# CPUs/Mobos... again...



## Guy Rowland (Feb 3, 2018)

Hello everyone. Another year of me saying "right, really need a new rig". I've gotten stuck in the loop of "oh there's a new generation right round the corner that will be miles better than anything out now". 2 1/2 years later...

I currently have a stock 4930k which seems sluggish. So here's my priorities.

1. Goes like lightning. I find maxing out the CPU more of a real world problem for me than voice counts, lots of synth work. But...

2. A near-silent rig. My current rig is great there, I'd like to keep it this quiet. Which means I don't want to be fighting with fans all day and using 1.21 gigawatts of power. And...

3. Ability to connect a ton of SATA drives, many of which SSDs, and a couple of M2s. Thunderbolt possibilities.

I think I'm ok sticking with 64gb of RAM. Budget is whatever it needs to be to satisfy my shopping list, which I realise has competing demands, hence my dilemma. Win 10 Pro for OS.

Grateful for anyone's experiences this most recent generation of processors and mobos. I'm very wary of AMD, but open to either of the Intel chipset platforms.


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## Living Fossil (Feb 3, 2018)

...i'm thinking about a powerful slave PC for some months (...and i keep delaying my decisions since the recent jobs are not that much relying on orchestral libraries, but more on electronics/synths or recorded instruments)

If 64 GB of RAM is an acceptable limit, the i7 8700k seems to be an excellent choice. I hear lot of praise about this CPU. For Mobos, my actual favourite would maybe be a Gigabyte Aorus Gaming 7 (or 5).
However, i'm still struggling, since there are rumors that RAM prices could calm down after the actual mining hype in the 3rd quartal...
(ps. i would be glad to hear some opinions concerning the future of RAM prices...  )


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## Quasar (Feb 3, 2018)

I try to sort of keep up, and agree that the 8700k seems to be the sweet spot if upgrading today. I've also read that memory prices may fall Q2/Q3, due to Samsung increasing component production and a leveling out of portable smart device RAM demand. But who knows? Such speculation is all Neville Chamberlain waving "peace in our time" AFAIK... 

...Still happily chugging along on an i7 2600 32GB, and the 8700k is the first gen Intel that looks significant enough to perhaps justify the expense, as upgrades since Sandy Bridge have been fairly incremental IMHO... But because of money constraints, and because my machine still rocks (between track disability toggles setup in Reaper and printing to audio I haven't found 32GB to be a huge liability), I will wait to see what the state of the state is on the other side of the Spectre/Meltdown fiasco, and daydream of something akin to an 8 core (16 virtual) i7 CPU with 128GB for a roughly similar price to the 8700k/64GB now, maybe around the time MS drops Windows 7 critical support in 2020.

I've looked at a few hypothetical current build options, and it's RAM more than anything else that is the $$$ bottleneck. So I'm glad I'm neither desperate or impatient.


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## Guy Rowland (Feb 3, 2018)

In the UK, Scan have a terrific reputation and they offer some 8700k systems that might be the way to go for me, as I think that single core performance will be a huge benefit and the power is lovely and low. A downside is they only offer it with the Asus Prime X370-A mobo, which is severely lacking in connections. I reckon I'd need additional brackets for USB 2, USB 3, Thunderbolt, ESATA and SATA to connect everything up (you lose 2 internal SATA ports if you use a 2nd NVMe drive which is what I'd need) - the last two I can combine, but that's still 4 brackets plus a graphics card that can handle 4 monitors. Doable, but not exactly comfy. Still, I'd rather go with a mobo that they confirm is good with audio and bolt all this stuff on than risk something that isn't going to play nicely.


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## fraz (Feb 10, 2018)

Hi,

You may regard your 4930 K as sluggish if used in isolation eg no other machines - but it is still a powerful machine capable of being used as a slave even if it isn't powered up all the time.

As you need lots of SATA 3 ports you could wait for AsRock to release one of their Extreme 11's or similar that may fulfill your need for lots of drives

Regarding thunderbolt, Asus, AsRock or Gigabyte - Gigabyte X299 Designare is awesome - Asus X299 WS Sage is too but needs a TH3 add in card -AsRock X299 OC Formula (64 GB RAM MAX) but it awsome apart from this - and needs a th3 card again


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## chimuelo (Feb 11, 2018)

I’m a huge fan of ASRock Extremes.
Don’t use them but use their industrial rack server models.
But since the Z87 era ASRock Extremes have really been the trendsetters.
They made Asus up their game by adopting 4x NVMe.
Asus was stumped and been playing behind ever since.
Asus has great boards. Just never quite offering as much as the Extremes.
Their triple monitor/triple 4x NVMe boards, with NVMe RAID 5 are bandwidth beasts.

Here’s the new Industrial Rack board for new Xeons with 128-512GBs od RAM.
As usual, they’re first out the gate.

Quad Core all the way up to 18 Core. 65 Watts on quads and Octos.


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