Best Music Production PC for FL Studio

Darbnosral11,

My tendency is to think of an audio production system as a workstation with an emphasis on a strong memory and disk system. For my dedicated sound recording and editing system I use an antique HP M9426F with a Core2 Quad Q6600 and M-Audio 192 MIDI soundcard and with baby Sonar, it works completely reliably - live recording and Hauptwerk and Garritan soft-synths.

Likely candidates:

HP z600, z420, z620, Dell Precision T3500, T5500, T3600, T5600

That said, for your use, consider the advantages of buying a good performing used workstation as these are high performance, reliable, and always very quiet. Mainly, you don't have to research, order, assemble, wire, and test a system from parts. How about:

HP Z420 WORKSTATION W7 PRO E5-1650V2 3.50GHZ 16GB 256GB SSD QUADRO K2000 2GB > $695 or offer

That particular one is almost ready to plug in and use for your applcations. The Xeon E5-1650 v2 is one of the great ones- 6-core @ 3.5 / 3.9GHz - excellent single-thread performance. The i7-5820K is a very good CPU but it has only 28 PCIe lanes whereas the E5 -1650 v2 has 40. For a music production system, you may eventually have a big load of peripherals. Also, the "K" in 5820K for overclocking is not a good idea in this use as it is inherently less stable. The z420 also has a very good SATAIII disk system and can use 64 GB of memory. It happens that the Quadro K2000 is about the perfect GPU as well for multiple monitors.

Personally, I would use Window 7 Professional 64-bit and run the Basic theme, turning off all the interface fussiness. Also, I disable all scheduled tasks and automatic updates which are terrible ruiners of recording on connected systems.

To that system:

1. Increase RAM to 32GB
2. Consider a Samsung SM951 M.2 256GB on a PCIe to M/2 Adapter card- seethe Passmark disk score for the z420 listed at bottom.
3. Add a pair of large Seagate ES.3 Constellation storage drives in RAID 1 as those have 128MB cache- made for big files.

Anyway, that's an alternative to building that should be well within the budget and much faster to accomplish. We have two z420's and a z620 and these have been 100% reliable. The z420 is very quiet and the z620 is the quietest system I know of.

Cheers,

BambiBoom


CAD / 3D Modeling / Graphic Design:

HP z420 (2015) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 (6-core @ 3.7 / 4.0GHz) / 32GB DDR3 -1866 ECC RAM / Quadro K4200 (4GB) / Samsung SM951 M.2 256GB AHCI + Intel 730 480GB (9SSDSC2BP480G4R5) + Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > 600W PSU> > Windows 7 Professional 64-bit > Logitech z2300 speakers > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H (2560 X 1440)
[ Passmark Rating = 5581 > CPU= 14046 / 2D= 838 / 3D= 4694 / Mem= 2777 / Disk= 11559] [6.12.16]

Analysis / Simulation / Rendering:

HP z620 (Rev 2) 2X Xeon E5-2690 (8-core @ 2.9 /3.8GHz) / 40GB DDR3-1600 ECC) / Quadro K2200 (4GB) / HP Z Turbo Drive (256GB) / 800W > Windows 7 Professional 64-bit > HP 2711x (27" 1980 X 1080)
[ Passmark System Rating= 5322 / CPU= 19675 / 2D= 767 / 3D = 3544/ Mem =2337 / Disk = 12951 ] 8.15.16