Advice on building a small PC for recording

Axe_meister

Danny1969 said:

I've just sorted myself out a new recording machine. The wife wanted a new TV so I got a 50" 4K one then hung it on the wall and put a motherboard from an M1 Macbook behind the TV where you can't even see it. There's no fan so it's completely silent which is nice. 

One thing to bear in mind when building a PC for recording is, it's not just a case of going and choosing the fastest bits based on Geek bench tests, it's a case of choosing parts that are proven in the field. There's no point at all having a machine that's lighting fast but stutters every 10 minutes or so because there's a translation software driver between a bridge chip and the OS. For this reason I never built any AMD machines, I'm sure they are great but it was just easier to  build machines that used Intel CPU, Gigabyte Intel board etc ... the kind of setup the OS already had built in drivers for. 

Nowadays I don't bother building any machines. With the cost of used Mac's being so low and so powerful for recording there's been little point. I'm still mainly doing rock bands with 30 tracks or so of drums, guitars keys and vox. A 2010 iMac can handle that straight off the internal drive. 
I've never used the Helix plugin, not a fan of modelled guitars so that may well use a lot more power than the VI's I use for keys and stuff. 

These days AMD based boards as long as you stick to Gigabyte, MSI, Asus work right out of the box. Yes there were teething problems in the early Ryzen days but they have long since gone. And yes first few months of Windows 11, but there are still scheduling problems in windows 11 for 12th gen intel processors. 

Heartfeltdawn

Danny1969 said:

One thing to bear in mind when building a PC for recording is, it's not just a case of going and choosing the fastest bits based on Geek bench tests, it's a case of choosing parts that are proven in the field. There's no point at all having a machine that's lighting fast but stutters every 10 minutes or so because there's a translation software driver between a bridge chip and the OS. For this reason I never built any AMD machines, I'm sure they are great but it was just easier to  build machines that used Intel CPU, Gigabyte Intel board etc ... the kind of setup the OS already had built in drivers for. 

All the system configs I mentioned above worked absolutely fine without any AMD-specific chipset drivers being installed, right down to using the Microsoft Display Driver instead of the Radeon driver for the 5600G and 5700G. 

Overall setup is a long way from the days of constant tweak. On the new build with the 5600X, I've turned off background apps and turned on the Ultimate Power Plan setting. I haven't had a system run this well with so few tweaks since the days of my i7 4770 and Z97 board.