Hey peeps,
A friend is asking a hand but I've been out the DIY world for a loong time.
He's looking for a desktop pc for professionalish music production, mainly a fast cpu heaps of space and ram and ports galore (usb 3 usb C thunderbolt..) and budget is around 1k.
He's not gonna use it for anything else, maybe just to watch stuff on it (no gaming).
He has already a nice curved monitor and all the necessary, this is purely for the tower.
Any suggestion?
Will be running dual boot Windows Linux, no apple products thank you.
Thanks for your time,
Gab
Music Production Desktop under 1k
Comments
Penguin lovers here bud there's no way he'll want a mac lol
Thanks for the suggestion tho
Fair enough. Might be worth looking at what audio interface he’d want first, then figure out a build on the remaining budget?
Do what I did and build a hackintosh. I I have it running on a ryzen 7.
He said under 1k. Mac Studio starts at $3,299.00…
It would help if you listed which programs he uses for music production to help look at benchmarks for different processors. Also, as a former dual booter, WSL has eliminated my need for a Linux installation at home as it now does 99% of what I need Linux for: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install
lol missed the brief… sorry! All I read was “music production” and “professionalish”.
Time for my morning coffee 🙃
Ableton mainly is what he uses, I'll have a proper look at your link later but I rather run personally linux as main and keep win just for occasional gaming
Prebuilt or build it yourself?
You don't need anything super-specific, just spec out perhaps a AMD Ryzen 5 7600, 32GB of RAM (DDR5), a B650 motherboard like this one (you may want to spend more a full sized ATX motherboard if you want even more PCIE slots and more IO), a budget case and a half decent gold rated PSU (500 watts). A graphics card isn't needed since the CPU has one integrated. The Lexar SSD deal here is pretty good value and worth checking out.
How much I/O you get, as well as how many PCIE / NVME slots will depend on the motherboard chipset. AMD motherboards have 3 'tiers' of chipsets, A, B and X series. Intel motherboards also have 3 mainstream tiers, B660, H670 and Z690.
If you're trying to stay under $1k you probably only want a mid-range motherboard ($200-ish), since the high tier ones have a significant upcharge and isn't worth paying the premium just for a few extra USB 3 ports and NVME slots.
Here's an example using all the parts I just mentioned, with the total cost at $930.
Can def build ourselves, thanks for taking the time bud I'll pass it on to him and see what he reckons.
That's definitely within the budget and should satisfy his needs, he can always add extra space later onEven the lowest end of AM5 boards has USB-C, high speed Type-A and a decent amount of USB port nowadays, you don't have to spend like $300 for a board with more than 4 USB ports anymore. The B650M Aorus Elite has 12 USB ports on the back alone, before account for the headers, its kinda insane coming from last gen.
I'd go with something like this
Type Item Price CPU AMD Ryzen 5 7600 3.8 GHz 6-Core Processor $349.00 @ MSY Technology Motherboard Gigabyte B650M AORUS ELITE Micro ATX AM5 Motherboard $199.00 @ Mwave Australia Memory G.Skill Trident Z5 RGB 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR5-6000 CL36 Memory $139.00 @ JW Computers Storage ADATA Legend 800 2 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive $118.00 @ MSY Technology Case Deepcool CH370 MicroATX Mid Tower Case $76.00 @ MSY Technology Power Supply ADATA XPG PYLON 550 W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply $65.00 @ MSY Technology Prices include shipping, taxes, rebates, and discounts Total $946.00 Generated by PCPartPicker 2023-08-13 12:25 AEST+1000
Music production is a pretty broad category. Are we talking lots of VST instruments and effects, then you want processing speed. Large sample libraries for realistic orchestration, you want lots of memory. Multi-track recording and playback, hard drive speed will be your biggest limitation.
Having lots of cores on your CPU won't help if the software doesn't multi-thread well.
FL Studio will run on a potato but like anything, the more you are trying to do at once, the more CPU it wants.
And if your friend wants to play virtual instruments in real time, then low latency is most important, and that's mostly down to the audio card and that's where a significant chunk of the budget needs to go.
The real question is what software is your friend going to run? If they already know, there are probably forums better suited to that. If not they need to try that out on what they have and see where the limitations are.
From memory he has an external audio card already and he will be multi-track recording with live instruments mainly.
I'm gonna see him over the weekend and gin some better info on what he needs.
He will be using ableton mainly.
Thanks for your time bud
buy a used/refurb system with gen8 i5 for like $200
do you need new?
just make sure you have adequate backups in case of data lossGo DAWless
opens can of worms
Mac Studio would be the go. Apple is waaaay better than PC for music production.
Or Mac mini if you can’t afford the Studio