Sweetwater Creation Station Rack Mounted PC's

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wmalan

wmalan

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Well it's finally time to do a complete DAW workstation upgrade for Reaper. My current Windows PC is one I built many moons ago. It's worked really great for a long time. But it's showing it's age: I5-750 @2.67ghz (1rst generation... Old!), 12gb ram, 500gb HD (x2) not SSD's. External USB b/u drive. Nvidia card. I just saw my cpu on Amazon for $30.00... <ggg>

Just got an email about Sweetwater's "Creation Station" rack mounted PC's. Here's the link: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/manufacturer/Sweetwater_Custom_Computing
I'm looking at the CS250 2U rack based on the I5 ($1599). The specs look good. It would also be much more quiet than my old tank. And would slide into my rack on wheels that's in my room.

Is it worth it? In the old days... An I5 vs 17 was a big thing. As was piecing together best price/performance components. But all things considered given how DAW's (Reaper) use resources, the newer tenth gen I5 I would think is light years over my old workhorse. I'm a home based guitar/keyboard songwriter with a simple Scarlett 2i2 interface.
 
I did a little googling and you can get a tower with a the latest i-7 same amount of Ram and Hard Drives for probably @ $500 less....but it is sweetwater and they do offer great customer service..

That all said if the computer you are using works I'd just keep using it unless you are noticing significant performance issues..an old i-5 with some ram and a ssd drive is waaaaay good enough for Reaper resources...They send those e-mail "specials" out to SELL to us old farts with GAS (gear acquisition syndrome) Ask your self "Do I really need it right now?" If the answer is yes the price isn't ridiculously high , if the answer is well not really...just wait till you really do ...They just keep making em faster n better n cheaper all the time...in 2 years what you are looking at today will be yesterdays news.... Depression era saying for those of us suffering from GAS... Use it up, wear it out, make due or do without. Good luck!
 
I think that the price is fair, accounting for it being marked up a bit for the labor of assembly and warranty. I could probably put together a similar system for a couple hundred less, but that stuff is fun for me and I understand that it's not everybody's cup of tea. It's a well-spec'd system, no worries there.

The main thing that I don't like is the rackmount chassis, especially a 2U. I had a 4U computer chassis for several years, and while I loved LOVED that it was rackmount and didn't take up any desk or floor space...it had one critical weakness. And that was heat. With a 2U chassis, the cooling options are almost as limited as what you'd find inside a laptop (OK not quite, but getting there). There's probably one little fan on the CPU heatsink, and a single 80mm intake fan and a single 80mm exhaust fan on the chassis. Smaller fans mean that they've got to spin faster to move the same amount of air as larger fans...which means more noise (or more heat, if you want it to stay even remotely quiet).

If the system is never under much of a load, then it'll probably be fine. A little toasty, but fine. But if it's stressed out from a big project or a long render or something, it'll probably be pushing the limits of noise tolerance with just 2 small fans handling air flow.

If it were me, I'd try to find a traditional desktop machine with similar specs, make sure it can accommodate 140mm fans, and learn how to adjust the fan speed-vs-temp curves in the BIOS. Then they can do their job quietly except when the machine is under hefty load, and your components will stay nice and cool and will enjoy a long life of service.
 
Tadpui said:
The main thing that I don't like is the rackmount chassis, especially a 2U. I had a 4U computer chassis for several years, and while I loved LOVED that it was rackmount and didn't take up any desk or floor space...it had one critical weakness. And that was heat.
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Yup I had a 4U several years ago same issue concern...Moved to Mac for music and it works for me running a 2012 iMac with the i5 a bunch of Ram and an TB SSD drive
 
TAE said:
Yup I had a 4U several years ago same issue concern...Moved to Mac for music and it works for me running a 2012 iMac with the i5 a bunch of Ram and an TB SSD drive
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You'll love it when you upgrade next. An i5 from today's Intel lineup is a whole different world of processing power than an i5 from 2012. And from what I hear, the Apple silicon CPUs are pretty awesome as well. It's been a great couple of years for CPUs, there's hardly a bad one on the market any more!
 
I dont use reaper but IME the spec that is most important for audio is the speed of the processor IOW above 3 Ghz is all gravy and best for recording.
 
Thanks all for the help. I get the GAS part of purchasing as I just bought two guitar pedals this year... The first time in 15 years! My existing PC while finer for Reaper ahs started to act up. Old standard hard drives. I get USB errors on startup. And the graphics card is starting to flicker. I built it back in 2011.

SW claims they rack units are very quiet (hence the dedicated music production build). But you guys do bring up a good point about heat. I did glance at Dells offerings (I've good success with them in my engineering work). Similar setup with an 11th gen I7 for that money. So maybe stick to another tower (paying attention to fan noise.
Thanks again!
 
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wmalan said:
Thanks all for the help. I get the GAS part of purchasing as I just bought two guitar pedals this year... The first time in 15 years! My existing PC while finer for Reaper ahs started to act up. Old standard hard drives. I get USB errors on startup. And the graphics card is starting to flicker. I built it back in 2011.

SW claims they rack units are very quiet (hence the dedicated music production build). But you guys do bring up a good point about heat. I did glance at Dells offerings (I've good success with them in my engineering work). Similar setup with an 11th gen I7 for that money. So maybe stick to another tower (paying attention to fan noise.
Thanks again!
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Good luck Bill...the ol use it up, wear it out thing can bite you in the butt with computers ..SSD hard drives are really sweet and relatively inexpensive for moving over to no moving parts. I still have a mechanical hard drive back up for my business computer (SSD inside) but also back up everything of importance in google drive...an over abundancy of redundancy is never a bad thing....SSD's are also much faster at processing data.
 
SSDs for sure (but maybe a BIG spinner for backup?) but no one has mentioned the elephant? Windows 11. Not that I am suggesting anyone gets it yet but whatever W10 is bought it would be vital IMHO to get a caste iron guarantee that it will run W11 in the future.

Ten is supported until 2025 they say and I shall just see what happens then. I shall be 80 by then assuming I survive. I am still running 3 W7 machines as well as this W10 laptop and I no problems with 7 so I doubt I shall ever need 11 but my youngers and betters shurely will?



Dave
 
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From what I can tell, this 10th Gen I5 Lenovo will run Win11 just fine. The big sticking point appears to be the Trusted Platform Module. Win 11 is supposed to run V2, which is already enabled in this computer. Its easy to see if your computer has it... just look under device manager under Security Devices.

I would bet that anything Sweetwater sells today will easily run Win11. They are using current motherboards, which is where you find the TMP.

TMP2.0 is not a new feature. This is from Microsoft from almost 4 years ago.

Trusted Platform Module 2.0 10/05/2017
Note: Since July 28, 2016, all new device models, lines or series (or if you are updating the hardware configuration of a existing model, line or series with a major update, such as CPU, graphic cards) must implement and enable by default TPM 2.0 (details in section 3.7 of the Minimum hardware requirements page). The requirement to enable TPM 2.0 only applies to the manufacturing of new devices.

Trusted Platform Module (TPM) technology is designed to provide hardware-based, security-related functions. A TPM chip is a secure crypto-processor that helps you with actions such as generating, storing, and limiting the use of cryptographic keys. Many TPMs include multiple physical security mechanisms to make it tamper resistant, and malicious software is unable to tamper with the security functions of the TPM.
 
ecc83 said:
SSDs for sure (but maybe a BIG spinner for backup?) but no one has mentioned the elephant? Windows 11. Not that I am suggesting anyone gets it yet but whatever W10 is bought it would be vital IMHO to get a caste iron guarantee that it will run W11 in the future.

Ten is supported until 2025 they say and I shall just see what happens then. I shall be 80 by then assuming I survive. I am still running 3 W7 machines as well as this W10 laptop and I no problems with 7 so I doubt I shall ever need 11 but my youngers and betters shurely will?



Dave
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Great ideas. My existing setup is a 500GB main HD drive for apps and sound libraries, a 500GB second HD drive that I store and load my musics projects from. Then of course a 2TB external USB drive that I back everything up to. I plan the same setup on the new PC except SSD's for both internals.

I recall years back learning that with spinning drives, it's best to separate the system drive from the drive that projects are stored on for read/write speed. I would assume with SSD's I follow the same play book. I could even stick with the standard 256GB SSD drive for the new system as I've never gone over 110GB of data on it.

The hard work to me will be installing everything new. That said, I've backed up my all my licenses, sound libraries, Reaper plug-ins, and projects. Reaper will be easy. Plus the folks at Toontrack made it easy with Downloaded Product Manager to redo EZKeys and EZDrummer. They know all my existing products licenses so I just go online and reinstall. Seeing it's all lasted me a decade... I can't complain!
 
I dont understand why they haven't took a page from the Gamers and run liquid cooled. They create tons of heat playing these processor hungry games and this is how they handle it....quietly. Low frequency fan noise be gone!
 
Songfarmer said:
I dont understand why they haven't took a page from the Gamers and run liquid cooled. They create tons of heat playing these processor hungry games and this is how they handle it....quietly. Low frequency fan noise be gone!
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I worked with a guy that had one as a test unit for an engineering firm I worked for. I wouldn't the added complexity with the external pump required to circulate the water.
 
Songfarmer said:
I dont understand why they haven't took a page from the Gamers and run liquid cooled. They create tons of heat playing these processor hungry games and this is how they handle it....quietly. Low frequency fan noise be gone!
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When I started running into heat issues in my rackmount case, I looked and looked for a rackmount chassis that was made for liquid cooling. There was pretty much nothing other than those companies that custom make cases if you send them a CAD drawing. I wasn't invested enough for all that jazz.

The trouble with most off-the-shelf rack chassis is that the front panel is already dedicated to accommodating optical drives, hot-swap bays, and the front of the inside of the chassis is dedicated to HDD slots. There's no room to put a radiator without some pretty major modifications.

I had mine mounted to the mid-chassis strip that was made to hold 3x120mm fans. It fit, and it worked. The problem was that the radiator was intaking warm air from inside the chassis and it wasn't very effective at dissipating heat. I had 2x120 intake fans and 2x80mm exhaust fans, which is about all you can expect to fit in even the most spacious cases. It just wasn't enough.

So I went back to a desktop case and everything runs nice and cool and extremely quietly now. I don't think I'll ever go back to a rackmount chassis.
 
Are you running L-C on your desktop? I never even considered using a rack mount, just looked like it would be too restrictive for the air flow to me especially since the other gear in the racks produce so much heat.
 
Songfarmer said:
Are you running L-C on your desktop? I never even considered using a rack mount, just looked like it would be too restrictive for the air flow to me especially since the other gear in the racks produce so much heat.
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Yeah, I've got a Corsair H150i all-in-one cooling a Ryzen 9 3900X in a be quiet 500DX case. I'm intaking through the front via the radiator, and exhausting through 1x140mm in the rear and 2x140mm on top. I'm idling around 30C and top out at about 75C under a full load when rendering or transcoding video, which is all I do that really winds up this machine. It's close to silent at idle and gets moderately noisy under full load.

I'm glad that be quiet finally made an airflow oriented case instead of repeating the suffocating "soundproof" cases that made them famous. 140mm case fans running at low rpm and moving air through mesh intakes and exhaust are quieter and (arguably) more effective than fans running at high rpm struggling to pull and push air through a restrictive solid case with low air flow. I think that the 500DX is a great $100 case, I'm a big fan (ha) of it.
 
wmalan said:
I recall years back learning that with spinning drives, it's best to separate the system drive from the drive that projects are stored on for read/write speed. I would assume with SSD's I follow the same play book. I could even stick with the standard 256GB SSD drive for the new system as I've never gone over 110GB of data on it.
Click to expand...

There isn't the same need with SSDs as the read/write speeds are so much greater but, probably more importantly, the seek times are tiny and there's no mechanical movement.
The old spinners had to send the arm back and forth, back and forth, which was time consuming, where SSDS don't have to do that.

Still, it can be nice to know your system and storage are two completely separate things, particularly if the storage is removable/external.
With the cost of SSDs these days I would go with 256gb system and 1TB (or whatever you need) for storage and, as Dave says, a big ol' spinner for backup.
 
"With the cost of SSDs these days I would go with 256gb system and 1TB (or whatever you need) for storage..."

My price point is about $1k. I'm happy with Dell for off the shelf. Not interested in building anymore. At that price point they seem to only offer either one 500gb SSD or a 256 gb SSD with a 1TB spinner. Might be the XPS series are only setup for one SSD? Not sure. But I'm still looking so...

Edit: Just double checked... It has 4 ports for SATA drives. So I can just add another SSD.
 
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Yeah, sounds good. If they have a pre-built with 256gb SSD + 1TB spinner I'd probably go with that and add additional SSD storage myself.
Personally I prefer spinning media to be in a caddy and disconnected for 99% of its life but this is just my preference.
Judge it yourself - If you've got 50GB of sessions backed up from the last ten years then, of course, you don't need a second SSD at all.
 
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