US-Built Audio PC recommendations?

[merlyn]

... Re: NVME Drives ... if one assumes they chose 3500 MB/Sec rather than the one faster than 7000 MB/s for cost saving purposes ... do I correctly understand your suggestion to be, "Don't worry about it"? ...

Most NVMe drives these days are PCIe 4. Doing a quick search there isn't a huge price difference between a PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 drive. It just seems odd to me putting a PCIe 3 drive in a PCIe 4 slot. They're backwards compatible and will work. I simply see no reason to do it.

[James Perrett]

RE future proofing... it seems to me that standard audio workflow has reached a plateau. Sure, there's CPU hungry apps for unmixing and restoration, but those functions will likely move to the cloud anyway. And hardrive speed is always increasing, no big deal to swap them down the road since the board has PCIe 5 capability. You'd likely want to do that in 5 years or so anyhow.

Those are the ones that make my current system crawl ... and that's on a good day !

If you are doing unmixing then a good graphics card will make all the difference. I find that Demucs runs around 4X faster on my Nvidia M2200 graphics processor using Cuda compared to a 7th generation mobile i7 processor.

[merlyn]

If you are doing unmixing then a good graphics card will make all the difference. I find that Demucs runs around 4X faster on my Nvidia M2200 graphics processor using Cuda compared to a 7th generation mobile i7 processor.

Is this your potato laptop from the early 2000s? It needs all the help it can get. These new chips are so fast in multithreaded workloads that I think Alexis will see a huge improvement without a graphics card. The reason to avoid a graphics card if possible is that it's another fan or fans, and often are annoyingly noisy.

[alexis]

If you are doing unmixing then a good graphics card will make all the difference. I find that Demucs runs around 4X faster on my Nvidia M2200 graphics processor using Cuda compared to a 7th generation mobile i7 processor.

Is this your potato laptop from the early 2000s? It needs all the help it can get. These new chips are so fast in multithreaded workloads that I think Alexis will see a huge improvement without a graphics card. The reason to avoid a graphics card if possible is that it's another fan or fans, and often are annoyingly noisy.

Also, though he didn't recommend anything beyond the onboard video, Jim Roseberry of studiocat.com (Options 2 and 3, above) said the Nvidia card he'd recommend if I wanted one anyway is expected to drop several/many hundreds of $US in several months.

[James Perrett]

Is this your potato laptop from the early 2000s? It needs all the help it can get.

No - you didn't have M2200 graphics chips in the early 2000s.

A new processor might give Alexis double the speed of mine but if you can use the graphics chip for the processing then you'll see a much bigger improvement. Of course, if you are using the software that has the biggest marketing budgets then you probably won't see any improvement at all as you need to be using something like UVR to take advantage of CUDA.

[alexis]

Is this your potato laptop from the early 2000s? It needs all the help it can get.

No - you didn't have M2200 graphics chips in the early 2000s.

...Of course, if you are using the software that has the biggest marketing budgets then you probably won't see any improvement at all as you need to be using something like UVR to take advantage of CUDA.

These words are strange to me

[James Perrett]

These words are strange to me

When it comes to source separation much of the good stuff is free open source software created by the backroom boys at some of the big corporations (Meta in the case of Demucs). UVR is the Ultimate Vocal Remover which pulls together some of the more interesting source separation projects and gives them a friendly front end user interface. UVR can use the processing power of Nvidia graphics cards (an AMD version is now in beta testing) to greatly speed up the process.

For this project I used a few of UVR's processes to greatly improve the original straight from the mixing desk recordings...



I used Demucs to separate, drums, bass, vocals and guitar, then MV_Drumsep to split the drumkit into its constituent parts and spread them out over the stereo soundstage. In the songs where the sound engineer had gone overboard with the reverb I used a De-reverb algorithm that is still under development. I then added a little of my own reverb to certain tracks to pull the sound together (as well as various other processing). Unfortunately you won't be able to hear the results for a few weeks but everyone seems happy with how it has turned out.

[merlyn]

It might help to put some numbers on it. Here are the Passmark scores for an i5-4570 and a Core Ultra 7 265K:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/18 ... tra-7-265K

• LGA1150 -> FCLGA1851

Over the course of eleven years CPUs have gained 701 pins. LGA is land grid array, which means the pins are on the board side. FCLGA is flip-chip land grid array.

• Clockspeed 3.2GHz -> 3.9GHz

This is the base clockspeed. This is what the CPU sits at when idling. When there is a load the chip speeds up towards the boost frequency.

• Turbo speed 3.6GHz -> 5.5GHz

Wow. A 4570 can boost by a whole 400MHz. The specs for a 265K do say 'up to 5.5GHz', and with the AMD chip I have, I have found that I only see the top boost frequency with a single thread load. As the number of cores in use goes up, the sustained boost frequency goes down.

• Number of cores 4 -> 20

We also have the number of threads in this row which, with these two chips, is the same as the number of cores. Going from a 4th gen chip to a 15th gen chip completely skips over hyperthreading. The Intel chips in between had hyperthreading. That means one core can run two threads.

It doesn't mean twice the performance. Intel came up with hyperthreading and found that the circuitry involved took up about 10% of the area of a die and gave a performance boost of 10% to 30% depending on the nature of the load, and so was worth it. Running two threads on the same core relies on the threads stalling. An efficient thread that maxes out one core would not benefit from hyperthreading.

• Cache -- there's a lot more cache on a 265K

• TDP 85W -> 125W

This is the thermal design power and isn't too crazy for a 265K.

• Single thread rating 2033 -> 4870

Now we're getting to the headlines. The single core rating has more than doubled.

• CPU Mark 5237 -> 58777

Just let that sink in for a minute. In multithreaded performance a 265K has more than ten times the power of a 4570. It won't struggle with much.

OK, now let's throw a potato into the mix. A 7th gen i7 laptop chip: a 7500U. Is this the chip you have James?

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/18 ... l-i7-7500U

A 7th gen laptop chip is less powerful than a 4th gen desktop chip. Understandable really as it only has a TDP of 15W, which is good for battery life but not so good for running Demucs.

[James Perrett]

A 7th gen laptop chip is less powerful than a 4th gen desktop chip. Understandable really as it only has a TDP of 15W, which is good for battery life but not so good for running Demucs.

Mine is an i7 7920HQ which has a CPU Mark rating of 7282 - better than the 4th gen desktop chip but a fair bit more power hungry than the laptop chip that you found.

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/18 ... -i7-7920HQ

I must admit that when I was looking at the performance of more recent chips I was looking at laptop chips rather than desktop. The desktop chips certainly seem to have moved ahead more than I expected.

[Pete Kaine]

Most NVMe drives these days are PCIe 4. Doing a quick search there isn't a huge price difference between a PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 drive. It just seems odd to me putting a PCIe 3 drive in a PCIe 4 slot.

Yeah, whilst I can ignore not offering the PCIe5 option as a cost management thing, it seems pretty weird to me to offer PCIe 4 drives only for the samples drives and not as an option for the OS drive.

Also, though he didn't recommend anything beyond the onboard video, Jim Roseberry of studiocat.com (Options 2 and 3, above) said the Nvidia card he'd recommend if I wanted one anyway is expected to drop several/many hundreds of $US in several months.

I see they are offering 5070's currently both regular and Ti editions. I'll note that Nvidia is rebating back certain models in each range at the moment to mitigate some of the public annoyance at pricing in the wider market. Given the potential impact of tariffs over coming months and how the last generation pricing went in general, I'm not going to be shocked if the cards you see over there right now are as cheap as this generation get's for the rest of the year at the minimum.

In PSU terms, without a GPU you have a 350W system there. With a GPU it's probably 650W depending on the model and assuming it isn't higher than a 5070Ti. WIth that card in mind I'd be looking at 850W to 1000W to allow for plenty of overhead and minimise fan use, but without a GPU I'd be fine with a 550W - 650W. All depends on your future expansion plans.

[Pete Kaine]

Most NVMe drives these days are PCIe 4. Doing a quick search there isn't a huge price difference between a PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 drive. It just seems odd to me putting a PCIe 3 drive in a PCIe 4 slot.

Yeah, whilst I can ignore not offering the PCIe5 option as a cost management thing, it seems pretty weird to me to offer PCIe 4 drives only for the samples drives and not as an option for the OS drive.

Also, though he didn't recommend anything beyond the onboard video, Jim Roseberry of studiocat.com (Options 2 and 3, above) said the Nvidia card he'd recommend if I wanted one anyway is expected to drop several/many hundreds of $US in several months.

I see they are offering 5070's currently both regular and Ti editions. I'll note that Nvidia is rebating back certain models in each range at the moment to mitigate some of the public annoyance at pricing in the wider market. Given the potential impact of tariffs over coming months and how the last generation pricing went in general, I'm not going to be shocked if the cards you see over there right now are as cheap as this generation get's for the rest of the year at the minimum. But... it's only on certain models in each range. I paid $700 recently (including our 20% sales tax here) for a 5070 standard model and have since seen them hit $670, so there's deals out there I'm sure if you check.

In PSU terms, without a GPU you have a 350W system there. With a GPU it's probably 650W depending on the model and assuming it isn't higher than a 5070Ti. WIth that card in mind I'd be looking at 850W to 1000W to allow for plenty of overhead and minimise fan use, but without a GPU I'd be fine with a 550W - 650W. All depends on your future expansion plans.

[alexis]

Most NVMe drives these days are PCIe 4. Doing a quick search there isn't a huge price difference between a PCIe 3 and a PCIe 4 drive. It just seems odd to me putting a PCIe 3 drive in a PCIe 4 slot.

Yeah, whilst I can ignore not offering the PCIe5 option as a cost management thing, it seems pretty weird to me to offer PCIe 4 drives only for the samples drives and not as an option for the OS drive.

Also, though he didn't recommend anything beyond the onboard video, Jim Roseberry of studiocat.com (Options 2 and 3, above) said the Nvidia card he'd recommend if I wanted one anyway is expected to drop several/many hundreds of $US in several months.

I see they are offering 5070's currently both regular and Ti editions. I'll note that Nvidia is rebating back certain models in each range at the moment to mitigate some of the public annoyance at pricing in the wider market. Given the potential impact of tariffs over coming months and how the last generation pricing went in general, I'm not going to be shocked if the cards you see over there right now are as cheap as this generation get's for the rest of the year at the minimum. But... it's only on certain models in each range. I paid $700 recently (including our 20% sales tax here) for a 5070 standard model and have since seen them hit $670, so there's deals out there I'm sure if you check.

In PSU terms, without a GPU you have a 350W system there. With a GPU it's probably 650W depending on the model and assuming it isn't higher than a 5070Ti. WIth that card in mind I'd be looking at 850W to 1000W to allow for plenty of overhead and minimise fan use, but without a GPU I'd be fine with a 550W - 650W. All depends on your future expansion plans.

Thank you, James Perrett and merlyn for your examples and analytical reviews. I have not fully worked through them yet, but am continuing to try.

Pete Kaine, thank you for your comments as well. I don't really understand the portion of your post I bolded, "without a GPU ... with a GPU ...", can you explain why those #s would be different from those nominally stated in the quote?

Personal communication with the builder:

"both the 850w and 1000w power-supplies are extremely quiet.
Both have a 0dB fan mode (fan doesn’t spin at all unless under heavier load).
When the fans do spin, they’re extremely quiet."

Thank you!

[James Perrett]

Pete Kaine, thank you for your comments as well. I don't really understand the portion of your post I bolded, "without a GPU ... with a GPU ...", can you explain why those #s would be different from those nominally stated in the quote?

I think that Pete is trying to save you some money by saying that you can use a smaller power supply in most cases. For normal DAW work you don't need a separate GPU as the one in the processor will handle everything you ever need. I only mentioned it because you were talking about doing source separation. However, you need to have a think about anything special that you want to do and think about the associated hardware requirements.

[alexis]

Pete Kaine, thank you for your comments as well. I don't really understand the portion of your post I bolded, "without a GPU ... with a GPU ...", can you explain why those #s would be different from those nominally stated in the quote?

Thank you, James, that makes sense to me now
I think that Pete is trying to save you some money by saying that you can use a smaller power supply in most cases. For normal DAW work you don't need a separate GPU as the one in the processor will handle everything you ever need. I only mentioned it because you were talking about doing source separation. However, you need to have a think about anything special that you want to do and think about the associated hardware requirements.

[alexis]

Pete Kaine, thank you for your comments as well. I don't really understand the portion of your post I bolded, "without a GPU ... with a GPU ...", can you explain why those #s would be different from those nominally stated in the quote?

I think that Pete is trying to save you some money by saying that you can use a smaller power supply in most cases. For normal DAW work you don't need a separate GPU as the one in the processor will handle everything you ever need. I only mentioned it because you were talking about doing source separation. However, you need to have a think about anything special that you want to do and think about the associated hardware requirements.

Thank you, James, that makes sense to me now

[Pete Kaine]

Hey, yeah, pretty much as James indicates. GPU's are rather expensive these days and whilst there's some audio scenarios where they might save you some time like the specific source separation task mentioned, it won't stop you from being able to do the same job on CPU just at the cost of time with it taking a bit longer.

You should give it some thought as $700 - $900 to save a few mins a couple of times a week probably isn't all that cost effective, whilst if you need to do that several times a day then it may pay for itself over the setups life cycle. If you come to the conclusion that you won't be picking one up, then downsizing your PSU to save a bit more money is another avenue I would consider.

[alexis]

I seem to have, for the Samples drives, options for PCIe 4.0 drives.

Consistent with comments here, I believe, the builder said,
"For a Boot drive, 3500MB/Sec is pretty fast.
For an Audio drive, 3500MB/Sec is ridiculously fast.

We can offer PCIe 4.0 drives for Boot and Audio"

Al that sounds great, but I have to get back to him for a further dumbing down of:
"Note that modern Z890 motherboards have a single PCIe 5.0 m.2 slot.
If you want a PCIe 5.0 m.2 SSD, we can certainly accommodate. PCIe 5.0 drives are just starting to appear (expensive and few options)."

[merlyn]

... Al that sounds great, but I have to get back to him for a further dumbing down of:
"Note that modern Z890 motherboards have a single PCIe 5.0 m.2 slot.
If you want a PCIe 5.0 m.2 SSD, we can certainly accommodate. PCIe 5.0 drives are just starting to appear (expensive and few options)."

Is that not pretty self explanatory? PCIe 5 is the new thing and a premium is always payed for the new thing. The price of NVMe drives is going up, but my guideline has been £50 per terabyte. A PCIe 5 drive is at least twice that.

There are more PCIe 5 drives around than there used to be: Samsung 9100 Pro, Sabrent Rocket 5, Crucial T700, Seagate Firecuda 540 ...

I don't think it's worth getting a PCIe 5 drive at the moment.

[SafeandSound Mastering]

Hard to think anyone needs anything faster. I recently discovered USB 3.2 slot on my PC and I can go from USB3.2 to NVMe internal at Win 11 reported speeed of about 700MB/sec. Amazing.

What a difference from the other slot I was using.

[alexis]

Hi, I was wondering if the following conversation I had with the computer builder/seller is anything that should be concerning:

I asked,

• "Would you please send me info on the motherboard used for each of the two quotes you sent me (for general information purposes, and also to help me understand how many/what kind of peripheral attachments I will have, such as USB types, etc.?"

And got the response,

• "We don’t give out the specific motherboard… but it will be an Asus Z890 motherboard. If you go to our website, navigate to the machine you’ve chosen, and click on the + sign to the right of Connectivity (beneath the cost)… you’ll see a breakdown of the available ports."

Is it reasonable that I don't know what specific motherboard will be in the computer system I order? Is the fact that it's an Asus Z890 all that's important for me to know?

Connectivity Details for each system being considered:
For the system with this chip, Core Ultra 7 265K (20 cores, 20 processing threads, 5.5GHz max turbo):

• PCIe slots: 4
  SATA ports: 4
  M.2 slots: 4
  Thunderbolt ports: 1 stock (2 additional available as option)
  USB: 4x USB2, 4x USB3.2 Gen1, 1x USB3.2 (A)
  LAN: 2.5Gb
  Video:
  - Intel Graphics -- HDMI, DP
  - RTX-3060 -- HDMI, 3xDP
  - RTX-4060Ti -- 2xHDMI, 2xDP
  - RTX-4070 -- HDMI, 3xDP
  - RTX-4080 -- HDMI, 3xDP
  - RTX-4090 -- HDMI, 3xDP

For the system with this chip,Core Ultra 9 285K (24 cores, 24 processing threads, 5.7GHz max turbo):

• PCIe slots: 5
  SATA ports: 4
  M.2 slots: 4
  USB: 4x USB2, 4x USB3.2 Gen1, 1x USB3.2 (A)
  LAN: 2.5Gb
  Video:
  - UHD-770 -- HDMI, DP
  - RTX-3060 -- HDMI, 3xDP
  - RTX-4060Ti -- 2xHDMI, 2xDP
  - RTX-4070 -- HDMI, 3xDP
  - RTX-4080 -- HDMI, 3xDP
  - RTX-4090 -- HDMI, 3xDP

Thanks for any guidance and comments!

[James Perrett]

Is it reasonable that I don't know what specific motherboard will be in the computer system I order? Is the fact that it's an Asus Z890 all that's important for me to know?

I guess they are probably worried that you are just going to take their list of components and buy the bits elsewhere to build a system yourself. I would be very wary of a customer asking me that level of detail unless they had given me a good reason - like the need for compatibility with a specific piece of hardware.

[alexis]

Is it reasonable that I don't know what specific motherboard will be in the computer system I order? Is the fact that it's an Asus Z890 all that's important for me to know?

I guess they are probably worried that you are just going to take their list of components and buy the bits elsewhere to build a system yourself. I would be very wary of a customer asking me that level of detail unless they had given me a good reason - like the need for compatibility with a specific piece of hardware.

That makes sense, thanks James, though after a few email exchanges with me I'd think it'd be pretty obvious to him that my complete and total inexperience and ignorance in that area would make me one of the worst candidates in the world to go and build my own system .