Sharing my new DAW (PC) Journey

with industry Pro, Nick Batzdorf

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BradGray
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Sharing my new DAW (PC) Journey

Post by BradGray » Sun Apr 25, 2021 7:55 pm

Hey Passengers,

I finally placed the order for a new PC for my DAW needs. My current PC is an older 4 core intel pc, with 16Gb Ram and SSD drives. While it worked well, it is hitting somewhere around the 7 years and it was time for an upgrade. After doing quite a bit more homework than anticipated, I wound up with the following main specs:

Intel® Core™ i7-10700K processor(8-Core, 16M Cache, 3.8GHz to 5.1GHz)
32GB, 2x16GB, DDR4, 2933Mhz
1TB M.2 PCIe NVMe Solid State Drive

The reasons why it works for me:
1) Apparently single-core speed is quite critical, due to the way the audio is processed.
- It's still a balance of speed and multi-cores, but higher single-core speed is critical for performance.
- I believe multi-core would come into play more on a much larger track count

2) RAM
- 16Gb's was still quite sufficient, but 32 will work for quite some time for me.

3) NVMe Drive - speed, speed and speed

The above is what will work for me, and I wound up customizing it via Dell. The long and short of it is that while I'm quite capable of building a system myself, it was much cheaper to buy it through them vs purchasing the parts, or going through a local builder. Just the state of computer parts at the moment.

All that said some key learning from my journey:

1) Watch out for the differences between M.2 and M.2 NvMe - they are different slots and different speeds; but read similar
- M.2. uses the SATA bus and has a top transfer speed of ~500Mbps. SSD Drives run at this speed
- M.2 NVMe uses the PCIe bus, and has a top transfer speed of ~5Gbps

2) Watch out for USB Specs - they look similar but they are different speeds.
USB 3 Speeds
USB 3.1 Gen 1 - 5Gbps
USB 3.1 Gen 2 - 10Gbps *USB C connectors are 10Gbps*
USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 - 20Gbps

Thunderbolt - 40Gbps

3) The Apple M1 chips look really great! I actually looked at that quite a bit as the Mac Mini's looked like they would be rockin' little machines. From what I read, you can't compare the specs, to standard pc specs, due to the M1 architecture. The reviews were very positive on how many simultaneous tracks, with tons of plugin's running. The main issue was compatibility. It was made for running Logic, but other applications and plugins are run in an emulation mode (due to the swtich of running from Intel to M1), until they are redone by the various software makers, for that platform. It means that previous software and plugins like Ableton, Protools, Izotope, Waves may or may not work, and will perform slower due to emulation. I'll keep watching the apple one, as it has the potential to be an amazing little machine for a DAW. =)
For the record, the last apple PC I owned was an Apple ][e as a kid. I have that emulated on the Raspberry Pi. =)

Anyway, thought I'd share the journey before it all leaves my mind. =)

Cheers,
Brad

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RickBourassa
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Re: Sharing my new DAW (PC) Journey

Post by RickBourassa » Mon Apr 26, 2021 1:20 pm

Hi Brad,

What DAW do you use?

BradGray
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Re: Sharing my new DAW (PC) Journey

Post by BradGray » Mon Apr 26, 2021 4:38 pm

Hey Rick,

I'm using Ableton Live 10 Standard.

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