Building DAW machines, some advice would be welcome!

[ReggieUK]

Hi All, I'm looking to help a friend build a DAW PC, it's been a while since I did one so I'm looking to catch up quickly on processors to go for/avoid and same with motherboards/chipsets/ram, also wondering about a need for a real graphics card or using onboard?

It's probably going to be around an £800 budget which I know will produce a reasonable machine, I currently run a core i7 920 with 12GB of ram which I know is a very capable machine even though it's relatively old so I'm sure anything like that these days will be more than adequate. Also bear in mind that this PC will also have hardware like a focusrite 6i6 etc. unit to help it which isn't part of the £800 budget. Any and all advice would be greatly appreciated!

[olisharp]

12GB ram and an Intel i7 is plenty. I'd recommend an SSD for sure though, so much faster when you're rendering tracks to audio.

graphics - music software isn't super intensive like games are, but having 2 or even 3 outputs for multiple screens is a good look - really improves workflow.

really quiet fans, or even liquid cooling, is pretty important too, so the noise doesn't interfere with the monitoring.

oh, and loads of USB ports too, with good power supplies, you can never have too many!

sorry to be so vague, hope that helps!

[ReggieUK]

Hi Oli, thanks for the advice, it's not vague at all, I'm kind of au fait with some of the requirements as I used to run my own daws but it was over 10 years ago, so it looks like times haven't particularly changed which is good, it's still intel based, still as much ram as you can shove in there :-)

The main thing I was really worried about was that some motherboard chipsets are better than others, it's always been that way unfortunately, so I was really making sure which chipsets I should avoid or if that's something that I don't really have to consider so much these days? USB/Firewire chipsets in particular are of some concern but I've read up a bit and if necessary a simple £20 pci/pci-e card will fixup any major issues like that but of course it would be nice to avoid them in the first place and get the right motherboard.

btw. the core i7/12GB machine is mine, it is watercooled too

I know that it's all 2d but some programs like 'mixxx' for instance use opengl, my laptop doesn't cope too well with it, so I was really concerned that other apps. might do similar and also whether there are gfx card/motherboard combos to avoid because of potential bottlenecks and dpc latency issues?

I was going to recommend a dual-head card no matter what, I've run dual screens for as long as I can remember with PCs, you can never have to much screen real-estate ;-)

My other issue is that I see some recommendations for turning off hyper-threading, which seems to make getting a core i7 redundant and a core i5 ideal instead?

[4eoN]

- You should buy a Intel Xeon CPU instead of an i7, its cheaper and has the same power (make sure you take the latest series e.g. E3-1230V3). hyper threading shouldn't make problems, never heard of that
- Don't struggle with the chipset...doesn't play a big role, just take a motherboards with enough outputs, there are no performance differences.
- take a cheap graphics card like a one of the new ATI R-Series, it should have passiv cooling and 3 digital outputs to have an mulit-monitor option for later.
- RAM....just the cheapest DDR3 u can get, just like motherboards, no real performance differences (AMD CPUs CAN scale pretty good with faster RAM, but Intels doen't really)

Example setup:
CPU: Intel® Xeon® Prozessor E3-1230V3
RAM: G.Skill DIMM 8 GB DDR3-1333 Kit (2x4GB) (SN: F3-10600CL9D-8GBNT)
MB: ASRock H87 Pro4
HDD: Maybe you have some left, otherwise Western Digital Greens with the size you need
SSD: Samsung 840 Pro/Evo with the size you need
GFX: GeForce GT 6xx, AMD Raedon R7-Series (silent, enough digital outputs)
PS: be quiet! Pure Power L8 350W, you wont need more, trust me
Case: Well, thats up to you, but i would recommend Fractal Design, in germany you can buy them with installed dam-mats
CPU-
Cooler: Thermalright HR-02 Macho


I hope i wasn't too late^^
sorry for my bad english...

keep it up