# What are the ideal specs when building a PC Cubase machine?



## Fitz (Nov 8, 2019)

I’m planning on switching my entire setup to PC, for cost sake in my studio. I’m going to build a new main machine — I already have one slave PC. 

What’s most important in processing when building a computer solely as a music machine? Are more cores better or are higher speed cores better? 

What should I configure to build a Cubase machine? I plan on 64GB Ram to start in my main computer.


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## Dirk Ehlert (Nov 8, 2019)

Very happy with the performance of my latest build, i9-9900k processor, 64gb of ram. Runs like a beast even on the most demanding tasks (2000 track template with 2 slaves)


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## colony nofi (Nov 12, 2019)

Unfortunately there are no such things as ideal specs. Everything is a trade off in this world.

At the *moment*, higher speed cores are more important than the number of cores - although you will still want 6 or 8 powerful cores in your machine. An i9-9900k is somewhat of a great audio processor by all accounts, and seems to tick the boxes for cores + base speed for your cores. 

Staring into the void of upcoming workstation chips to be released before the end of the year, we have the cascade lake X chips that might prove to be monsters (12 cores @ 3.5GHtz sounds great to me, but will it beat of the 9900k?) . And their cost is much less than the previous generation. New AMD chips look incredible (just for shear amount of processing power with their many many cores) but will they translate to real world performance for sample / synth composers? 

And then what about mixing - which tends to use cores in a slightly different way?

Its all a bit wait and see right now. I'm a mac head - but am seriously looking at a PC machine to replace one of my mac pro's very soon. I'm following a tonne of threads online - and hopefully end of november we will have some interesting results. 

Unlike you, I'm aiming to have everything on one machine. So 256GB ram. X299 if intel.


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## BlackDorito (Nov 12, 2019)

colony nofi said:


> I'm aiming to have everything on one machine


@Fitz - if you are the sort of person who fires up your system once in the morning and uses it all day on a single project, then master-slave may be the way to go (sounds like you may be familiar with this already). On the other hand, if you find yourself booting up a few times a day (like I do) or switching projects/configs a lot, you might prefer just using a master system for most projects, it comes up quicker. I've found that if I load up a bunch of Kontakts full of instruments and drive them with Sibelius or Cubase, as long as I don't have too many instruments playing at once, it works fine on just a master PC (32Gig i5 Win7) with no glitches. Previously I used a master-slave running VEP on the master, and this config works great with large templates, but took awhile to get up and running, which started to irritate me after awhile, particularly if I had to switch projects or it crashed. If you want to be light-and-quick, then I'll bet the 64Gig i9 config will allow you to run just the master for many projects.


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## colony nofi (Nov 12, 2019)

Or... the third way - which is still running VEP, but for specific things and on one machine.


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## Jeremy Gillam (Nov 12, 2019)

My i9 9900k, 1TB m.2 SSD, 64gb RAM build has been rock solid for Cubase. As it happens I’m going to be selling it soon as I’m switching back to Mac, if on the off chance you’re near LA and interested send me a PM and I’ll give you a good deal!


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