What you probably need is something that can drive larger displays but not at insanely high refresh rates. Look at smaller, single-slot workstation graphics cards like the AMD Radeon Pro series. If it's a dedicated audio PC, you probably don't need a massive graphics card intended for gaming, certainly not one with big noisy fans onboard.But eliminating bundleware / bloatware and disabling memory-hogging things that launch silently at startup is important. (The weirdest things can happen, like your Windows Audio sample rate not matching your ASIO driver's.) There are tweaky things that can be done at the BIOS level to adjust memory timing and the like to eke out better performance, which I would leave to a trained professional to do. As others have said, building from scratch or buying from a specialist audio workstation maker is probably a better way to make sure the system is optimized.AMD systems generally don't support Thunderbolt (though there are one or two motherboards that support it via an add-in card), but USB 3 / C is well supported, if you are looking at UAD external DSP modules or Apollo interfaces. If you use Universal Audio UAD-2 cards, be advised that most of their PCIe cards don't work in AMD systems except the Octo.If you want more PCIe slots/lanes, you have to look at workstation processors and motherboards like Intel Xeon, AMD Threadripper Pro and/or EPYC. Nowadays motherboards come with 2-3 M.2 SSD slots (usually PCIe) so you can split your boot drive, scratch disk and storage between those, then add more storage on a PCIe card or traditional SATA SSDs for backups etc. If you are building from scratch and want more PCIe slots for things like extra USB, PCIe SSD carrier cards, FireWire etc, be sure to see how many lanes you really require. Consumer CPUs have limited numbers of PCIe lanes.The Zen 3 architecture which debuted on the newest Ryzens solves this problem with a new unified cache, so that's probably a good choice if you're building a new computer. It could be ameliorated by using 'AMD approved' high speed RAM and higher clock speeds. ![]() Until very recently, AMD Ryzen and Threadripper chips based on the Zen 2 architecture had issues with running well at low audio buffer sizes, due to the way the cache was split between the core groups.The faster the bus you can use, and the faster the SSD, the better and the more channels of RAM, the faster the CPU can read/write. (You may not need liquid cooling, but a big heatsink / fan combo helps.) Higher core speeds usually means a bigger processor with a higher TDP so you need a larger physical enclosure with better ventilation and cooling.So, that means individual core speed is more important than number of cores, at least for now.(This matters for Windows if you plan on using a high-core-count / high speed workstation chip like the new Threadripper Pro, as you might need a Windows for Workstations license.) As we are now seeing an increasing number of consumer and workstation CPUs with more than 8 cores, this may change, but right now, realtime audio processing tends to be linear - it cannot effectively be parallel processed. Most DAW software is not multithreaded.Mac user for daily driver (design work etc) and usually use Macs to record, but Windows machines are now perfectly capable. ![]() I've been researching this extensively over the past year.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |