Just when I had settled on saving up for a new Mac later this year when the M3 Max and Ultra Mac Studios are released, I stumble across Guy Rowland's thoughtful thread about building his AMD PC.
I have a 12 year old gaming rig that was top quality back then (i7-3770k, Gigabyte Z77 motherboard, GTX 680 graphics card, G.Skill Ripjaws memory, Corsair SSD and 600T case, OCZ 850 power supply) that has been absolutely rock solid over the years. It has been a VEPro slave most recently but struggling mightily with Cinematic Studio libraries and with the CPU intensive plugins I've tried to use. My main music computer has been a 5 year old 16gb MacBook Pro to run Cubase and Logic, and over the pandemic I added a 2018 i7 Mac Mini that I upgraded to 64gb. I was content with these until I started to use deeply sampled libraries with multiple mic positions and adding convolution reverbs. The final straw was getting Rico Derk's Project Colossal which brought all 3 computers to their knees. The combination of parallel effects processing, multiple mics with complex Kontakt scripting, and mastering plugins was just too much for these processors to playback in realtime without significant compromise. My VEPro instances were regularly spiking and glitching (I'm looking at you Cinematic Studio Woodwinds). I was bummed that a total of 16 cores and 112 gb over 3 machines could get swamped by what I was throwing at them.
I have learned so much in the past 2 weeks by reading through Guy's thread and Pictus's recommendations. I learned that nowadays, memory is really secondary to processor speed (a single overloaded core can cripple a project), there are other bottlenecks that have nothing to do with the number of cores, and you don't need the absolute fastest SSDs to stream samples since Kontakt can only load them at a certain pace anyway. I went down the rabbit hole of researching power efficiency, air vs liquid cooling, AM5 pros and cons, dual channel DDR5 limitations, XMP, underclocking, PCI4 vs PCI5 SSDs. It has been a lot of fun actually, I haven't nerded out like this in a while.
Anyway, I put my oldie but goodie PC components to use and rather than spending 3-4k for a tricked out Mac Studio, I upgraded to this:
(AMD 7950x, ASRock Taichi Lite B650e motherboard, Thermalright Phantom Spirit cooler, 96gb G.Skill 6400 DDR5, Crucial T500 2gb m.2 SSD)
$1300 and I now have a new top of the line music PC.
It is amazingly fast. Where 3 computers were getting hammered with instances constantly 80-100% maxed and cracking, I have yet to break 50% on even the most plugin heavy, multiple mic instance in VEPro, and it would be much lower with a more normal template. And this is running it in the 105W ECO mode! I have had zero problems with the BIOS or posting (the memory runs at 6400 as advertised). I get it now. Macs are wonderful and I will continue to use them, but PCs represent so much value.
Thanks Guy for doing all the build research that I piggybacked on and to Pictus for providing so much info about the AM5 platform in these threads. Team Red or Team Blue, it doesn't matter, this a great time to be building computers.
I have a 12 year old gaming rig that was top quality back then (i7-3770k, Gigabyte Z77 motherboard, GTX 680 graphics card, G.Skill Ripjaws memory, Corsair SSD and 600T case, OCZ 850 power supply) that has been absolutely rock solid over the years. It has been a VEPro slave most recently but struggling mightily with Cinematic Studio libraries and with the CPU intensive plugins I've tried to use. My main music computer has been a 5 year old 16gb MacBook Pro to run Cubase and Logic, and over the pandemic I added a 2018 i7 Mac Mini that I upgraded to 64gb. I was content with these until I started to use deeply sampled libraries with multiple mic positions and adding convolution reverbs. The final straw was getting Rico Derk's Project Colossal which brought all 3 computers to their knees. The combination of parallel effects processing, multiple mics with complex Kontakt scripting, and mastering plugins was just too much for these processors to playback in realtime without significant compromise. My VEPro instances were regularly spiking and glitching (I'm looking at you Cinematic Studio Woodwinds). I was bummed that a total of 16 cores and 112 gb over 3 machines could get swamped by what I was throwing at them.
I have learned so much in the past 2 weeks by reading through Guy's thread and Pictus's recommendations. I learned that nowadays, memory is really secondary to processor speed (a single overloaded core can cripple a project), there are other bottlenecks that have nothing to do with the number of cores, and you don't need the absolute fastest SSDs to stream samples since Kontakt can only load them at a certain pace anyway. I went down the rabbit hole of researching power efficiency, air vs liquid cooling, AM5 pros and cons, dual channel DDR5 limitations, XMP, underclocking, PCI4 vs PCI5 SSDs. It has been a lot of fun actually, I haven't nerded out like this in a while.
Anyway, I put my oldie but goodie PC components to use and rather than spending 3-4k for a tricked out Mac Studio, I upgraded to this:
(AMD 7950x, ASRock Taichi Lite B650e motherboard, Thermalright Phantom Spirit cooler, 96gb G.Skill 6400 DDR5, Crucial T500 2gb m.2 SSD)
$1300 and I now have a new top of the line music PC.
It is amazingly fast. Where 3 computers were getting hammered with instances constantly 80-100% maxed and cracking, I have yet to break 50% on even the most plugin heavy, multiple mic instance in VEPro, and it would be much lower with a more normal template. And this is running it in the 105W ECO mode! I have had zero problems with the BIOS or posting (the memory runs at 6400 as advertised). I get it now. Macs are wonderful and I will continue to use them, but PCs represent so much value.
Thanks Guy for doing all the build research that I piggybacked on and to Pictus for providing so much info about the AM5 platform in these threads. Team Red or Team Blue, it doesn't matter, this a great time to be building computers.
