£600 Audio rig

FloppyPoppy · 3 Jul 2016 at 19:35

Hey guys a friend of mine is looking for a audio editing rig and thought i would come on and ask here as i don't know as best as you chaps where power is best distributed for an audio rig over a gaming rig however i can't imagine it needs much though, could be wrong.

He has a cooler master mastercase 5 lay around so no problems for case no need for monitor K&M or speakers and such just the rig and os

.

He has £600 to spend including a OS however has some leeway so i would not mind being able to provide him with two builds one with the cost of the OS in the £600 and one with the rig alone costing £600 to see if he may want a slightly faster one.

Thanks for any help provided

Rilot · 3 Jul 2016 at 20:23

Not a huge amount needed for audio production. Lots of RAM and a decent i5 or i7 will do him.
He will want a decent sized SSD for audio cache while he's editing.

I'm assuming he already has a pro-grade audio card or USB adaptor to use.

FloppyPoppy · 4 Jul 2016 at 09:40

He does have all the audio stuff side sorted just requiring the PC to go with it

he will be wanting an ssd and hdd

joeyjojo · 4 Jul 2016 at 10:11

Nothing too fancy. An i5 (use the integrated graphics) will do.

A quiet PSU and fans (and well-built case) are worth it too.

Assuming he's not overclocking it forget all the Z- fancyness on the motherboard too. A B- or H- motherboard is fine. mATX even.

jcoe85 · 4 Jul 2016 at 11:17

The balance is exactly how much he wants to spend on the graphics card. Audio editors and digital audio workstations obviously have no need for a graphics card. As Rilot said. music production and audio editing relies more on a good CPU and RAM, more so the CPU for music production than audio editing. Honestly, you need nothing much to edit audio, unless you're talking huge, hi-fidelity scores. I was editing audio and producing music fine on computers as a teenager 15 years ago, "giga" wasn't even a thing

If he plans for music production then the CPU will matter more, but again it isn't like you need a beast or 6+ cores. If you're running 100 synths through umpteen insert and send fx, then......good luck mixing that, more of a problem than pc specs

If you do run out of CPU, then just bounce the synth/sampler down to audio, sorted.
Anyway, no build but my advice as someone who has dabbled in audio stuff as a hobby is that a pc good enough to run modern games with good graphics should deal with audio just fine.