My PC is 6 years old and is starting to display unstability and erratic behaviour. I have tested my RAM, updated the BIOS and formatted the system and reinstalled everything. It was better for a while but it’s happening again now so it’s time to invest in a new configuration.
So after some research I’ve come up with the following. I am not interested in computers that much and don’t know anything else than what I read on Google. Please let me know if you see something that doesn’t look ok or if you think of any alternative component that would be better suited for professional music production, without making the whole thing more expensive than it already is. I will have to do light video editing every once in a while, which is why there is a GPU in there, otherwise I would have skipped it. So here it is:
That’s a powerful machine and should serve you well. You might want to optimize it even more for recording and there are a lot of online resources available to guide you through the process.
When you’re not editing tracks, you could launch Space Shuttles with it in your spare time… crikey that’s a machine. I have a 32gb, i7 8700 machine, and it doesn’t slow down at all. I do throw some nonsense at the CPU I have to admit - especially when I get fancy with my video editing. The only thing I would do is get a couple of SSD hard drives for projects, files, samples and VST’s that come with GB of samples. I have one NVMe drive as the OS drive, a couple of SSD’s for files and things, and then a couple of HDD’s for backup purposes.
Well I’m going to use Reaper 90% of the time. I do have large projects occasionally (hundreds of tracks, lots of plugins) but it’s not the most common. Apart from that I’ll use some Adobe software (Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro) but only occasionally.
I gather from your comments that this configuration might be a little overkill. The thing is, I don’t want speed, power or reliability issues ever getting in my way so I went for something powerful thinking that it would help with that. But it might not be the right thing to do, I don’t know… It was already my goal when I bought my current configuration 6 years ago and it was powerful at that time (i7-4770k @3.5GHz, 32GB RAM, SSD…) and it did work well for some years, but I never got good latency values.
In general that’s true, but in my case I believe a lot of it is due to something wrong in my current configuration. I’ve spent days optimising my system for audio but latency monitoring always showed multiple problems coming from the network card, the graphics card and whatnot. And latency numbers have gotten worse over time. Now it has got to the point where I have to run buffer size at 256 to avoid cracks and pops and latency values are high. It’s not a big deal as I can always change the buffer size when recording but I’m pretty sure that with the gear I have I should have better values.
Sometimes it can be the funkiest things that screw up latency. Some background processes or drivers of other devices can really screw up your latency, and it can be hard to track down.
Very interesting reading this thread… I can’t add any kind of meaningful critique to that list though. I’m super new to the PC world - when I was finishing up school I started having to look at building one that could run Unity extensions properly… (macs have some real problems with dev software not being compatible). So I started learning about them because I was in bad need of a graphics card update, then I started a new job and the software company I’m working for now gave me a decked out 7000 series Dell Percision laptop that absolutely smokes my MacBook Pro.
I think the 2 graphics cards I was looking at were the 2080Ti and the RTX, but I remember the dude I was talking to at Best Buy saying something about the power supply starting to matter at that point. I don’t remember what you’re supposed to look at to see if the power supply is large enough for the card and if its compatible with the motherboard.
