Tips for Building An Audio Recording / Engineering PC
Posted: Thu May 03, 2018 8:09 pm
It's generally more advisable to build a mid-range PC every 5 years and upgrade it as needed than to build the highest-end PC every 10 years. I've had some musicians ask "I spent $3000 on a Mac Pro in 2010 and now it's slow. Do I need to spend another $3000 now?". No. An excellent audio recording/editing/engineering build can easily be had within a $700-1200 budget.
If having PCI-E cards such as Thunderbolt ports and other expansions are needed, use an ATX (large) form factor. Otherwise, an ITX (small) form factor should handle all of your needs just as proficiently.
While i7 CPU's are powerful, they are not mandatory for strong performance as they may have once been. Nowadays, i5's are also powerful enough to get demanding work done and i3's are definitely not weak either.
A quad-core CPU is recommended, although 6 cores is ideal. DAW's generally benefit both from higher clock speeds and more cores/threads rather than significantly preferring one over the other.
8 GB RAM is minimum. 16 GB is ideally recommended. If more RAM is needed, it can be upgraded. However, it's not recommendable to start with 32 GB RAM without knowing whether your workload will truly benefit from it.
A video card is not needed at all. A strong GPU will not increase DAW/Plugin performance. Integrated graphics are fine; using a CPU with integrated graphics is recommended due to better cost and energy efficiency. All Intel CPU's have them; most AMD CPU's currently do not.
A 500 GB SSD is recommended to speed up the flow of your operating system, DAW, plugins and samples/instrument packs. Determine if your plugins/digital instruments' file sizes are large enough before investing a 1 TB SSD. If you're only recording or mixing, but not composing digitally, 250 GB is fine. Optane and NVMe storage are nice to have, but don't necessarily offer a lot of additional real-world benefit compared to regular SSD's.
An audio PC build only uses ~100-200 watts, at a generous estimate. A power supply with 500+ watts is not needed.
If having PCI-E cards such as Thunderbolt ports and other expansions are needed, use an ATX (large) form factor. Otherwise, an ITX (small) form factor should handle all of your needs just as proficiently.
While i7 CPU's are powerful, they are not mandatory for strong performance as they may have once been. Nowadays, i5's are also powerful enough to get demanding work done and i3's are definitely not weak either.
A quad-core CPU is recommended, although 6 cores is ideal. DAW's generally benefit both from higher clock speeds and more cores/threads rather than significantly preferring one over the other.
8 GB RAM is minimum. 16 GB is ideally recommended. If more RAM is needed, it can be upgraded. However, it's not recommendable to start with 32 GB RAM without knowing whether your workload will truly benefit from it.
A video card is not needed at all. A strong GPU will not increase DAW/Plugin performance. Integrated graphics are fine; using a CPU with integrated graphics is recommended due to better cost and energy efficiency. All Intel CPU's have them; most AMD CPU's currently do not.
A 500 GB SSD is recommended to speed up the flow of your operating system, DAW, plugins and samples/instrument packs. Determine if your plugins/digital instruments' file sizes are large enough before investing a 1 TB SSD. If you're only recording or mixing, but not composing digitally, 250 GB is fine. Optane and NVMe storage are nice to have, but don't necessarily offer a lot of additional real-world benefit compared to regular SSD's.
An audio PC build only uses ~100-200 watts, at a generous estimate. A power supply with 500+ watts is not needed.