help needed :D music production

bobbydnice · Feb 27, 2014

i am building a pc and need advice.

i wanr a pc good for running games and ableton + vst's.

i will be getting ssd's, was thinking i7, cooling system and case sorted.

intel or amd?
GPU's? i hear to stay clear of nvidia for audio.

any advice would be appreciated

PsychoGamingLemon · Feb 27, 2014

If u heard that about nvidia then get a AMD CPU and GPU....
They work good together, whats yur budget?

CaedenV · Feb 27, 2014

Audio work has extremely low requirements. Every week I do audio editing at my church on a 5 year old i3 processor with no problems whatsoever. A faster HDD than the craptastic laptop HDD in the system would help export audio faster, but it really requires very little CPU and RAM to do audio work. Any gaming PC should be able to do audio editing without issue.

HOWEVER: Cheap gaming rigs tend to be noisy as hell. If you want to do audio work, then do youself a favor and get a tower with some acustic padding and quiet fans inside. Get a GPU with a nice quiet cooler, and an aftermarket CPU cooler with nice quiet fans, or look into water-cooling the both of them.

For gaming an i5 processor is all that you need, and that will be entirely overkill for any audio work you need to do. AMD has some decent options, but (at least for now) Intel is the way to go for gaming.

SSDs are nice, but even a slow HDD these days is more than fast enough to record several uncompressed audio streams at once in real time. Absolutely get a decent sized SSD to hold your OS, programs, games, and scratch disc space... but for archiving and recording a nice fat HDD will save you money and offer plenty of space while still offering more than enough performance.

Your GPU has nothing to do with audio. I have always used nVidia GPUs in all of my recording rigs and never had a problem. Again, whatever GPU you decide on, be sure to pick one up with a nice quiet cooler, but choose your brand based upon the games you play, not your audio workflow.

CaedenV · Feb 27, 2014

Oh, and for God's sake, read the recent Tom's article about sound cards! Unless you need a few extra inputs and are not yet willing to spend cash on a true audio interface, then stick with onboard audio. Preferably use a digital output to a receiver and then use some nice flat response headphones or monitor speakers.
They may not make your game/music/movie audio 'pop', but flat audio is very important for editing so that you have a better feel for what your final product will sound like on a variety of systems.

bobbydnice · Feb 27, 2014

thanks lads.

i have active studio monitors, 2 external soundcards, serato, traktor, ableton. so audio end covered. studied audio in college so know bout audio very well.

i dont really have a budget, just wanna know what best options are.

i just hear for using DAW's(digital audio workstations) and VES(Vinyl Emulation Software) you dont want to have a kick ass GPU, you want one that doesnt output much power when using these programs.

is there a graphics card that you can set to not output much when these progams are on? and still handle intense graphics for latest games.

i will be using cooling system, SSD's, i7 id say

CaedenV · Feb 27, 2014

All GPUs and CPUs throttle down when not working on a heavy load. Essentially, when your monitor is turned off your GPU will use less than 10W, when you kick the monitor on and are using normal desktop applications, or are watching a movie, then it will use 20-30W, and then when gaming it will use as much power as it can (typically 100-250W).

Even when using a lot of power, if your external sound cards are more than 3-4 feet away then you should not have any interference issues to speak of. That was a bit of a problem 10 years ago... but not really an issue anymore.

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