Oddly, Steinberg has taken over two years working to find the issue. They still haven't. Ugh for others that do not have the desire to change their mobo.

I would agree that in most cases, a more modern PC will perform better, but it can be a crapshoot. Best would be to buy a fresh 'OEM' copy of Windows to make sure the manufacturer hasn't added a bunch of bloatware you can't get rid of.

I am curious though, is there a Windows 10 OEM? I am sticking with W 7 till It explodes...Windows 10 scares me as I have heard the auto updates can screw with software. I can't afford to have things suddenly not work while I am working on a project.
 
I'm going to quote myself here, just for claritys sake:



The recording PC (probably from 2004 or 2005) in my studio is quite close in processing speed to a super crappy laptop I got for free recently. The laptop is "only good for emailing" if even that, but it's over 4 years old. I doubt you'd find anything that slow now, in late 2017. Still, I wouldn't recommend going for the absolute cheapest thing.
Basicaly, I agree with you jimmys69.

I agree with you there as well.
 
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