# If you were going to order a new desktop/tower today...



## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 12, 2018)

what would you get?

specs?

pre-built?

$2,500-ish budget


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## Tfis (Mar 13, 2018)

i7 7700k, 64GB, 500GB + 2TB SSD, Asus MB, be Quiet DarkRock3,..


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## EvilDragon (Mar 13, 2018)

Make that i7-8700K instead with Noctua's cooling.


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## chimuelo (Mar 13, 2018)

i7 8700k the most powerful audio CPU you can get as its single core strength has no rival, and 6 Cores is capable of real time use on lower buffer settings.
I’d still get Noctua or a Corsair Hydro water/radiator and take that sucker to 5GHz.

I doubt anyone bounces tracks with the new HEDT CPUs.


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## EvilDragon (Mar 13, 2018)

chimuelo said:


> I doubt anyone bounces tracks with the new HEDT CPUs.



You can ALWAYS do things that make you bounce tracks, worry not. I'm pretty sure there still are people doing it even on 8700K


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## khollister (Mar 13, 2018)

8700K is definitely how I would roll. As far as prebuilt vs DIY, DIY isn't that difficult from a HW assembly standpoint (assuming some technical proclivity). The real value of going with a prebuilt from an audio PC firm (StudioCat, DAWPlus, SCAN UK, etc) is in the configuration to maximize audio performance. One of the reasons I returned to Mac after a couple year Windows detour was because I hated managing Windows 10, not using it. Of course you also get a warranty with a prebuilt.


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## Craig Duke (Mar 13, 2018)

I recently purchased a Coffee Lake 8700K system, pre-built and tuned by _Purrfect Audio_. All cores are running at 4.7 GHz. Fast, dependable, and silent. I'm very happy with my choice.


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## eirikbj (Mar 15, 2018)

Ok, so yall agree on 8700K. I am looking into the 7820X, that is over 200$ more expensive. Is it not better? (Of course I am planning on building myself).

(And I am using it as a VEP slave entirely)


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## Jazzy_Joe (Mar 15, 2018)

Another very happy 8700K user here, got mine from Scan in the UK. Running at 4.7 Giga-whops, it has comfortably taken everything I thrown at it so far!


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 15, 2018)

thanks for all the posts!

i am now looking at a September, 2018 timeframe (bonus month).

i need something that will handle 3D Rendering and Animation too, so Cores and GPUs will play heavily.

should be an interesting 6 months.


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## EvilDragon (Mar 16, 2018)

Still 8700K but then also add a beefy GPU to it.


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## gregh (Mar 16, 2018)

I would look at Toms Hardware site and Ars Techinica and see what the primo system was for last year (or year before this years hot system). I would go on the reddit subforum for video machines and ask there, and then I would ask a good retailer what they would do to build you a machine - given the specs of what you found. I would go for last years hot processor and graphics cards - which will be amazing - and spend money on SSDs and internal backup drives. And dont forget the monitor - get something that can handle the resolution (pixels and colour space) that you need. The last of your problems will be the CPU and graphics if you go down that route.


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 16, 2018)

EvilDragon said:


> Still 8700K but then also add a beefy GPU to it.



Yup

I will be working with Maya 2018 and Red Shift.

Stuff never sits still.


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 16, 2018)

gregh said:


> I would look at Toms Hardware site and Ars Techinica and see what the primo system was for last year (or year before this years hot system). I would go on the reddit subforum for video machines and ask there, and then I would ask a good retailer what they would do to build you a machine - given the specs of what you found. I would go for last years hot processor and graphics cards - which will be amazing - and spend money on SSDs and internal backup drives. And dont forget the monitor - get something that can handle the resolution (pixels and colour space) that you need. The last of your problems will be the CPU and graphics if you go down that route.








Current setup.

A couple of Asus 27" 1440s working well.


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## tack (Mar 16, 2018)

eirikbj said:


> I am looking into the 7820X, that is over 200$ more expensive. Is it not better? (Of course I am planning on building myself).


It's got two more cores, and the X299 platform offers more features than X370 (including going beyond 64GB RAM).

There's a very lengthy thread over on The Sound Board (requires registration, sorry) where @Guy Rowland agonizes over the 8700K vs the 7820X, and we spent quite a lot of time benchmarking, with the help of Scan. Ultimately Guy decided to go with the 7820X as although the 8700K's realtime performance was clearly better, he didn't feel it was better _enough_ to matter to him compared to the 7820X. And in exchange, he gets 2 extra cores and a richer platform.

I await with interest to see how his new build works out.

FWIW, I went with the 8700K because I wasn't convinced about the thermals of the 7820X with air cooling when I purchased.


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## EvilDragon (Mar 16, 2018)

Which is a sane choice you did. 8700K is still a 95W TDP CPU, whereas 7820X pushes 140W... Eek.


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## Symfoniq (Mar 16, 2018)

EvilDragon said:


> Which is a sane choice you did. 8700K is still a 95W TDP CPU, whereas 7820X pushes 140W... Eek.



Not that you'd ever know it, unless perhaps pushing AVX-optimized workloads heavily. My 7820X is cool, quiet, and efficient, and I'd buy it again over the 8700K for the extra PCIe lanes.


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## LinusW (Mar 16, 2018)

i9-7960X


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## khollister (Mar 16, 2018)

If you are planning a high-end graphics card, the 8700K may not be the best choice. It, like the 6700 and 7700 before it, only has 16 PCIe lanes which will all be taken up by a single video card. That leaves nothing for NVMe drives, among other things. The 8700 is a great choice for music because most folks can use the integrated graphics.

Now a 7820 or 7900 starts making more sense. The 7900 is where you get a full 44 lanes.


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## tack (Mar 16, 2018)

khollister said:


> It, like the 6700 and 7700 before it, only has 16 PCIe lanes which will all be taken up by a single video card. That leaves nothing for NVMe drives, among other things.


It's not _quite_ as bad as that. Bear in mind the PCH provides 24 PCIe lanes, so if you're using NVMe M.2 slots on your motherboard, you'll usually be using lanes provided by the chipset. The bottleneck then would be the DMI 3.0 interface to the CPU which is PCIe x4 (and which does not cannibalize the 16 for the video card).

The question is how many peripherals are you running full tilt simultaneously such that the bottlenecks become material.


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 17, 2018)

Man

Great stuff.

Need to sit and digest all of this.

Getting some preliminary online quotes,

Seems a realistic budget for an audio/3D render machine would be more like

$5,000


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 17, 2018)

khollister said:


> If you are planning a high-end graphics card, the 8700K may not be the best choice. It, like the 6700 and 7700 before it, only has 16 PCIe lanes which will all be taken up by a single video card. That leaves nothing for NVMe drives, among other things. The 8700 is a great choice for music because most folks can use the integrated graphics.
> 
> Now a 7820 or 7900 starts making more sense. The 7900 is where you get a full 44 lanes.



A serious consideration.

Thanks.


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 17, 2018)

LinusW said:


> i9-7960X


Looking that way.


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## tack (Mar 17, 2018)

If you're seriously considering Core X options, be sure to spend a good amount of time researching cooling solutions, especially if you intend to overclock.

If you don't overclock, as you climb the Core X SKUs, be cognizant of the fact that your single core performance rapidly decreases as you increase your core counts. At some point you'll have a rig that'll be great for video rendering and not so great for audio ...

... at least not where realtime input is needed. If you're fine with 1024 sample ASIO buffers and you don't do any realtime performance on demanding FX chains (e.g. expensive synths, reverbs, or other processing chains) then indeed maybe lots of cores is the right trade-off to make over single core performance.

But if live input is still a concern, then beware the low clock speeds.


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## khollister (Mar 17, 2018)

tack said:


> If you're seriously considering Core X options, be sure to spend a good amount of time researching cooling solutions, especially if you intend to overclock.
> 
> If you don't overclock, as you climb the Core X SKUs, be cognizant of the fact that your single core performance rapidly decreases as you increase your core counts. At some point you'll have a rig that'll be great for video rendering and not so great for audio ...
> 
> ...



Agreed. Based on my experiences with both Win10 and Macs in the last couple years, an effective core speed of much less than 3.8-4.0 GHz is going to be trouble playing heavy VI's in live. I say effective because the published base clock is no longer necessarily representative of what you see even with loads on all the cores. For instance, my iMac Pro 10c has a base clock of 3.0, but lightly loaded I see 4.2 and even on a 10-15 min torture test of 99-100% on all cores (which you will never see on audio), the clock speeds bounce between about 3.5 - 3.8 (thermal management). The Xeon in my Mac has crazy high turbo multipliers though, so check some CPU load tests on the specific chip you are considering as to what you can expect.


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## EvilDragon (Mar 17, 2018)

This is why you can disable thermal management on PC, and set cores to always work at full tilt with High Performance power option... My 6700K works at 4.5 GHz all the time.


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## khollister (Mar 17, 2018)

EvilDragon said:


> This is why you can disable thermal management on PC, and set cores to always work at full tilt with High Performance power option... My 6700K works at 4.5 GHz all the time.



I know that, but the point Tack was trying to make is that the higher core count X299 parts can become thermal challenges when you try to lock all the cores at or above the stated turbo freq. locking a 8700 @ 4.7 is not a big problem for air cooling


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## tack (Mar 17, 2018)

khollister said:


> locking a 8700 @ 4.7 is not a big problem for air cooling


And interestingly, for me anyway, 4.8 was more of a challenge on my 8700k (cooled with a Cryorig H5 Ultimate). In some cases I ran into thermal throttling at 4.8GHz (curiously not while video encoding, but I did see it while running some demanding synths), but at 4.7GHz I stayed nearly 10C below the thermal ceiling.

Old hat for many of us here, but as a PSA, ED's last point can't be stressed enough. Disabling CPU frequency scaling (easily done via the High Performance power profile in Windows as ED pointed out) is crucial to prevent audio buffer underruns. I can't make it 5 seconds with a Spitfire Chamber Strings legato patch on the Balanced profile due to the low idle clock speeds combined with the lag time to clock it up. The hysteresis is reasonable for most applications but it just doesn't work for audio.


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 17, 2018)

Definitely have some homework to do.

Looks like i came to the right place.

I'm thinking a 60/40 Audio over 3D priority split.

Lots of VIs and guitar/bass amp sim tracking.

My main 3D application is pure CAD (Creo/SolidWorks) with the occassional photorealistic render.

I can test render quickies and offload to the render farm where i work for final deliverables.


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## khollister (Mar 17, 2018)

tack said:


> And interestingly, for me anyway, 4.8 was more of a challenge on my 8700k (cooled with a Cryorig H5 Ultimate). In some cases I ran into thermal throttling at 4.8GHz (curiously not while video encoding, but I did see it while running some demanding synths), but at 4.7GHz I stayed nearly 10C below the thermal ceiling.
> 
> Old hat for many of us here, but as a PSA, ED's last point can't be stressed enough. Disabling CPU frequency scaling (easily done via the High Performance power profile in Windows as ED pointed out) is crucial to prevent audio buffer underruns. I can't make it 5 seconds with a Spitfire Chamber Strings legato patch on the Balanced profile due to the low idle clock speeds combined with the lag time to clock it up. The hysteresis is reasonable for most applications but it just doesn't work for audio.



About that - on my older X79 VEP slave (Asus MB), setting Windows to High Performance worked fine. When I did my X99 build for Cubase (Gigabyte MB) The Windows power settings did nothing - I had to turn everything off in the BIOS.

Interestingly, my iMac Pro seems to try to maximize the clock freq - runs at 4.2-4.3 at idle. I guess Apple must manipulate the clock modes in the OS or SMC firmware - there is no known user accessible way to change this.


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## AdamKmusic (Mar 18, 2018)

Keeping an eye on this thread!


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## thereus (Mar 18, 2018)

Is nobody using Xeons any more? They look like a good compromise of hz/temp to me and you can use lareger memory sizes.


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## EvilDragon (Mar 18, 2018)

They usually don't have good enough base clock frequency (below 4 GHz mostly). They're really more for servers rather than audio workstations, IMHO.


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## thereus (Mar 18, 2018)

Aren’t the new W series changing all that? They have turbo speeds well north of 4Ghz.


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## khollister (Mar 18, 2018)

thereus said:


> Aren’t the new W series changing all that? They have turbo speeds well north of 4Ghz.



The W series parts are basically the i7/i9 Skylake-EP with enterprise features enabled along with expanded RAM capability (512GB vs 128GB) and 48 PCIe lanes (vs 24-44 depending on the Skylake-EP part). In return they are more expensive and require a different chipset than X299, making the consumer X299 motherboards incompatible. 

Short answer is there is no reason to go Xeon, at least with Skylake. Both the Xeons and i9 parts have exactly the same cache design now. You are spending more money for no real world advantage. The availability of lower TDP parts trades speed for cores, which as ED states, is a bad trade for most audio purposes. 

For a box without high end GPU requirements (audio only/general purpose), the 8700K is the clear bang for the buck leader. If you want to pay for 128GB of RAM and/or need high end GPU(s), then X299 is your solution (ideally starting with the 7820 or 7900).


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## tack (Mar 18, 2018)

khollister said:


> For a box without high end GPU requirements (audio only/general purpose), the 8700K is the clear bang for the buck leader. If you want to pay for 128GB of RAM and/or need high end GPU(s), then X299 is your solution (ideally starting with the 7820 or 7900)


You had me nodding all the way up to here. IMO the Z370 platform can still be a perfectly fine choice even if you want to go with a high end GPU (I have a 1080 Ti) because the relevant question is how many of your other PCIe peripherals will you be saturating at the same time as your graphics card.

If you're doing serious rendering, pulling a lot of high resolution textures from multiple PCIe attached flash cards, such that you'd be at risk of bottlenecking those 16 lanes, then maybe there's an argument to be made. (Though it's not a slam dunk, because benchmarks comparing high-end GPUs at x8 vs x16 don't typically show much of a difference. Maybe the situation has changed with the Titan V?) But if the x4 bandwidth of DMI 3.0 is enough for your storage devices connecting into the PCH, then I don't see that performance should suffer even in theory.

Of course you'd be maxing out the platform at that point, so future upgrade options is another consideration toward X299. Yet it does need to be stressed that PCIe 3.0 x8 is still a hell of a lot of bandwidth.


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## khollister (Mar 18, 2018)

tack said:


> You had me nodding all the way up to here. IMO the Z370 platform can still be a perfectly fine choice even if you want to go with a high end GPU (I have a 1080 Ti) because the relevant question is how many of your other PCIe peripherals will you be saturating at the same time as your graphics card.
> 
> If you're doing serious rendering, pulling a lot of high resolution textures from multiple PCIe attached flash cards, such that you'd be at risk of bottlenecking those 16 lanes, then maybe there's an argument to be made. (Though it's not a slam dunk, because benchmarks comparing high-end GPUs at x8 vs x16 don't typically show much of a difference. Maybe the situation has changed with the Titan V?) But if the x4 bandwidth of DMI 3.0 is enough for your storage devices connecting into the PCH, then I don't see that performance should suffer even in theory.
> 
> Of course you'd be maxing out the platform at that point, so future upgrade options is another consideration toward X299. Yet it does need to be stressed that PCIe 3.0 x8 is still a hell of a lot of bandwidth.



Good point about running at x8. Given that sample streaming is mostly small random reads, it is certainly reasonable that the DMA bandwidth limitation is not going to practically impact performance.

Don't get me wrong, if I was still on a PC as my DAW and needed a machine, I would make a beeline for the 8700K.


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## JamesIV (Mar 19, 2018)

Any thoughts on the AMD Threadripper 1950x? I know they're supposed to announce version two of these in a few months with supposedly faster base clock and turbo speeds (I've decided to delay my build until these are announced/released). They have more PCI lanes than the intel, I think. Has anyone used these in a V.I. environment? Thanks!


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## EvilDragon (Mar 19, 2018)

Intel is still a better choice for low latency audio. Threadripper's performance depends quite a bit on RAM speeds (and fast RAM is quite expensive), plus I'm not sure you can get it to work on 8700K's turbo clock (4.7 GHz) that easily.


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## Zoot_Rollo (Mar 30, 2018)

Thoughts on Icelake later this year bringing down the price on 8700Ks?


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