Music production build - Advice please!

hexagonsun

hexagonsun

hexagonsun

Associate
Joined
24 Dec 2010
Posts
49
Hi everyone, looking for some advice on this build I am thinking of doing. The main purpose of it is going to be for music production, so it needs to be fast, not so concerned about graphics as I'm not a gamer.

Here is what I've come up with so far:

Case - Already have one I can use.
PSU - Corsair CX 600W ATX Power Supply
Motherboard - Motherboard - Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD5 AMD 890FX (Socket AM3) DDR3 Motherboard
CPU - AMD Phenom II X6 Six Core 1090T Black Edition 3.20GHz
RAM - Corsair Vengeance 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-15000C9 1866MHz Dual Channel Kit
Graphics Card - MSI ATI Radeon HD 5450 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card
Hard Drive - Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Optical Drive - LiteOn IHAS124 - DVD±RW (±R DL) / DVD-RAM drive - Serial ATA [IHAS124-19]

I assume the old case I have (Antec Plus 1080AMG) will be OK? It's an old case but it takes ATX motherboards.

Any advice/tips/bottlenecks/obvious mistakes I've made?
 
an i7 rig would be better...i dont think you will get the ram to run at 1866mhz with an amd chip

as razorback says also a good x-fi or xonar soundcard would be first pick
 
what daw are you using?

if you dont game, then get a really cheap gfx card and get i7

im assuming you already have a dedicated sound card?, if not then are you recording guitar/vocals etc?

ali
 
I went with AMD cos I wanted to keep the cost down, may have to choose some slower RAM if it won't run at 1866 with the AMD. The cost of an i7 CPU, a motherboard that will take it and the triple channel RAM really knocks the price up quite a bit. I only looked at ATI graphics cards (Maybe I should check out Nvidia too) and that was the cheapest one that wasn't low profile, am I right in thinking a low profile one may not fit my case?

I mainly use Reason and sometimes Reaper. At the moment I have a laptop with an Intel Pentium M running at 1.8GHz and 1GB RAM, which actually almost does everything I need, it just starts getting sluggish when the amount of tracks start to mount up. So this build should blow it out the water.

Don't need to worry about a sound card, got a basic external one already and will probably upgrade that too in future, just want to sort out getting a decent rig first.

Oh and thanks for your replies everyone, very quick. :)
 
If you're recording from an external source then sound proofing is vital, as such a better psu and case would be essential, antec p series for case and either a corsair hx or the antic true power psu
 
95thrifles said:
If you're recording from an external source then sound proofing is vital, as such a better psu and case would be essential, antec p series for case and either a corsair hx or the antic true power psu
Click to expand...

Don't really do any of that, pretty much just in the box electronic music, just looking to solve the issue of slowness that I currently have.

cammy5477 said:
low profile cards normally have brackets for low and standard profiles....

ive only ever seen one in my mates dell....
Click to expand...

Ah ok, useful to know. :)
 
Trying to choose the right motherboard and RAM hurts my brain, it has to be the most confusing part of building a computer! :p What's the maximum memory speed the AMD will support? Then what is a good, similarly priced motherboard that isn't going to be a bottleneck in itself?

I see where everyone is coming from with the suggestions of an i7 build, but it seems to push the price up by another £150-200. I think the AMD may be enough, as I said I can almost do everything I need, although slowly, on this old laptop, and as far as I can see, this AMD build should leave it coughing in it's dust!
 
If you're not going to overclock, then motherboards will never be a bottleneck limit, so the motherboard I specced will be fine.
1333mhz is the max rated speed, but 1600mhz works as well.
 
Cool, so with the motherboard and RAM you suggested, and as I don't need a case or a graphics card, that build would cost £475. :)

Is it worth looking at any other RAM or will it not make use of it? Any drawbacks to that motherboard you can think of?
 
I'm actually sick of people doubting the AMD Phenom X6...it exceeds any chip AMD has produced before (excluding the opteron).

The 1090T is great for video editing and encoding: which is what I primarily use my chip for. And I have 1600MHz RAM and have previously overclocked it to 1700MHz no problem. Just because it's an AMD chip doesn't mean it will let you down...despite being much more affordable than the i7.

What I would recommend though is PERHAPS a better-than-stock CPU cooler as the stock one isnt brill and is rather noisy : P
 
I use my pc for music production, i7 is THEE CPU, if your using intensive programs like Gladiator or Massive, your going to need to serious horsepower as %usage starts rocketing the more layers and OSC/voice you use. Cores WONT do much in music production as not many VSTS or DAWS are multi threaded capable, only Cubase and that's only up to dual/quad. clock for clock is what you should be looking for.

6GB RAM is more than enough so if you went i7 and went down to 6gb it should knock a little off your price, which should favour to getting an i7 rig.
 
Well if I went for this CPU, which is closest in price (With triple channel memory support) to the AMD 1090T:

Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz (Bloomfield) (Socket LGA1366)
http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=cp-344-in

what would be a good motherboard and ram to go with it?

according to this passmark benchmark list, the i7 only comes 0.281 points ahead of the 1090t.

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html

Is it really going to be that much different? Is it worth the difference in price?
 
cammy5477 said:
as razorback says also a good x-fi or xonar soundcard would be first pick
Click to expand...

Not really - if you're doing any sort of music production then you're not going to be using an X-fi/Xonar sort of soundcard, you'll have your own external breakout card or something similar. Just as a note on this point - if you use FireWire for recording, then try to get a motherboard which uses a TI FireWire chip. The TI chips seem to be much more stable in things like Pro Tools.

General advice is plenty of RAM, lots of hard drive space and a snappy processor. You don't really need to go overboard - even the new Pro Tools would need to have lots of tracks and plugins/inserts on each one to even begin to push (for example) a Phenom X4. Stability is the order of the day really - if you don't need a graphics card, don't get a powerful card as all it'll do is increase the temperatures in your case and bring in possible instabilities (with respect to the drivers). Keep the build simple, make sure you've got good (but quiet!) ventilation and a high quality PSU - save the cash on the PC and spend it on a new DI box or something!
 
Last edited:
I won't even be running anything as heavy as Pro Tools, 99% of the time I just use Reason, which is pretty light on the CPU as it is, and (Correct me if I'm wrong of course) I think the AMD will allow me to finish tracks without getting frustrated at it for responding slowly or taking ages to open a folder of samples.

I'm not even that bothered about how quiet it is because I rarely ever record anything from a mic, and if I do it's not going to be high quality vocals or anything, maybe just a random odd sound. If I record anything that needs to be high quality it might be some guitar directly recorded into the computer, in which case external noise isn't an issue.

All I'm looking for is something fast, that isn't going to frustrate me waiting for it to respond to clicks or browse a folder when I'm about halfway through a track. At the moment I have a single core Pentium M @ 1.8GHZ with 1GB RAM, so I assume the 6 core 3.2GHz AMD with 8GB RAM would be a significant step up?
 
hexagonsun said:
All I'm looking for is something fast, that isn't going to frustrate me waiting for it to respond to clicks or browse a folder when I'm about halfway through a track. At the moment I have a single core Pentium M @ 1.8GHZ with 1GB RAM, so I assume the 6 core 3.2GHz AMD with 8GB RAM would be a significant step up?
Click to expand...

I think that AMD would be as quick as quad-core Intel i5 760/2.80 GHz.
Requirements of Reason are not high, but "multi-cores CPU" doesn't look like that program would really use six cores. There are just a few software titles that can take advantage over >4 cores and I really doubt if Reason is one of them.
As someone told, more GHz gives more horsepower in that type of software, so I'd suggest you 1156 platform and Intel i5/760 CPU with decent (cool) case aka CM Dominator II, Antec 600/1200 etc plus really good cooling (aka Corsair H50, or at least Scythe Mugen 2). This is needed for o/c which won't kill your CPU, but will definately overtake six-cores AMD CPU. As I think OCUK sells pre-oc-ed sets. i7 is wasting money in that case IMO.

I can even say that lower-budget platform 775 with dual core E8400 @ 3.6-4 GHz will be nice progression comparing to your actual rig (Pentium M). Such CPU costs about 50 quids on Eb*y and there's no reason to afraid buying used CPU as CPUs break down rather rarely. Of course no one can compare it to i5 ;-) but relating to old Pentium 3 architecture, it is "significant step up" as you said, too.

Because CPU is not everything (memory is NOT so important in timings or speed dimension, but rule "more=better" applies here), you should consider having SSD. Todays drives will make reading of directory content fly, and even having big cache on it (20 GB for Reason) shouldn't kill disk writes within 3-4 years (simple math: using drive 30 times more intensive than usually). But if you plan to buy standard hard drives, better is to buy two quick drives (aka Samsung F4, or F3) and make RAID-0 plus additional standard backup drive). It will give you nice speedup with linear read/write, for example, with saving entire project to disk ;-)

And last, but not least - your soundcard with ASIO drivers should have lowest possible latency. I presume you record some stuff there, not just rework samples given. You may consider buying used entry-level M-Audio soundcard (Delta 2496 Audiophile model) which gives you that, for extremally low price (20 quids on Eb*y).
 
Only things that would be big on my list are an SSD, large storage device, 27inch screen, a quality soundcard (not a gaming card..) and some decent headphones (sen' hd25) for when it gets late and you don't want to stop :)

You really don't need a crazy fast cpu/loads of memory for music production.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom