Need advice for my gaming/music production rig

Which music production software are you looking at using?

Ableton and Reason mostly. Possibly Cubase if I'm going to record live instrumentation.

The reason I ask is I use Protools. Protools is very touchy with regard to driver updates, running the software on a specific OS's SPs, and things like that. I keep a separate PC just for Protools. I don't even connect it to the internet. Just coming from my point of view, I wouldn't think you'd want to mix your gaming with your music production on the same PC.

Are Ableton and Reason not so touchy?

I haven't had problems with them previously in Windows XP or 7.

Everything looks great. All the components work together and you're setting up a very solid upgradeable machine.

The power supply is solid. You have 34A available on each of 4 12V rails. A GTX 580 requires 22A if that gives you any idea of your available power on each rail. You'll have no problem.

I don't think you're going to need more than 3.8 GHZ during the next few years while this platform is still viable. Plus, if you OC your processor, you void your warranty. Is there a better way for a company to get rid of warranty expenses than to encourage their customers to OC and void their warranties?

That case is great and gives you a lot of room to work. On the other hand, you could go with an HAF 922 and get the 6950? Just depends how important the gaming part of the build is to you.

Also, with music recording/production apps, it's good practice to record to a good fast drive and keep the actual recording/production application on a separate drive. I've used WD Blacks on my last 2 DAW builds and they work great. You can always add drives later.

If you're concerned with the cache on the Blu-ray drive and you're going to be burning a lot of Blu-rays, you should get a better one. But last I checked burning Blu-rays costs lots of $$. If you're primarily burning to CD/DVD (ie your music productions), I would just get that drive for its ability to play the Blu-ray format and not so much write to it?

You can crossfire later.

Beside that, it looks great!

Thank you very much for the in depth response! I'm glad you know about the PSU situation, because I had no idea. I'll definitely check out the HAF 922 and a few other cases to see if they could work.

I had no idea OCing the 2600K would void its warranty. Thanks for pointing that out! I will also have a second hdd but only my OS drive will be SSD unfortunately.

And you're absolutely right about the Blu-ray stuff. I'm gonna look for a BD-ROM/DVD-RW to save a little money.

Thanks again, man! You've been very helpful.

Hey, great stuff here guys. I am also lookingnto build a music production pc as well. I would like to come in under what tonga is looking to spend. Looking at the wish list could anyone help me out and let me know where I could safely cut a few corners here? I am by no means a full time music producer and I will be running mainly ableton and reason as well. Thank you very much in advance.

You should probably start your own thread for this one. Include your target price for the complete system and whether or not you need a monitor, mouse, keyboard, input devices for the instruments, monitors (mix speakers), etc...