DAW build advice needed

[Yossarian99]

Hi,

I'm in the market for a new DAW computer. (In addition to DAW, I'll be using it for photo/video editing & gaming, thus the graphics card.)

I plan to use Cubase, as well as the EW Composer's Collection + Hollywood Strings Diamond, among others.

So I called AVA Direct and gave the rep a $2500 budget (with wiggle room). He put together the build shown below:



AVA DIRECT BUILD:

COOLER MASTER, Elite 371 (RC-371) Black Mid-Tower Case, ATX, No PSU, Steel/Plastic
THERMALTAKE, Toughpower™ Grand 750W Power Supply w/ Modular Cables, 80 PLUS® Gold, 24-pin ATX12V V2.3 EPS12V V2.92, 2x 6-pin + 2x 8-pin PCIe, SLI/CrossFireX Certified
ASUS, P8P67 LE Rev 3.0, LGA1155, Intel® P67, DDR3-2200 (O.C.) 32GB /4, PCIe x16 /2, SATA 3 Gb/s RAID 5 /4, 6 Gb/s /3, USB 3.0 /2, HDA, GbLAN, FW /2, ATX, Retail
INTEL, Core™ i7-2600K Quad-Core 3.4GHz, HD Graphics 3000, LGA1155, 8MB L3 Cache, 32nm, 95W, EM64T EIST HT TB VT-x XD, Retail
MUSHKIN, 16GB (4 x 4GB) Enhanced Silverline PC3-10666 DDR3 1333MHz CL9 (9-9-9-24) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC
EVGA, GeForce® GTX 580 772MHz, 3072MB GDDR5 4008MHz, PCIe x16 SLI, 2x DVI+mini-HDMI, Retail
INTEL, 120GB 510 Series SSD, MLC, 450/210 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail
INTEL, 120GB 510 Series SSD, MLC, 450/210 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail [RAID, RAID 0 (striping), min 2 hard drives required]
WESTERN DIGITAL, 2TB WD Caviar® Green™ (WD20EARS), SATA 3 Gb/s, IntelliPower™, 64MB Cache
SONY, AD-7261S Black 24x DVD±R/RW Dual-Layer Burner w/ Lightscribe, SATA, OEM
SONY, BD-5300S Black 12x/16x/48x BD/DVD/CD Blu-ray Disc™ Burner, SATA, Retail
MICROSOFT, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition, OEM
WARRANTY, Silver Warranty Package (3 Year Limited Parts, 3 Year Labor Warranty)

TOTAL: $2528


Questions:
1.) 2 X SSD (Intel 510) in Raid 0 -- Are these drives known to be stable in this configuration? I plan to use them for the OS, software & sample libraries. I've read a lot about TRIM... what are the implications, if any?

2.) 2TB WD Caviar Green -- Does anyone have experience with this drive? He recommended it for its stability. Is there a faster drive I might look at getting without sacrificing stability?

3.) Mushkin 16GB -- Should I look at getting faster/more RAM? From what I've read 16GB seems to be a sufficient amount. There is the possibility of upgrading to 24GB/2000Mhz. Thoughts?

4.) Also, should I look at getting a full tower, given the additional hard drives I'll be adding (at least 3... HWS, EW Composer Coll, additional data, etc?).



Thanks in advance.

Ryan

p.s. Some of you might advise me to build the computer myself, to save money. I simply don't feel comfortable doing this. I've tried before on multiple occasions, with the help of friends who were A+ certified, and it has provided nothing but headaches and anxiety (always wondering if I'd done something wrong, regardless of current performance). The peace of mind from knowing the computer was built and optimized by a reputable company is more than worth the additional price.

AVA seems to have a good reputation, with solid customer service, so I feel good about ordering from them. That said, if you know of another builder with comparable pricing and reliability, I'm certainly open to suggestions.

[Yossarian99]

...also, is there a better motherboard option? I've kind of been out of the loop for awhile. Thanks.

[Kaoz]

First thing that pops out is that power supply. Get a bigger one from a better brand, never go cheap with a PSU. Will check the rest out later.


edit - more thoughts.

rprecording is right about the noise that will be generated from the 580. Would be a better option going a for a couple of lower performance cards that can run silently.

He's also right about the SSD's - I don't know if you'll get any real performance benefit, and went working with audio (and video for that matter), your software will only run as fast as the hdd that the files you're working on are on, which would be the 2TB WD.

I've got one of the exact same drives and haven't had any problem with it whatsoever. rp is right about the speed difference though, having said that it hasn't been an inconvenience with me.

I think the 16GB would be more than sufficient RAM.

Definitely go a full tower, and get some decent performing but quiet cooling. You're going to need it. I'd recommend the Noctua range of coolers.

I'm not a fan of ASUS MB's, but know plenty of people that use them without a problem. As long as it has the connectivity you need, then it should be fine.

You could also cut down to just the single optical drive if needed, but that's not really an issue either way i'm guessing.

Posted via the Gearslutz iPhone app

[rprecording]

You might check out ADK. I got a laptop/DAW from them that I use for my mobile rig and it's been flawless. I also found them to give the most bang for the buck when I priced out comparable systems from the various DAW builders. I built my current deskside but would seriously consider them for my next one.

On the build you listed...

SSD's are darn fast to begin with. I dont see a need to put them in a RAID configuration.

I use a SSD for OS and application software. Put all my sample lib's on separate drives (I have two RAID0 arrays for streaming sample lib's...both consist of WD 640 gig 7200 rpm drives. plenty big and plenty fast).

I have a 3'rd RAID0 array for project audio files. That one's made up of two 300 gig Raptor drives. This is overkill actually...I just had the drives and thought it might be helpful. I regularly use an external 500 gig SATA drive with my mobile rig (ADK laptop) and record/playback 24 tracks of audio (usually 44.1/24) with no problems at all (most 7200 rpm drives will get 70 MB p/sec transfer rates...plenty fast enough to stream lot's of contiguous audio files).

I would shy away from the WD Caviar green drives. These are designed to be low power/eco freak drives. They're not as fast as standard drives. The WD Caviar blue drives are quite good. These also have a feature that varies the seek speed of the heads based upon how soon the disk platter will actually bring the data under the heads . This substantially reduces the noise of the drive when it seeks (and may reduce wear and tear). The WD black drives are generally considered to be "industrial strength" and they're quite fast but pretty noisy because they don't use this seek algorithm.

I also use Seagate drives and have had good results with both (many DAW builders use Seagates too).

My deskside machine runs Win7/64 with 8 gig of RAM (and I'm still running 32 bit Cubase). This has been remarkably powerful. I've just been waiting for some VST's to be 64 bit compatible before upgrading. Just ordered 16 gig of RAM to do this and will be upgrading in the next few weeks. If you can put 24 gig in your machine then more power to you. RAM's pretty in-expensive now so why not.

Graphics... IMHO you might be asking for too much here. Most DAW's dont need much graphic power but you say you want to use the machine for photo/video editing and gaming.Many of the high powered graphics cards have very noisy fans on them (not a good thing for a DAW) and there are quite a few forum posts about folks having problems with their DAW's/add on pci cards (UAD cards) etc... related to graphics cards chip set's. You might want to consider limiting the machine's use to DAW and photo/graphic editing. I run two fanless cards in my deskside machine (4 monitors) and they've been perfect. The primary use of the machine is as a DAW but I also do a fair bit of video editing and, given a powerful enough CPU (which you'll have) I've found the low cost fanless graphic cards have worked just fine. And they're silent.

Case...I would definitely get a full tower. More space gives you more options and may also help with keeping the machine cool.

Cooling... no mention of what CPU cooler/case fans are to be used. In a high powered DAW, there's a lot of heat generated. Thus a need for multiple fans. A $2500 DAW that sounds like a dual turboprop airplane in the room wont be very useful. My deskside is full tower, 750w PS, 7 hard drives (1 SSD), two graphics cards, RME 9356 pci card...etc...

Case is full tower, all steel with noise reduction padding on all internal sides. It's split into two segments, top for the MOBO and bottom for the drives (can accomodate 10 drives). I run 7 fans in it. All Noctua. Most are large diameter (running at low speeds). They move vast amounts of air and I can crank all 4 cores of the CPU for hours on end with the CPU temp never rising above 42c (naturally, I've disabled all speed stepping in BIOS so the CPU is running at full speed all the time).

And the machine is almost silent. An important consideration for a DAW.

[Marando]

Originally Posted by rprecording

[..]

SSD's are darn fast to begin with. I dont see a need to put them in a RAID configuration.

I agree 100%. SSD's are already extremely fast, no need to put them in RAID-0 I believe.. Besides, you will lose TRIM when you put them in RAID-0, something you don't want.

I would shy away from the WD Caviar green drives. These are designed to be low power/eco freak drives. They're not as fast as standard drives.

I have a WD Caviar Green drive and I have to agree, it's a terrible slow drive. I think they are okay as a backup drive or for movies/music storage or something. I prefer Samsung F3 7200rpm hardidsks, I have three of them in my DAW and they are fast and allmost silent.

About the SSD's. The Intel 510 is a lot more expensive compared to the Crucial M4 SSD's. I have an 128GB M4 and the speed is amazing. For an OS and applications, it's actually a bit faster compared to the Intel 510, since that one is tuned to be fast with big files, while the M4 is more tuned towards little random read/writes.

Good luck with your new DAW!

[fastlanestoner]

I just built a desktop that specs higher than that for $1100. I would recommend find someone else to build it. NE or TD are good alternatives

I have 2 caviar greens in mine and they have given me no hiccups

[DAW PLUS]

Intel ssd is not a good value for money.

Green series are slow. Rather use an ssd for OS and use 2 WD blacks for data. A green is ok for backup.

750 watt psu is ridiculous. We built a GTX 580 system this week in an almost similar setup and the system used 340 watts peak on MAXIMUM load on all components.

Unless you need CUDA you are probably better off with an Ati. The latest Nvidia drivers are buggy as hell.

[jcschild]

intel is the fastest SSD~ worth it? up to the client
mushkin is not far behind either..
OZC would not touch with a 10' Pole
that leaves Crucial.. slower than Intel/Mushkin..

700w would be the absolute bare minimum i would put in a system a GTX 470 and up.
in fact i prefer 700w without the GTX card...

Scott
ADK

[Yossarian99]

Thanks all. Great advice... exactly what I was looking for.

Originally Posted by fastlanestoner

I just built a desktop that specs higher than that for $1100. I would recommend find someone else to build it. NE or TD are good alternatives

I have 2 caviar greens in mine and they have given me no hiccups

That's amazing. I'd be very interested to see what hardware you went with and where you bought it. To even come close to the above build for $1100 would be incredible (unless you're buying at below cost?) The graphics card alone is over $500. Needless to say, I would certainly love to save $1500, if possible.

Also, what do "TD" and "NE" stand for, so I can find them online? I'm unfamiliar with those companies.

Originally Posted by rprecording

Graphics... IMHO you might be asking for too much here. Most DAW's dont need much graphic power but you say you want to use the machine for photo/video editing and gaming.Many of the high powered graphics cards have very noisy fans on them (not a good thing for a DAW) and there are quite a few forum posts about folks having problems with their DAW's/add on pci cards (UAD cards) etc... related to graphics cards chip set's. You might want to consider limiting the machine's use to DAW and photo/graphic editing. I run two fanless cards in my deskside machine (4 monitors) and they've been perfect. The primary use of the machine is as a DAW but I also do a fair bit of video editing and, given a powerful enough CPU (which you'll have) I've found the low cost fanless graphic cards have worked just fine. And they're silent.

Cooling... no mention of what CPU cooler/case fans are to be used. In a high powered DAW, there's a lot of heat generated. Thus a need for multiple fans. A $2500 DAW that sounds like a dual turboprop airplane in the room wont be very useful. My deskside is full tower, 750w PS, 7 hard drives (1 SSD), two graphics cards, RME 9356 pci card...etc...

What about water cooling? I'm pretty set on gaming with this rig as well, and there are some high-end fanless (water-cooled) solutions out there. Have you heard of anyone water cooling their DAWs? Seems like it would be a good low-noise solution. That said, I imagine some are nervous about the possibility of leaks (though I've heard leaks are rare, with the right maintenance).


POWER SUPPLY:

Originally Posted by Kaoz

First thing that pops out is that power supply. Get a bigger one from a better brand, never go cheap with a PSU. Will check the rest out later.

vs.

Originally Posted by DAW PLUS

750 watt psu is ridiculous. We built a GTX 580 system this week in an almost similar setup and the system used 340 watts peak on MAXIMUM load on all components.

And the winner is...? Not sure who to believe on this issue.

[DAW PLUS]

Originally Posted by Yossarian99

What about water cooling? I'm pretty set on gaming with this rig as well, and there are some high-end fanless (water-cooled) solutions out there. Have you heard of anyone water cooling their DAWs? Seems like it would be a good low-noise solution. That said, I imagine some are nervous about the possibility of leaks (though I've heard leaks are rare, with the right maintenance).

For the current Intel CPU's, you don't need watercooling. Just a good airflow, good fans, good fan settings.

POWER SUPPLY:

vs.

And the winner is...? Not sure who to believe on this issue.

I have seriously no idea why anyone needs a 700 Watt PSU. Even our fully loaded dual Xeon systems with 10 harddrives and a Quadro 5000 run exemplary with a PSU < 700 Watt.

My own system fully loaded with cards only uses more than 150 Watt when the Ati 6870 graphics card is running a 3D app.

[jcschild]

HI Leon,
coming from anyone else but you i would question the sanity of that statement. maybe with EU power being 230v it makes a difference but somehow i doubt it.
(asking on of my techs said yes 230v is more effecient)

the bare minimum for a dual Xeon is 1000W (many of my single processor NLE systems ship with 1000W)

and a good number with 1600W.

dual 3.46GHz @ 4GHz, 24-48Gig ram, 13 drives, 580 or quadro video (quadros are near useless) 9-13 drives, 8x raid card, 4x capture card etc.

oddly enough going here
eXtreme Power Supply Calculator
tells me 1680W

a dual 2.8GHz xeon with only 5 drives raid and capture requires 1000w

doing a basic 2600 with 3 drives, ati 5450 and 2 PCIe cards says 500W and that leaves no room to grow...
thus why most of my audio systems ship with 700W...

a weak/underpowered power supply can cause an amazing amount of issues/trouble shooting.
i would rather error on the side of caution than sell a cheap power supply...

Scott
ADK

[DAW PLUS]

Hi Scott,

thanks for your explanation.

I have no idea where the big differences come from, maybe it is a 230V thing. Note that we never overclock. I should check with my collegues since I am not the expert on this, even though I did look into the topic and measure the PSU load a lot myself.

We actually test many of our workstations, especially if they have heavy duty graphics cards or many components (large RAID 5 arrays).

We never had to use a 700W PSU in the last 2 years. We never had a customer with issues. We built dozens of dual Xeon systems, mostly with workstation graphics.

Most modern PSU's, especially gold certified, have peak protection which captures the current peak usually created by graphics cards. The sustained current load on our workstations under full load simply do not exceed 700 Watts. We let our systems run under extreme conditions for 36 hours, and we never had a PSU let us down, nor the customer.

I have checked that PSU calculator a while ago. It claimed I needed over 600 Watts. Running a measure device on my system, the peak was 151 Watts during a working day of a mixing session. The system was fully loaded (with a small fanless Ati). So I highly doubt that calculator makes sense. Even with a 6870 now for realtime 3D playout my PSU handles it fine.

I'll check on whether 110V/230V causes this difference.

Cheers,
Leon

[aracu]

I agree with the point of view of investing in a powerful, high quality
power supply. The power supply takes a lot of stress and is one of
the first componants to wear out. When the power supply is causing
problems to the system it is not easy to diagnose.

[Vic Trola]

You've gotten great info here. For they're worth, my comments in blue.

FYI, I just did your build on a wish list on Newegg.com and the parts on your list come to $2012.20.

AVA DIRECT BUILD:

COOLER MASTER, Elite 371 (RC-371) Black Mid-Tower Case, ATX, No PSU, Steel/Plastic Consider a case with front hot swap bays. If you're using the machine for video and as a DAW, it sure come in handy to be able to pull drives or load separate clean discs for your OS and programs. I keep two separate discs for my video OS/program and my DAW.

THERMALTAKE, Toughpower™ Grand 750W Power Supply w/ Modular Cables, 80 PLUS® Gold, 24-pin ATX12V V2.3 EPS12V V2.92, 2x 6-pin + 2x 8-pin PCIe, SLI/CrossFireX Certified Having extra headroom in your PSU is a good thing. Use that online calculator someone posted. For safety's sake I don't like to have my total maximum potential power usage to be more than 70% of the PSUs rating. Check out the Corsair HX modulars as well. You only plug in what you need and it's a lot cleaner build.

ASUS, P8P67 LE Rev 3.0, LGA1155, Intel® P67, DDR3-2200 (O.C.) 32GB /4, PCIe x16 /2, SATA 3 Gb/s RAID 5 /4, 6 Gb/s /3, USB 3.0 /2, HDA, GbLAN, FW /2, ATX, Retail This board (as well as the Gigabyte P67 and Z68s) use the VIA 1394 firewire chipset. Depending on your interface, you may or may not have some compatibility issues. Do a little looking around to be sure. If you need the TI chipset that many interfaces like, you'll need to revise your build to the X58 platform on Gigabyte boards.

INTEL, Core™ i7-2600K Quad-Core 3.4GHz, HD Graphics 3000, LGA1155, 8MB L3 Cache, 32nm, 95W, EM64T EIST HT TB VT-x XD, Retail Good.

MUSHKIN, 16GB (4 x 4GB) Enhanced Silverline PC3-10666 DDR3 1333MHz CL9 (9-9-9-24) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC Redline or Blackline gives you a little more speed for not much more money.

EVGA, GeForce® GTX 580 772MHz, 3072MB GDDR5 4008MHz, PCIe x16 SLI, 2x DVI+mini-HDMI, Retail You don't need that much video horsepower for a DAW, but for video editing it really depends on which video editing software you're using. Check out this site for a full rundown and compatibility discussion. Video Guys

INTEL, 120GB 510 Series SSD, MLC, 450/210 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail
INTEL, 120GB 510 Series SSD, MLC, 450/210 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail [RAID, RAID 0 (striping), min 2 hard drives required]

Everything I'm gathering these days suggests using one SSD for your system/OS/program drive and another for samples and VSTi files, then a standard HDD for your recording drive. I'm in the process of reconfiguring one machine this way. I'm not sure you need SSD drives as big as you've specced unless you have a buttload of samples, but Win 7 and your programs should easily fit on a 64 gig drive. Either way, the prevailing wisdom is to have only the programs you absolutely need on the drive for your DAW and keep it as lean and optimized as possible, so I think you'd save some money with smaller drives. Crucial's got a couple 64 gig drives in the $115 range. Better to have 3 or 4 swappable system drives than one that's bogged down.

WESTERN DIGITAL, 2TB WD Caviar® Green™ (WD20EARS), SATA 3 Gb/s, IntelliPower™, 64MB Cache Not so much on these for reason stated previously. Caviar Blacks 64 Mb cache only for me for production drives. I'm also not to hip on drives this big. I'd rather go with a few 1 Tb drives for storage. Faster, cooler and easier to backup, and you lose a lot less data if the drive goes south.

SONY, AD-7261S Black 24x DVD±R/RW Dual-Layer Burner w/ Lightscribe, SATA, OEM Fine

SONY, BD-5300S Black 12x/16x/48x BD/DVD/CD Blu-ray Disc™ Burner, SATA, Retail Fine

MICROSOFT, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition, OEM
WARRANTY, Silver Warranty Package (3 Year Limited Parts, 3 Year Labor Warranty) Why not upgrade to professional for a few bucks more?

[hardwinte]

Hey smart guys , quick Q !

Will the current Sandy Bridge mobos (eg.chipset P67, H67, Z68) work with a PCI soundcard? I have an M-Audio Delta-66, but am afraid for compatibility issues with the PCI-E bridging? I'm not too sure how this works out for me, could someone smarter explain 10 words or less ?!

Thanks guys !!

[Marando]

Originally Posted by jcschild

intel is the fastest SSD~ worth it? up to the client
mushkin is not far behind either..
OZC would not touch with a 10' Pole
that leaves Crucial.. slower than Intel/Mushkin..

700w would be the absolute bare minimum i would put in a system a GTX 470 and up.
in fact i prefer 700w without the GTX card...

Scott
ADK

A place where the Crucial M4 is slower compared to the Intel 510 is mostly on paper! In real world, the difderence is very small, and when it comes to loading an OS and apps, the Crucial is a bit faster, since it can do more Read IOPS!

750 watt is more than enough for a DAW like this, make sure to get one from a good brand. Cheap is often bad!

[bgs]

Originally Posted by hardwinte

Hey smart guys , quick Q !

Will the current Sandy Bridge mobos (eg.chipset P67, H67, Z68) work with a PCI soundcard? I have an M-Audio Delta-66, but am afraid for compatibility issues with the PCI-E bridging? I'm not too sure how this works out for me, could someone smarter explain 10 words or less ?!

Thanks guys !!

There are still PCI slots in those mobos. I got a P67 mobo using an Audiophile 24/96 and it works just fine on win 7 x64 bit.

[bgs]

You should probably just get 1x 64gb~100gb SSD for the system and swap partitions to make the programs you normally use run fast. When it comes to audio and video processing I agree with the other poster - it will be happening on the HDD so your performance won't improve unless you get a Z68 chipset motherboard which can make use of SSD caching and even then I doubt the performance boost will be very noticeable.

If you want a decent quiet case you might wanna look at Fractal Design Define R3 or Antec P 183. Antec power supplies have a great reputation since cases and psu's is what they mostly manufacture. Antec TruePower series could be a good alternative to the Thermaltake.

As for the motherboard you might wanna look at ASRock boards. Their sandybridge mobos have really earned a good name this year (I got an ASRock Extreme4 after an ASUS P8P67 I got came DOA and I'm quite happy).

You should really consider an aftermarket cooler for the CPU to make the whole setup more quiet in high intensity situations as the stock fan is really audible when the CPU usage goes higher. (Might not be a problem if your PC isn't in the room you record in. My setup is pretty ghetto...) Noctua makes really quiet cooling combos! It's only $50-$70 more for reliable quiet cooling.

Geforce GTX 560 Ti should be enough if you are going with CUDA. 580 is more than twice the cost but performance from looking at passmark is only 1/3.5 higher. If you game you won't be dissapointed with the 560's performance at all.

[rprecording]

Originally Posted by Yossarian99

What about water cooling? I'm pretty set on gaming with this rig as well, and there are some high-end fanless (water-cooled) solutions out there. Have you heard of anyone water cooling their DAWs? Seems like it would be a good low-noise solution. That said, I imagine some are nervous about the possibility of leaks (though I've heard leaks are rare, with the right maintenance).

Keep in mind that a water cooling setup will have a pump of some sort, so they may not be as quiet as one might think. I looked into that option when I built my machine and passed on it because it wouldn't actually be "silent" and it added a number of additional complications (leakage, piping etc...).

Even if you do water cool the CPU, you'll still have to employ fans in the machine to cool hard drives, power supply etc....and any high power'd graphics cards will have fans too (often very noisy).

Of course, there is the option of getting a sound deadening enclosure that you put the entire machine inside. I looked at this option too...certainly a viable option.

I understand that your focus is on the performance of the machine. Entirely reasonable but, when you're actually sitting in the room with it trying to work on some music and it's putting out some nasty loud whinning or whirring noise, that'll become a "performance" issue as real as an under spec'd CPU. In actual use, silence is golden when it comes to a DAW.

BTW...Scott/ADK posted here. I hadn't heard of them when I built my deskside. Did get a laptop from them later and it's been great. Excellent bang for the buck. I'll look hard at their deskside systems when the time comes to replace my current one. They might be worth taking a look at.

[jcschild]

Originally Posted by Marando

A place where the Crucial M4 is slower compared to the Intel 510 is mostly on paper! In real world, the difderence is very small, and when it comes to loading an OS and apps, the Crucial is a bit faster, since it can do more Read IOPS!

750 watt is more than enough for a DAW like this, make sure to get one from a good brand. Cheap is often bad!

not with the benchmarks i ran, you should know i dont go by white papers
iops is for server stuff..

Scott
ADK

[Xaque]

Originally Posted by jcschild

intel is the fastest SSD~ worth it? up to the client
mushkin is not far behind either..
OZC would not touch with a 10' Pole
that leaves Crucial.. slower than Intel/Mushkin..

700w would be the absolute bare minimum i would put in a system a GTX 470 and up.
in fact i prefer 700w without the GTX card...

Scott
ADK

sorry to hijack the thread a little bit but why should he not touch OCZ with 10' pole? That's what i have in my system and haven't had troubles...what should i be looking out for. I strongly value your opinion Scott so when i read this is concerned me haha. Is my DAW going to fail/explode soon? I've had a 60GB vertex 2 as my OS drive since oct 2010.

[Yossarian99]

Originally Posted by Vic Trola

You've gotten great info here. For they're worth, my comments in blue.

FYI, I just did your build on a wish list on Newegg.com and the parts on your list come to $2012.20.

AVA DIRECT BUILD:

COOLER MASTER, Elite 371 (RC-371) Black Mid-Tower Case, ATX, No PSU, Steel/Plastic Consider a case with front hot swap bays. If you're using the machine for video and as a DAW, it sure come in handy to be able to pull drives or load separate clean discs for your OS and programs. I keep two separate discs for my video OS/program and my DAW.

THERMALTAKE, Toughpower™ Grand 750W Power Supply w/ Modular Cables, 80 PLUS® Gold, 24-pin ATX12V V2.3 EPS12V V2.92, 2x 6-pin + 2x 8-pin PCIe, SLI/CrossFireX Certified Having extra headroom in your PSU is a good thing. Use that online calculator someone posted. For safety's sake I don't like to have my total maximum potential power usage to be more than 70% of the PSUs rating. Check out the Corsair HX modulars as well. You only plug in what you need and it's a lot cleaner build.

ASUS, P8P67 LE Rev 3.0, LGA1155, Intel® P67, DDR3-2200 (O.C.) 32GB /4, PCIe x16 /2, SATA 3 Gb/s RAID 5 /4, 6 Gb/s /3, USB 3.0 /2, HDA, GbLAN, FW /2, ATX, Retail This board (as well as the Gigabyte P67 and Z68s) use the VIA 1394 firewire chipset. Depending on your interface, you may or may not have some compatibility issues. Do a little looking around to be sure. If you need the TI chipset that many interfaces like, you'll need to revise your build to the X58 platform on Gigabyte boards.

INTEL, Core™ i7-2600K Quad-Core 3.4GHz, HD Graphics 3000, LGA1155, 8MB L3 Cache, 32nm, 95W, EM64T EIST HT TB VT-x XD, Retail Good.

MUSHKIN, 16GB (4 x 4GB) Enhanced Silverline PC3-10666 DDR3 1333MHz CL9 (9-9-9-24) 1.5V SDRAM DIMM, Non-ECC Redline or Blackline gives you a little more speed for not much more money.

EVGA, GeForce® GTX 580 772MHz, 3072MB GDDR5 4008MHz, PCIe x16 SLI, 2x DVI+mini-HDMI, Retail You don't need that much video horsepower for a DAW, but for video editing it really depends on which video editing software you're using. Check out this site for a full rundown and compatibility discussion. Video Guys

INTEL, 120GB 510 Series SSD, MLC, 450/210 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail
INTEL, 120GB 510 Series SSD, MLC, 450/210 MB/s, 2.5-Inch, SATA 6 Gb/s, Retail [RAID, RAID 0 (striping), min 2 hard drives required]

Everything I'm gathering these days suggests using one SSD for your system/OS/program drive and another for samples and VSTi files, then a standard HDD for your recording drive. I'm in the process of reconfiguring one machine this way. I'm not sure you need SSD drives as big as you've specced unless you have a buttload of samples, but Win 7 and your programs should easily fit on a 64 gig drive. Either way, the prevailing wisdom is to have only the programs you absolutely need on the drive for your DAW and keep it as lean and optimized as possible, so I think you'd save some money with smaller drives. Crucial's got a couple 64 gig drives in the $115 range. Better to have 3 or 4 swappable system drives than one that's bogged down.

WESTERN DIGITAL, 2TB WD Caviar® Green™ (WD20EARS), SATA 3 Gb/s, IntelliPower™, 64MB Cache Not so much on these for reason stated previously. Caviar Blacks 64 Mb cache only for me for production drives. I'm also not to hip on drives this big. I'd rather go with a few 1 Tb drives for storage. Faster, cooler and easier to backup, and you lose a lot less data if the drive goes south.

SONY, AD-7261S Black 24x DVD±R/RW Dual-Layer Burner w/ Lightscribe, SATA, OEM Fine

SONY, BD-5300S Black 12x/16x/48x BD/DVD/CD Blu-ray Disc™ Burner, SATA, Retail Fine

MICROSOFT, Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit Edition, OEM
WARRANTY, Silver Warranty Package (3 Year Limited Parts, 3 Year Labor Warranty) Why not upgrade to professional for a few bucks more?

Thanks! Great info.

A few questions:

1.) I've heard Caviar Black drives are loud... was thinking about going the Caviar Blue route. Is there a noticeable difference, speed-wise?

2.) How many SSDs should I go with, in your opinion (keep in mind, I also plan to play games), and which brand? I've read that Intel 510s are the most reliable, overall, but a lot of people give high marks to OCZ for speed/price.

Possibility:
64gb - OS/DAW
64gb - Samples
64gb - Games/misc.

1TB Caviar Blue/Black (data/storage)

3.) I agree about the RAM... decided to switch to Blackline a few days ago.

Originally Posted by bgs

You should really consider an aftermarket cooler for the CPU to make the whole setup more quiet in high intensity situations as the stock fan is really audible when the CPU usage goes higher. (Might not be a problem if your PC isn't in the room you record in. My setup is pretty ghetto...) Noctua makes really quiet cooling combos! It's only $50-$70 more for reliable quiet cooling.

I have a question about that... I'm currently planning to go with 4 X 4GB Mushkin Blackline (tall-ish heatsinks), and I've heard these can cause a problem with aftermarket coolers when installing more than 2 sticks...a lot of the high-performance RAM is too tall. Can you recommend any specific CPU coolers that will not cause this problem?



TO ALL:

I've decided to order from Newegg and have a local company build it. This will save me around $500.

After a few days of review reading, I think I've settled on the following components:

2600K -- the support for this CPU, given its current price, is virtually unanimous. A no-brainer.

MSI HD 6870 Twin Frozr II (1GB) -- this seems to be a great solution right now in terms of noise/price/performance.

Antec P183 V3 -- a great case for noise reduction & solidly built.

Antec CP-850W CPX -- A quiet PSU with plenty of headroom, from a well-known company. Probably overkill right now, but will give me peace of mind and room to expand.

2 X Noctua NF-S12B FLX 120mm -- nice, quiet fans.

16GB Mushkin Blackline -- High-performance, reliable. The tall heatsinks worry me, though (see above w/regard to CPU coolers).


SUGGESTIONS NEEDED:

Motherboard? Someone mentioned ASRock. I've heard good things about them. Which board offers the best performance, given my hardware and needs?

SSDs? How many? Brand/Model? Size? Software & OS distribution?

Uses: 1.) DAW. 2.) Photo/video editing. 3.) Gaming (should I get a separate SSD for games only?)

CPU Cooler? Do I need a CPU cooler, as one person suggested? If so, which should I go with? (Again, keep in mind that I'll be installing 4 X 4GB Mushkin Blackline, with high-profile heatsinks.)

Sound Card? Do I need one? (Note: I will primarily use the setup to digitally compose via MIDI keyboard/software... don't have a studio, not recording bands or anything.)



Thanks again!

[Yossarian99]

Update:

I think I've decided on the following ssd/mobo:

3 X 128GB Crucial M4 SSD (SATA III)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820148442

These seem to have the best rep when it comes to speed (especially random reads, where they beat the Intel 510 series by a significant margin) and reliability. East West used the previous gen (C300) for testing with Hollywood Strings.

ASRock P67 EXTREME6 (B3) LGA 1155
Newegg.com - ASRock P67 EXTREME6 (B3) LGA 1155 Intel P67 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Great reviews everywhere I look. Seem to fail much less often than Asus boards. Love the fact that this one includes 6 X SATA, which should come in handy as SSD prices continue to decrease.


I might wait on the cooler for now. I think the case will be quiet enough, and I haven't heard too many complaints about heat with the 2600K running at stock speed... I don't really plan on overclocking in the near future.

[jcschild]

Originally Posted by Xaque

sorry to hijack the thread a little bit but why should he not touch OCZ with 10' pole? That's what i have in my system and haven't had troubles...what should i be looking out for. I strongly value your opinion Scott so when i read this is concerned me haha. Is my DAW going to fail/explode soon? I've had a 60GB vertex 2 as my OS drive since oct 2010.

my 60G OCZ (my first) is still wooking as well (in a different system) OCZ has a very high fail rate. particularly the last yr.

Scott