Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

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Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by Glenelg »

Hi I use Studio One 4 Professional but moving to Studio one5. My PC is now old and I need to replace it. What spec can I expect to get for £1000, and what should the priorities be. Thinking of an AMD Ryzen 5600 or 7 -3700 and 16DDRRam and maybe an SSD. Can I still use my old 2TB Sata drive too? Advice please?
Thanks
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by tea for two »

Pete from Scan hasn't posted in a while.
Does anyone know if Pete is alright, safe and sound.

Glen, Pete would have given useful Audio Computer advice.

Scan site has Pro Audio Workstations (what I call PAW) .

Glenelg wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 5:34 pm Thinking of an AMD Ryzen 5600 or 7 -3700

I would suggest latest Ryzen 5 series as the improvements over Ryzen 3 series are well worth it.

Scan site should be able to spec up a PAW using Ryzen 5.

£1129 pretty much your specs :
Ryzen 5 5600x 16GB DDR4 1TB SSD & 500GB NVME SSD, Win10 home.

https://www.scan.co.uk/products/3xs-pro ... 0-see-info

Has rear
4 x USB 3.2 Gen1 Type-A
1 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-A
1 x USB 3.2 Gen2 Type-C

(site says offline today due to network maintenance).
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by Luke W »

tea for two wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 8:57 pm Pete from Scan hasn't posted in a while.
Does anyone know if Pete is alright, safe and sound.

When I ordered my PC a couple of months back it was Pete that got in touch to help out and answer my questions regarding the specs. He said then that they've had a pretty manic year and that he hadn't had as much time on forums as usual, so I assume that's probably still the case. Incredibly helpful though as always, and honest to the point of saving me a fair chunk of money over what I'd have spent if I had just ordered without asking!
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by Nazard »

Definitely specify an SSD as the OS and application drive: you could fit everything on a 256GB SSD, but 500GB is better for future proofing.

The 2GB SATA HDD can be used internally, no problem.
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by merlyn »

From your post it sounds like you are considering building a computer yourself. If you buy a pre-built system you are buying one thing and you can compare the different options doing research into what all the different options mean.

If you are building a computer yourself then you are buying eight things -- case, power supply, motherboard, cpu, cpu cooler, memory, graphics card and storage and you will have to do research into eight items and the different options available.

If you've built computers before then you'll already know about some of the options, jargon and technical terms. If not it could be a steep learning curve.

The current approach is to use an NVMe drive as the boot drive. When I went from a spinning hard drive to a SATA SSD booting and loading programs dramatically sped up. I got a similar speed up when I went from a SATA SSD to a PCIe NVMe. An M.2 NVMe SSD can be ten times faster than a SATA SSD, which in turn is up to ten times faster than a spinning hard drive.

if you look at this link :

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/configurator ... -studio-pc

you can see the components that are in the machine @tea for two linked to above.
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by worshiptuned »

Glenelg wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 5:34 pm Thinking of an AMD Ryzen 5600 or 7 -3700

it is not obvious to buy an AMD

with the same specifications, Intel is usually cheaper and in the single core performance outperforms AMD

look at this comparison and note that the comparison is made with the Intel7 10th generation, now there is the Intel7 11th generation which has further improved the single core performance

they state "The lower 10700K and 10900K Intel’s feature the fastest single core speeds in the testing and as such might prove attractive for anyone wishing to process audio in real-time where single core performance proves important"

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/daw-d ... -processor
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by S.Crow »

worshiptuned wrote: Sat Jul 31, 2021 8:35 pm
Glenelg wrote: Fri Jul 30, 2021 5:34 pm Thinking of an AMD Ryzen 5600 or 7 -3700

it is not obvious to buy an AMD

with the same specifications, Intel is usually cheaper and in the single core performance outperforms AMD

look at this comparison and note that the comparison is made with the Intel7 10th generation, now there is the Intel7 11th generation which has further improved the single core performance

they state "The lower 10700K and 10900K Intel’s feature the fastest single core speeds in the testing and as such might prove attractive for anyone wishing to process audio in real-time where single core performance proves important"

https://www.scan.co.uk/3xs/custom/daw-d ... -processor

Those are old tests using the previous generation Ryzen 3000 series.
The latest 5000 series offer a significant boost that impacts DAW usage.
They are also much more power efficient than Intel under load which helps to keep the noise level down.
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by Drew Stephenson »

For what it's worth, I bought a new PC from Scan last year and my initial budget was £1k. After a bit of a chat I decided it was worth going up to £1100 to get on the newer generation of chips. After all, if this machine lasts as long as the last one that'll be just £10/year.
I think chip prices have gone up since then so it might be worth stretching your budget a bit, if you can.
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by MOF »

For what it's worth, I bought a new PC from Scan last year and my initial budget was £1k. After a bit of a chat I decided it was worth going up to £1100 to get on the newer generation of chips. After all, if this machine lasts as long as the last one that'll be just £10/year

A 100 year old computer, I thought they originated in WW2. :lol:

I was going to suggest the Mac Mini M1, but then I saw the forum heading.
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by Drew Stephenson »

Ahem. I meant the difference equated to £10 per year, not the total price. :oops:
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Re: Can anyone advise me on audio PC for under £1000

Post by MOF »

Sorry, couldn’t resist, I thought you’d got your Maths wrong. :D
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