# Questions on new PC BUILD for music film scoring



## Max Pa (Jan 4, 2023)

1- Why some musicians buy a pricey internal desktopPC audio card if they already have a great external audio card? As film composer do I need a good internal PC audio card or not? (I already have external focusrite)

2- What motherboard max 250$ do you suggest for music? I just wanted with nvme, USB3 ports, Wifi and ethernet. Do I need some else too? (This PC is only for music work.)

3- Since intel 10gen has more single core frequency, can I use that to build new pc or is better 12gen ?

4- For using Vienna VEP 7 do I need 2 ethernet connectors on motherboard or I can add a simple network card with ethernet port in PCI-E x1 ? Is 2.5 ethernet important?

5- Do I need SATA 6gbps if I use external SSDs with USB3 ?


----------



## Berdinskikh (Jan 4, 2023)

I would try to follow the order giving answers.
1. PCIe is the best known protocol for audio on the PC, having direct access to the CPU, it results in better performance and stability. Not all of the external solutions are equally good: mentioned Focusrite (as well as most of the XMOS-based USB interfaces) is nowhere near, let's say, RME USB counterparts regarding low-latency performance and RTL.
2. For music I suggest you to exclude Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity from your top priorities for the system board. You'd be better checking the number of the lanes, ability for delivery to the CPU a proper amount of power as well as for fine tuning (overclocking), RAM compatibility.
3. Single core speed isn't always related to the clock, 12th Gen, especially with DDR5, will give you better performance overall (and a more future proof in comparison with 10th Gen).
4. You may use whatever you have, if it does offer at least a Gigabit connection. There was no specification for a secondary computer, so that question is left open.
5. It's uncommon, at least from my view, for the current mainstream boards to exclude SATA in any way — so it will be present almost anyway, but occasionally dividing lanes from the other peripherals and devices, so, as I said earlier, you must check for that at the time of choosing board. And it does nothing to the absolutely separate USB with anything connected to.


----------



## Max Pa (Jan 4, 2023)

1. ok so you mean that if I don't have RME USB interface then it's better to buy only an internal audio card that costs a bit more than external?
What is it RTL ?

2. ok and then once i choosea motherboard without wifi how can I add it? With a card connected to PCIE x1 or x16?

4. in any case if I use one ethernet port for connecting to internet then I need another for VEP 7 right? (the second computer is option for no, I just want to know ho w to build this so if I want to add another in future I have that possibility without changing the motherboard)


----------



## Berdinskikh (Jan 4, 2023)

1. There are Thunderbolt (essentially a PCIe externally) solutions as well, but presence of that raises up demands for your PC's board to offer a support for it — yet it does not necessarily help to outperform those of USB-based interfaces, which are known for being done right, and RME with their own custom FPGA and drivers is just first brand to mind. Under equal conditions all of those protocols should declare nothing more than just a pure number of channels they could work on due to the bandwidth of each — but reality differs from that.
RTL is "round-trip latency".
2. When I said about WiFi/BT regarding its removal from priorities for the board selection, I mean that in a big way: for audio there should not remain any wireless connections on PC under Win, as these are known for being common reason for the DPC latency issues raising drastically. At least you should turn them off from the "Device manager" as soon as you preparing to start your work with audio and prevent them from having drivers self-updating, as soon as you'll reach those working for the situation perfectly.
(?) 4. You may use external switch for interconnection between your machines and all the rest of networking, including Internet, with that you could stay with a single Ethernet port. Sure enough you may install a separate card, in some setups it is more effective.


----------



## dunamisstudio (Jan 4, 2023)

Max Pa said:


> 1- Why some musicians buy a pricey internal desktopPC audio card if they already have a great external audio card? As film composer do I need a good internal PC audio card or not? (I already have external focusrite)
> 
> 2- What motherboard max 250$ do you suggest for music? I just wanted with nvme, USB3 ports, Wifi and ethernet. Do I need some else too? (This PC is only for music work.)
> 
> ...


1. if you got a good external one already, don't need a soundcard too.
2. When building PC's it's always buy the most you can afford. Also I agree with what someone said, leave off the Wifi.
3. Any Intel latest or past few should be fine. With hardware, get the newest you can afford unless it just came out (less than three six months.) Reason being, some times developers don't have all the kinks worked out. With that, previous generation is good.
4. Either get a simple network switch or if the motherboard has two Ethernet ports, you could use a crossover cable.
5. Internal always good, but if you don't have thunderbolt, USB-C or USB3 are next.


----------



## PaulieDC (Jan 5, 2023)

You don't need any internal sound if you have (and should have) a decent audio interface. I just finished building my new tower tonight as a matter of fact, and I turned HD audio OFF in the BIOS.

Pretty much all SATA ports are 6gbs, and a SATA SSD plugged into a SATA port will run faster than USB3 external. 

Have fun with the build!


----------



## Max Pa (Jan 6, 2023)

I already have external audio card, but I was planning to use tha motherboard integrated audio sometimes, so wanted to choose one with a good audio inside. 
(but I don't know if phones like 250 ohm could ever work with that)

about turning AUDIO OFF in the BIOS is this done to reduce latency?

And WIFI do you think is better having it on eternal card attached to motherboard, or integrated in the motherboard? (I mean always for having low latency, because I suspect that if wifi and ethernet are already in the motherboard could have low latency right?)

Then VEP7, the ethernet cable to connect the 2 PCs is enough or do I need something else to use it (like a specific router)?

Last thing: if I use 3 internal NVME and an additional network card could these things take all PCI-E lanes so that I can't use a video card because PCI-E lanes are full?


----------



## PaulieDC (Jan 6, 2023)

Max Pa said:


> I already have external audio card, but I was planning to use tha motherboard integrated audio sometimes, so wanted to choose one with a good audio inside.
> (but I don't know if phones like 250 ohm could ever work with that)


They will, but you may not get super loud volumes.



Max Pa said:


> about turning AUDIO OFF in the BIOS is this done to reduce latency?


Good question! My thinking is that the less Services running the better, but I can't confirm it actually helps with latency.



Max Pa said:


> And WIFI do you think is better having it on eternal card attached to motherboard, or integrated in the motherboard? (I mean always for having low latency, because I suspect that if wifi and ethernet are already in the motherboard could have low latency right?)


To me, shooting data through a PCIe lane with an external card just for wireless doesn't seem like a great idea on paper, but again it may not matter. I say try your board's internal and see how it flies. Make sure you get the latest drivers from the website of course. If it runs slow or gives you problems, maybe go with a USB solution. Cheap and easy and sits right in the rear of your tower. if you decide to try that, you want to make sure you get an AC600 rated dongle (most are AC300). This one would work:





Max Pa said:


> Then VEP7, the ethernet cable to connect the 2 PCs is enough or do I need something else to use it (like a specific router)?


Nah, any standard gigabit router will work. And cables to support that speed which most do these days.



Max Pa said:


> Last thing: if I use 3 internal NVME and an additional network card could these things take all PCI-E lanes so that I can't use a video card because PCI-E lanes are full?


GREAT QUESTION. This is an area that I just did a mountain of research on because of what happened when I assembled my tower this week. I'm assuming your concern isn't an available SLOT on the mobo, but that you will "choke out" one or more lanes. I'll list what I found, see if it applies to your question. First I'll mention that after a lot of research, I went with the MSI Z790 Carbon WiFi because it has 5 M.2 NVMe slots, all PCIe 4.0 capable, and my plan was for using 5 NVMe drives (one for OS and apps, the other 4 for sample libraries). The only PCIe card I have in my RTX 3080 video card which is PCIe 4.0, so of course I wanted it in the x16 main slot, no problem right?

So here is where you really want to read the motherboard manual and see how M.2 slots affect PCIe slots. The first two M.2 slots on mine are tied to the CPU buss, the other three are on the Z790 chipset, but if I put an NVMe stick in M.2 slot #2, my main PCIe slot for my video card drops from x16 to x8, and I didn't know that at first. So upon the initial boot and post, all drives showed up as expected in the BIOS before I started doing some minor tweaks. I saw a setting for the main PCIe slot (where the video card is) and it had three choices, AUTO, 16+0 or 8+8. I wasn't totally sure what that was but I wanted to make sure I was "getting full speed from my video card" (remember that statement), so I set it to the x16 setting. I rebooted and one of the NVMe drives was gone, did not appear, and when I went back to the BIOS, the M.2 slot said "Not available". After reading the manual FINALLY, I discovered that I can't force my video card to run at x16 or I lose M.2 Slot 2, so the video card slot either has to run at x8 with a drive in M.2 slot 2, or I leave that M.2 slot empty so I can get x16 speed for the GPU. Now I was bummed of course, BUT, I headed back to google and discovered that _GPUs running at x8 still run at 97-99% speed!_ The gaming community freaks over that as if losing 3FPS will destroy your game of destruction, but there is no real-world impact. And I got that info from GamersNexus, so if Steve on that channel says it, it's accurate (I later ran the Userbenchmark test and the card scored 238%, so I think I'm OK, lol).

OK, that was super long but the summary is, use all of your NVMe slots and if that means your GPU slot drops in speed, it means NOTHING to us MIDI composers. I can't stress enough, read your motherboard manual before you even turn a screw on your build so you see what affects what. BTW, a straight composer tower does NOT need a $1K 3080 video card _at all_, you can easily run up to 4 monitors on a card for a third of that price. I simply did that for Microsoft Flight Simulator, lol!

I think I'm going to do a long post with all of the specs of my new build, simply to help with the myriad of choices out there, especially with how the technology has changed and all of the choices we have now, that weren't there when I built my last tower 5 years ago. I actually started this new tower a year ago, buying a component at a time when a good deal came up, plus I didn't want to rush the decision on the big items. That caused me to sidestep the Gen 12 CPUs and wait for 13 to arrive, for better DDR5 support. Since I wanted five NVMe slots all running PCIe 4.0, that meany Z790 chipset and DDR5 RAM, which was fine with me anyway. So on-board NVMe's do come into play depending on the mobo as well, so it takes some planning. What's crazy to me is, when I built my first tower 15 years ago (video editing at the time), putting in a 150GB 10,000RPM hard drive was considered crazy fast for an OS/apps drive, and then you bought a huge 12-bay tower so you could add 250GB or if you could afford it, 500GB drives to spread video and audio assets to different drives to help with speed, which was about 100mb/sec. This past week I mounted 5 tiny m.2 sticks on my new mobo, and all of a sudden I have 7.5TB of storage, with speed in the thousands of mb/sec! And the hard drive bottleneck is OVER, thank the Lord. Interesting time to build, whether it's AMD or Intel... speed per dollar is nuts, in a good way!


----------



## Anthony (Jan 6, 2023)

PaulieDC said:


> *I think I'm going to do a long post with all of the specs of my new build, simply to help with the myriad of choices out there*, especially with how the technology has changed and all of the choices we have now, that weren't there when I built my last tower 5 years ago.


Yes please! The last desktop I built was in 2010 so things have _really_ changed since then.

I've been using a 'desktop replacement' laptop since 2018 as a stopgap measure until I build my new desktop. It worked _extremely_ well up until the last 12-18 months when many of the latest versions of the VI that I own have become huge resource hogs. As such I now struggle to do realtime exports of almost every project in Cubase without getting audio drop-outs. Cheers....


----------



## PaulieDC (Jan 6, 2023)

Anthony said:


> Yes please! The last desktop I built was in 2010 so things have _really_ changed since then.
> 
> I've been using a 'desktop replacement' laptop since 2018 as a stopgap measure until I build my new desktop. It worked _extremely_ well up until the last 12-18 months when many of the latest versions of the VI that I own have become huge resource hogs. As such I now struggle to do realtime exports of almost every project in Cubase without getting audio drop-outs. Cheers....


Things sure HAVE changed! I would say that for a composer wanting to build a tower, there needed to be a new plateau to reach, and I believe this is the time. It will always get better but three things created a great leap: PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives, and the two processors we have at our disposal for only 600 bucks, the AMD Ryzen 9 7950X and the Intel i9-13900KF. Right now BOTH platforms have a killer CPU that doesn't cost more than BBCSO Pro even when it's on sale.


----------



## Max Pa (Jan 6, 2023)

WOW, what a mess ahahah
Yeah, only this week I discovered both that x16 lanes problem and the motherboard latency. In reality I haven't bought PC pieces yet, I'm just getting informed before. So about all those wifi and ethernet card or having already in motherboard dit's the same, just want to what it's the best to have low latency and most powerful PC possible with budget of about 1300$

Why do you have that huge video card? Do you use it for other things too?
Because I was planning to use the PC only for music and nothing else, and I want to have 3 or 4 monitors. My idea was to have a cheap video card like GT 730 which has 4 HDMI outputs. (don't know if only 2GB could be enough to run 4 monitors).

About NVME I think I need only 2 or maybe 3 on the motherboard, and for anything else I could use SATA3 or external USB3

So it's better to put WIFI OFF while doing music, but what about ethernet? Should I disable that internet too in some way?
And the AUDIO OFF in the BIOS is there a simpler way to make it off from the system without going in the BIOS ?

is it possible to use the 1 ethernet port of motherboard to do 2 things: connect to internet + connect to slave PC ??


----------



## PaulieDC (Jan 6, 2023)

Max Pa said:


> WOW, what a mess ahahah


 All part of the fun.


Max Pa said:


> Yeah, only this week I discovered both that x16 lanes problem and the motherboard latency. In reality I haven't bought PC pieces yet, I'm just getting informed before. So about all those wifi and ethernet card or having already in motherboard dit's the same, just want to what it's the best to have low latency and most powerful PC possible with budget of about 1300$


That's tight but doable. Deciding on components and then waiting for special sales and deals will get you there. Took me a year! But you can at least scratch the x16 issue off the list since x8 runs at 97% of the speed, we won't even feel that. I don't 



Max Pa said:


> Why do you have that huge video card? Do you use it for other things too?


YES, you do NOT need the card I bought! I got that for Flight Sim and for the now-occasional video editing. A decade ago it was all I could do to play a 1080HD vid in real time without stutter so I go totally and self-indulgently overboard on the GPU choice.


Max Pa said:


> Because I was planning to use the PC only for music and nothing else, and I want to have 3 or 4 monitors. My idea was to have a cheap video card like GT 730 which has 4 HDMI outputs. (don't know if only 2GB could be enough to run 4 monitors).



Some research would need to be done for the best choice, but for an Nvidia card, the 730 would probably not cut it. This is an area I'm a little fuzzy on because al I know is Intel/NVidia, because 10 years ago, Adobe premiere Pro ONLY supported NVidia cards. There may be an AMD Ryzen and AMD GPU combo that's cheaper and works better to get 4 monitors, I'm not up to date on that yet.



Max Pa said:


> About NVME I think I need only 2 or maybe 3 on the motherboard, and for anything else I could use SATA3 or external USB3
> 
> So it's better to put WIFI OFF while doing music, but what about ethernet? Should I disable that internet too in some way?


At home my desk is near the router so I just run a Cat6 cable to that, I don't use wireless at home. If you can, running on a wire is more stable and faster, but that's a moot point because you're not needing that resource when composing. If you ran a YouTube channel I'd say definitely run a cable to the router. And because i run on Ethernet, I turn wireless off in the BIOS so my board isn't even thinking about it. But I've not thought turning internet off all the way, I don't know if that's necessary as a latency tuning step but I may be wrong. @rgames is really knowledgeable on the latency thing so maybe he'll see the Mention and hop on in regards to internet causing latency. Thing is, more nd more our software tools and libraries expect a connection 24/7.



Max Pa said:


> And the AUDIO OFF in the BIOS is there a simpler way to make it off from the system without going in the BIOS ?


You don't have to turn it off in the BIOS, that's just me being over the top, lol. I do that mostly so no spurious system sounds spring up. If you get a decent CPU, the audio service shouldn't have an impact, you just don't want system sounds popping up n the middle of a great take. In that case I would simply go to the Sounds Control panel and just select No System Sounds, and then your PC will hush up.  And with Windows 11, do your best to stop all of the endless Notifications, yikes. Win11 is a total Yenta but fortunately you can silence it all (see "Fiddler on the Roof" for the Yenta reference).




Max Pa said:


> is it possible to use the 1 ethernet port of motherboard to do 2 things: connect to internet + connect to slave PC ??


So you need a simple router, whether you get a combo unit from your Cable/DSL company or buy your own separate model and router. If you get the Combo unit from, say, your cable provider, it'll have 4 network jacks already built in. Connect your PC to one jack and your slave PC to another, and Viola, everything is on the network and you can connect to each other. BaDaBing. OR, if your router isn't too close, see if you can run a Cat 6 cable to your desk area and plug it into a simple switch at your desk position, then plug your main PC and slave into that, and you can connect the two PCs. You'll essentially end up with a small network switch at your desk. I actually run a second 4-port switch and have that mounted right behind my desk, because I bought the Beumann KH80s and 750 Sub and to calibrate them, all three need to be plugged in via Ethernet. Point is, doing it that way, everything connects to each other effortlessly (mostly)
I put a link below for the switch I run in our home office/studio, because we only have 4 ports on the wireless router that I had bought for our home internet provider (Cox Cable... I never use what they provide). Even if you go wireless on the DAW tower you can still connect to the wired slave since it's all on the same network. There's no benefit to connecting two PCs directly when you have a $22 solution:



Hope all that made sense!


----------



## Max Pa (Jan 7, 2023)

sure, this discussion it's really enlightening for me, a lot! There's so many things to know about PC.. at beginning I thought was much much simpler

yeah that thing about x16 is really great, one less thing to think about!

connection 24/7 you mean with ilok? Because if there is some library that wants internet always on please tell me because I won't buy them. I like to have things in my PC to work when I want, even without any internet access.

great! Thanks for all these informations! Now last thing, can you recommend me something to protect PC for electricit bumps and when like electricity goes suddenly away, so the PC is protected and I can save my work before put all off?


----------



## daimebag (Jan 8, 2023)

Max Pa said:


> Because I was planning to use the PC only for music and nothing else, and I want to have 3 or 4 monitors. My idea was to have a cheap video card like GT 730 which has 4 HDMI outputs. (don't know if only 2GB could be enough to run 4 monitors).


Hi, I suggest you search for second-hand old and cheap GPUs like Firepro. I bought two AMD Firepro W600 (6*FullHD monitors or 3*4k monitors each) for 50 bucks.

Don't hesitate to search Datasheet on the AMD website to get more info about max res and monitors for each GPU.


----------



## Max Pa (Wednesday at 7:29 AM)

HERE WITH MORE QUESTIONS ABOUT NEW PC BUILD: 

1- What should I buy to protect PC and instrumentation from electricity problems and blackouts?

2- do i need compatibility also for RAM and SSD to avoid any latency?? And for mouse and PC keyboard? 

3- is it true that Nvidia video creates problems with latency and so AMD video card are better? 

4- what motherboards have a good onboard LAN? 

5- Could USB in motherboard create latency problems too? Should I buy a separate PCIe card with USB ports to connect my external audio card there?

6- any suggestions about motherboard brands? I heard many say that Asus is the best and many others say Asus/Asrock has problem with latency… 

7- if I put off things wifi and internal audio in the BIOS or in the Windows Device Manager?

8- Any router/modem brands suggested?


----------

