New PC thoughts and advice sought

Snap

Hi,

I'm looking at getting a new PC for all things music- this will be it's main purpose, if not it's only purpose. Budget is around £1800. And before anyone suggests a Mac, don't want one - I have one, and just don't like it, or Logic.

I've done a fair bit of research, and it looks like the best value company is PC Specialist. I can get a slight mod of their DAW1500 spec PC, with an I7 7820 eight core CPU, 32GB RAM, for around 1750. Much better value than Scan at the same price point.

But, does anyone have any other suggestions? I want a desktop, not a laptop. I've done a build your own before, so not averse to doing that either actually. I'd rather someone else build it, so custom build appeals more tbh. It will be running Cakewalk/Sonar, Komplete, Omnisphere, and a load of other synths.

cheers for any thoughts, will be appreciated.

J

fastonebaz

With that budget and that spec anything you through at it will be handled admirably,  esp if you for SSD as your main OS drive. 

Sporky

My PC was originally built by Scan and has kept on trucking for far longer than you'd expect a PC to do.

But their pricing does seem to have become a bit ambitious.

digitalscream

For what it's worth, I just specced this on Scan:



Pretty much the same spec as the DAW1500, except it's got a much faster (and bigger) SSD and includes a monitor.

Snap

cheers all. @digitalscream - nice, thanks. Though I could take out the monitor, upgrade the motherboard to a 299. Is also missing a decent sized HDD, 4TB at least.

Hmmm...…..stuff to procrastinate on. Same as most kit/gear purchases - the research and faffery on decision is the most interesting bit. When it arrives, its inevitably not as exciting!!

Snap

Sporky said:

My PC was originally built by Scan and has kept on trucking for far longer than you'd expect a PC to do.

But their pricing does seem to have become a bit ambitious.

I've got a PC Specialist tower, which was one of their audio stations, and that has been very reliable, dare I say that out loud.....

Also had a few laptops from them, hard to fault. Really good aftersales service too, exceptional even.

Looks like I have some configuring to do …..

digitalscream

Snap said:

cheers all. @digitalscream - nice, thanks. Though I could take out the monitor, upgrade the motherboard to a 299. Is also missing a decent sized HDD, 4TB at least.

Hmmm...…..stuff to procrastinate on. Same as most kit/gear purchases - the research and faffery on decision is the most interesting bit. When it arrives, its inevitably not as exciting!!

If you don't need the monitor, I'd be tempted keep the motherboard, skip the 4TB drive and get another NVMe drive (probably 512GB) for system/programs. That way, you've got the whole 1TB NVMe drive for data, and you can get an external for backup/archiving.

Those NVMe drives are ferociously fast. You won't want a spinning rust drive holding you up with a machine like that.

revsorg

digitalscream said:

For what it's worth, I just specced this on Scan:



Pretty much the same spec as the DAW1500, except it's got a much faster (and bigger) SSD and includes a monitor.

Software Geeks sell Windows 10 Pro for £19.99 saving you £76

duotone

Haven’t bought from them myself, but a good mate bought a £1500 laptop from Scan & said he would definitely buy his next computer from them again.  I remember he left it a bit late to order it & as he needed it to take on a trip, so he paid a bit extra to get it built quicker.  Delivered on the date they originally said with no hassles/excuses.

Sporky

revsorg said:

Software Geeks sell Windows 10 Pro for £19.99 saving you £76

From their own page they're selling volume licenses to non volume customers, so they're not really legal. I know a lot of people don't care.

digitalscream

revsorg said:

Software Geeks sell Windows 10 Pro for £19.99 saving you £76

As Sporky said, that's a volume license - buying and installing that is no different to using a cracked copy. No idea how they get away with it, but it's definitely not legal to use it.

Heartfeltdawn

Go for the self-build. The money saved is considerable and it's really not that difficult to set up a computer from scratch now. 

Snap

@heartfeltdawn yeah I might. The last one I built never had a problem. As you say, pretty easy. I will look into that.

guitartango

@Snap rather than one 4TB SSD go for two 2TB discs and software raid them. So if one of your drives dies the machine will just carry on. 

Snap

@guitartango - makes sense, but having had a computer since 1992 , in some form, I can honestly say, I've never had a single catastrophic failure. And now I think that saying that, I've pushed my luck...…..!¬

digitalscream

Snap said:

@guitartango - makes sense, but having had a computer since 1992 , in some form, I can honestly say, I've never had a single catastrophic failure. And now I think that saying that, I've pushed my luck...…..!¬

By contrast, in the last 15 years I've had something like 10 or 11 drive failures, several of them at the same time (ie main drive and backup failure).

PolarityMan

digitalscream said:

Snap said:

@guitartango - makes sense, but having had a computer since 1992 , in some form, I can honestly say, I've never had a single catastrophic failure. And now I think that saying that, I've pushed my luck...…..!¬

By contrast, in the last 15 years I've had something like 10 or 11 drive failures, several of them at the same time (ie main drive and backup failure).

Do you have electromagnetic fingers or something?

digitalscream

PolarityMan said:

digitalscream said:

Snap said:

@guitartango - makes sense, but having had a computer since 1992 , in some form, I can honestly say, I've never had a single catastrophic failure. And now I think that saying that, I've pushed my luck...…..!¬

By contrast, in the last 15 years I've had something like 10 or 11 drive failures, several of them at the same time (ie main drive and backup failure).

Do you have electromagnetic fingers or something?

Nope. Totally different circumstance every time.

For example, the time that I had my main machine rebuilding after a drive failure and my backup server on top of the desk (just a bare board) because of heat, plugged into a 4-way with strict instructions for nobody to go near it. The wife decided that the hoovering was more important, and plugged into that four-way...then took the hoover out of the room, reached the limit of the cable and yanked it...dragging the power supply, motherboard and still-spinning drives off the desk and crashing to the floor. Roughly 10 years' worth of work and code gone.

See, I thought that having the backup drives in RAID 1 was ultra-safe. Turns out nothing survives a wife who really wants to do some cleaning.

guitartango

Snap said:

@guitartango - makes sense, but having had a computer since 1992 , in some form, I can honestly say, I've never had a single catastrophic failure. And now I think that saying that, I've pushed my luck...…..!¬

So far this year had two SSD failures and we like to hammer the machines, so RAID 1 as @digitalscream puts it does make some sense. I take it that you will be backing up your 4TB drive once is it full  ?  Or do what i tend to do is start again? 

Snags

digitalscream said:

Snap said:

@guitartango - makes sense, but having had a computer since 1992 , in some form, I can honestly say, I've never had a single catastrophic failure. And now I think that saying that, I've pushed my luck...…..!¬

By contrast, in the last 15 years I've had something like 10 or 11 drive failures, several of them at the same time (ie main drive and backup failure).

That's going some.  We look after a few hundred people, and plenty of multi-drive servers, and I reckon we've only had about double that over the same period, which would cover a good few thousand drives. And very few of them catastrophic.

OTOH, none of them have involved over-enthusiastic vacuum cleaning, so I guess you're just in a more hostile environment!

Heartfeltdawn

digitalscream said:

See, I thought that having the backup drives in RAID 1 was ultra-safe. Turns out nothing survives a wife who really wants to do some cleaning.

If only Blair had sent her into Iraq instead of the military...