Advice on £3k+VAT Audio Production/Gaming Rig

danyjr · 2 Nov 2018 at 22:07

Hi, before you call me a rich mofo I've been saving for 10 years for this, currently running a Core i7 920 @3.2 GHz and the only thing I've upgraded since buying my rig 10 years ago has been the GPU (GTX 670 upgraded from GTX 285).

So I have 3k + VAT (i.e. £3.8k inc VAT) to spend and the goal is to use this rig for sound production and gaming.

Currently this is what I'm thinking:

Intel® Core™ i9-9900K processor = £599 - More cores, more power. All welcome for both sound production where I do a lot of CPU intensive work using multiple cores, and gaming.
Gigabyte Z390 Designare = £230 - Good for overclocking, has 2 Thunderbolt 3 inputs which are needed for my audio equipment (audio interface + expansions)
Corsair Hydro Series™ H150i PRO RGB 360mm Liquid CPU Cooler = £137 - As I'm planning to overclock the CPU to 5.0 GHz I thought I'd need this cooler. Is this an overkill? Can go for something cheaper instead?
Corsair VENGEANCE® LPX 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4 DRAM 4266MHz C19 Memory Kit = £127 - Not interested in LED, I think 32GB would be an overkill for what I use my PC for. My current PC has 8GB and I'm doing just fine memory wise.
Samsung 860 EVO SSD 500GB SATA III 2.5 inch 500GB = £68 - Good bang for buck in my opinion, any point in going NVMe considering the prices go up exponentially with no sizeable returns?
WD BLACK Performance Desktop Hard Drive 6TB = £218 - Generally have had very good experiences with WD Blacks but I need a lot of storage for my audio files which take a lot of space...and there is many of them, hence why 6TB.
Gigabyte GeForce® RTX 2080 Ti WINDFORCE OC 11G = £1300 - Frankly think RTX series are way too expensive for what they are but why the hell not. This is my treat to myself after a decade.
Corsair Obsidian Series™ 750D Full Tower ATX Case = £122 - I've built quite a few systems over the years on this chassis and it is a fantastic case. Full tower giving a lot of room and airflow and it doesn't look too game-y and very easy to work with. My only gripe with it is that it doesn't have front USB-C inputs but I guess I can live with it. I'm open to suggestions.
Corsair HXi Series™ HX750i High-Performance ATX Power Supply — 750 Watt 80 Plus® PLATINUM Certified PSU = £128 - Really nice modular PSU I've had the pleasure of working with a few times. Hope 750W is enough for my build?
I'm thinking either a Samsung 32" CHG70 Curved High Resolution Gaming Monitor or a Samsung 2018 49" Q6F QLED 4K Ultra HD certified HDR 1000 Smart TV - I have around £900 to spend on the screen. I will be plugging in my consoles to it as well and not a big fan of ultra-wide screens. I'm not an expert when it comes to screens so open to suggestions here.

Any other suggestions? NVMe? Intel Optane memory? Any overkills? Anything that can be improved upon?

Thanks in advance

orbitalwalsh · 3 Nov 2018 at 08:30

Designare is a beast of a board for what it does, finally more oriented towards creation then gaming, others weren't as much but shame it's lost the silver PCB

Verys are the same as the Aorus ultra-elite so your covered there and one of the coolest if your pushing the overclock and workload hard

Heads up, Aorus 2080ti is currently cheaper ! Also comes with 4 year UK RMA , which at £1200-500 card is a no brainer.

Not sure if Gigabyte rep @GIGA-Man or @Gibbo can give a date of .When Designare would hit shelves

Would personally change for Focus 750w unit or since your doing music production, Straight Power 11 from Bequiet as it's quiet...

Also check out Bequiet Base 601/801 for a case , the amount of sound insulation as well as having a nice class window sound help

danyjr · 3 Nov 2018 at 10:57

Thanks very much for your reply

Great advice on the Auros, sounds like a nobrainer. Yes, quietness is important although I don't record the work I do in the PC room, I mix them there, and the extra levels of quietness does help!

orbitalwalsh · 3 Nov 2018 at 12:27

danyjr said:
Thanks very much for your reply

Great advice on the Auros, sounds like a nobrainer. Yes, quietness is important although I don't record the work I do in the PC room, I mix them there, and the extra levels of quietness does help!

https://www.bequiet.com/en/case/1506

Some damn thick sound dampening

easyrider · 3 Nov 2018 at 12:48

I would buy a couple of 1tb ssd drives aswell as the 500gb os drive and have a thunderbolt external drive for storage...and backup.

Ditch the WD black.

I take it you already have a backup of your audio files ...?

danyjr · 3 Nov 2018 at 15:26

orbitalwalsh said:
https://www.bequiet.com/en/case/1506

Some damn thick sound dampening

Thanks for the recommendation. I have one question however. This is a mid tower case meaning the circulation and room won't be as much as a full tower ATX? Isn't the a downside? Because I have plenty of space in my room to accommodate for a full tower.

orbitalwalsh · 3 Nov 2018 at 15:41

danyjr said:
Thanks for the recommendation. I have one question however. This is a mid tower case meaning the circulation and room won't be as much as a full tower ATX? Isn't the a downside? Because I have plenty of space in my room to accommodate for a full tower.

Like new have been blurred a bit with mid and full tower .
Look at full tower a few years ago and their classes as large sized mids, but with much better airflow in cases .
What's your current case

danyjr · 3 Nov 2018 at 18:33

orbitalwalsh said:
Like new have been blurred a bit with mid and full tower .
Look at full tower a few years ago and their classes as large sized mids, but with much better airflow in cases .
What's your current case

I have a very old Antec Titan 650. I won't be using any of my current system as the whole thing will go to my parents.

danyjr · 3 Nov 2018 at 18:35

easyrider said:
I would buy a couple of 1tb ssd drives aswell as the 500gb os drive and have a thunderbolt external drive for storage...and backup.

Ditch the WD black.

I take it you already have a backup of your audio files ...?

This is very good advice although I would prefer having the WD Black than the external Thunderbolt. I don't really move my files around so mobility isn't important to me.
1TB SSD sounds like a good plan in addition to the OS SSD

orbitalwalsh · 3 Nov 2018 at 18:53

danyjr said:
I have a very old Antec Titan 650. I won't be using any of my current system as the whole thing will go to my parents.

Yeah, that's classed as a Mid tower in size now .
As you've seen, PSUs are normally on the bottom, the .space for 50mm thick AIO systems at top long with 3x 120fans at the front .

Full towers normally classed as being able to house 3x 140mm fans at the front

easyrider · 3 Nov 2018 at 19:10

danyjr said:
This is very good advice although I would prefer having the WD Black than the external Thunderbolt. I don't really move my files around so mobility isn't important to me.
1TB SSD sounds like a good plan in addition to the OS SSD

You didn’t answer my point about backups ?

danyjr · 3 Nov 2018 at 19:18

Great, thanks for the clarification. I think the BeQuiet is the likely candidate to go through

danyjr · 3 Nov 2018 at 20:09

easyrider said:
You didn’t answer my point about backups ?

They are backed up in the cloud.

orbitalwalsh · 3 Nov 2018 at 20:09

The speed of thunder bolt 3 back up is insane , specially if doing who system backups

Love cloud storage but nothing beats physical copies personally

lee32uk · 6 Nov 2018 at 15:16

danyjr said:
Thanks for the recommendation. I have one question however. This is a mid tower case meaning the circulation and room won't be as much as a full tower ATX? Isn't the a downside? Because I have plenty of space in my room to accommodate for a full tower.

A Full tower can have worse thermals than a mid tower and vice versa. It depends on your fans/fan setup and also the actual case itself i.e Is the front panel solid or mesh. Are there any internal drive cages blocking airflow etc.

danyjr · 6 Nov 2018 at 21:52

easyrider said:
I would buy a couple of 1tb ssd drives aswell as the 500gb os drive and have a thunderbolt external drive for storage...and backup.

Ditch the WD black.

I take it you already have a backup of your audio files ...?

Perhaps a 500GB M.2 for OS plus 2 1GB SSD drives for everything else?

easyrider · 7 Nov 2018 at 00:33

danyjr said:
Perhaps a 500GB M.2 for OS plus 2 1GB SSD drives for everything else?

Sounds good to me

Petrolhead · 7 Nov 2018 at 15:13

To me, the bottle neck looks like the RAM. For such a high spec I would be looking at 32G

lee32uk · 7 Nov 2018 at 16:36

cms239 said:
To me, the bottle neck looks like the RAM. For such a high spec I would be looking at 32G

Depends if the Audio production work can make use of that much Ram. You don't need 32GB for the gaming side of things.

danyjr · 7 Nov 2018 at 18:53

cms239 said:
To me, the bottle neck looks like the RAM. For such a high spec I would be looking at 32G

Interesting thought, however I hardly use my 8GB as it is. This is because I use a lot of synths and effects. These plugins do need a lot of processing power but hardly use any memory.
On the other hand for someone who would use samples frequently (I'm talking huge, 500 GB libraries) would need a lot of memory, but even then I think 16GB would suffice. And if it is not, it is always easy to add a few memory modules along the way.