Building my own PC - what should I keep in mind?

[Punky921]

Hey guys,

So I'm going to be building a PC for the first time. I did a lot of little incremental installs with my father when I was younger, but never built my own PC from scratch. I want to use this PC primarily for Ableton and maybe DJing at home, and maybe a little bit of PC gaming on the side. Gaming and anything re: the internet will be kept on a separate HD partition.

If a primary concern is to keep latency low and bugs out, what should I keep in mind as I consider components? In terms of cost / benefit ratio, where will my money give me the best back for my buck? I know RAM and HD speed are integral. I'm thinking of jumping up to one of the i5 or i7 processors.

What else should I keep in mind? I'm sure some of you folks have put together PCs before. Help a brother out!

EDIT: I'm a little worried about fan noise interrupting vocal recordings as well. Any suggestions on good CPU coolers and GPUs that aren't too loud?

EDIT: My budget isn't super huge. I'd like to keep it under ~$1000 if at all possible. I'd need a new monitor too, as my current monitor is as old as the hills (I found it on the street)

[nebulae]

Most PCs these days will be just fine. If you're gonna be mobile, look into a shuttle, though that will likely increase your cost and limit your expandability.

I'd highly recommend an ASUS, Gigabyte, Abit, or Intel board, and I'd recommend the second fastest i7 chip you can get. Usually, Intel has a primo extreme chip for like $1000, then the fastest chip for around $500, and the second fastest is around $300, and that's usually my price point.

Get at least 8gb of RAM to future proof yourself. Plan on installing Windows 7 x64.

You may consider two hard drives, one dedicated to audio, but that's no longer really necessary. Modern Sata3 hard drives are really fast, and SSL drives even more so.

Get a quiet power supply and quiet fans. Try to get a graphics card without a fan, as those tend to be noisy as well.

[#1thelark]

If you want it to be less loud than your music... then go for a huge cpu cooler with big and slow rotating fans. To fit that into your system you need a case that's wide enough. For the rest: how much money do you want to spend?

If you're in €urope you better hurry because prices for pc components will rise shortly if they haven't already due to the weak Euro.
About Gaming vs. Music: a fast gpu will give you more fps but also more heat and possibly more noise... which can be a downside when it comes to making music. I'm not sure about desktop pcs but some laptops have onboard gpus and dedicated gpus for gaming... if that works for desktop pcs as well, it might be useful to get a motherboard with onboard graphics and add a gaming graphics card for your games.

About i5. vs. i7: I can't complain about the i5, but AMD has a new 6core-cpu, which could be an option, though they are not yet performing as well as the intel (according to the Live8-performance-thread).

Just my 2cents.

[Punky921]

Fan noise is something I'm really worried about. What fans cool well, but aren't hugely loud?

[nebulae]

http://www.quietpcusa.com/how-to-silenc ... puter.aspx

http://www.silentpcreview.com/section6.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiet_PC

[Punky921]

Oh cool! Thanks!

[davepermen]

consider setting it up completely passive if you want (for the fun of it).

huge silent cooler should work great, at least for the i5. i dropped the gaming, and could then go for an i5 + passive cooling + ssd + 150W power supply (picoPSU), completely passive and rather cheap.

in terms of cost per performance, i'd say i5, 4gb ram is the minimum. from then on, consider an ssd, 6-8gb ram, i7. in that order i guess.

and yes, if you check youtube, you find my current setup, which DOES have an active cooler. but that just, because the whole setup is in a drawer, and thus the cooler has to be quite small.

great for creating music.

(and just for the savety, you could still pop a fan onto the cooler, and just let it idle around till needed, of course)

[nebulae]

^the only thing I'd disagree with is prioritizing i7 last. You should always get the fastest CPU you can get, and the i7 has 4 hyperthreaded cores, meaning your system will show 8 cores, which will be fabulous in Live.

[davepermen]

^the only thing I'd disagree with is prioritizing i7 last. You should always get the fastest CPU you can get, and the i7 has 4 hyperthreaded cores, meaning your system will show 8 cores, which will be fabulous in Live.

reasoning: ssd gains you more perceived performance than any processor, and ram is more cheap to upgrade than an i7. but obviously, it depends.

and for live, i actually went from a quadcore to an i5 (which is dualcore only), as in general usage, i still gain from the automatic overclocking. live is very bad at threading. still, i'd love to have an i7.. you have one for me? (but i5 + ssd > i7 except if your main job is heavy rendering on 3dsmax or maya (and even there, a gpu assisted rendering solution beats out the cpu by a long way, so there i5 + ssd + gpu > i7 )

[nebulae]

^yeah, good reasoning. For me, I'm doing a lot more guitar based stuff these days, so my track count and plugin usage is increasing a lot, so more cores the better for me.

[davepermen]

more is always better

then again, i've yet have to max out my i5 and when i do, i can still get an i7 and drop it in there (or by then, an i9 or what ever.. 6 cores are already here.. i want 8 )

then again, i'd take this for sure:

[Punky921]

Keep going guys, I'm learning a lot from listening to you talk.

[McQ714]

this is right up my alley...

we really need to know your budget.
i'm an AMD fanboy but if you don't have a budget and you have to get an Intel i7, go for broke! 980x all the way. it's the one and only dominator!

if you go with Intel, i can't help you much in the way of picking components other than to say, get a mobo that has SATA 6gb/s ports, hard drives should be either Seagate or Western Digital (my choice!) and make sure your RAM of choice is compatible with the mobo and made for i7 CPUs.

since i'm an AMD fan, i highly recommend you get the new 6-core 1090t CPU. if you have a firewire audio interface, go with the Gigabyte GA-890FXA-UD7. reason for this is that it's firewire chip is made by Texas Instruments and TI chips are highly recommended for firewire audio. if you have usb or a PCI or PCIe based audio card, i highly urge you to wait for the Asus Crosshair IV extreme board which should be out in a month or so. there is also the Crosshair iv formula. don't get the two mixed up. you'll want every bit of power you can get out of a motherboard and the crosshair iv extreme should be the best AMD board for a while unless the web rumors are true and it's only a prototype and won't be built, in which case, the Gigabyte mentioned is the best.

hard drives: gotta get SATA III drives now that they are available. if you can find the WD 10K rpm Velociraptor 6gb/s hard drives, get it! otherwise go for the WD 7200 rpm caviar black 6gb/s hard drives. they will be just fine for audio. don't need a big hard drive for your system drive. 320gb is enough here but the caviar black has a minimum of 640gb of storage it seems. no big deal here. get at least one if not a few more hard drives for sample and library storage. since i'm running all velociraptors with a 300gb capacity, i have multiple hard drives set up as follows... first is for windows 7 professional 64-bit and system utilities. 2nd drive is for audio apps (Live, Reason, all plugins and standalones). 3rd drive has Live's library, Native Instruments libraries (this all takes some creative installation of software and in some cases editing the library paths of the software or editing of the registry which i do not recommend if your new to this.. you may not be comfortable doing that and could seriously fuck it up!). 4th drive is for all other WAV samples and libraries you may have. since your drive will be larger capacity, you could probably fit all of Live and Live's library and any plugins and their libraries on a single 1tb drive. and then have a 2nd 1tb drive for everything else. i also highly recommend an external hard drive for backup. get a 2tb drive, do a complete backup of all drives once all software is installed (this will take forever), then do a minor backup every week.

for RAM: i recommend Corsair Dominator or Dominator GT. again, check compatibility with your CPU and mobo. Intel uses triple or hexa channel. AMD uses dual channel or quad. gor for at least 8gb of DDR3.

video card is not that important for audio but check out some reviews and see which ones are quiet. i wouldn't necessarily recommend a fanless card unless the case has plenty of airflow. the card that has caught my eye lately is the ATI radeon HD 5770... lot of reviews say it's pretty quiet. i am partial to Sapphire brand ATI cards and that one has a vapor-x version which helps cooling the card.

for power supply, i like ABS power supplies. Majesty series 900w will be in my next build later this year. there are plenty of reliable PSU makers though so choose the one that fits your case and budget.

for CPU cooler, unless you want to go with a water cooler, get a large case and get yourself a Noctua CPU cooler. they are relatively quiet and will cool your CPU like no other. they are really big though and that's why you need a big case. all your case fans could be swapped out for silenx fans. they are pretty quiet and cool very well.

couple more notes... when you go to build this thing, watch videos, read instructions, don't miss a single screw, make sure you ground yourself so you don't discharge static electricity (don't stand on carpet), don't forget the thermal compound on the CPU. and install one hard drive at first and then install windows, then shut down and install the next hard drive and install your software, then install the next drive for misc samples. this is so you know which drive is which in case you have to take one out. it's easier than looking up the drive properties to figure out which port the system drive is connected to. and lastly, they may have fixed all of the RAM issues but it would be best if you install only one stick until you get windows installed. then when you shut down to install the next hard drive, you can install the rest of the sticks of RAM.

[davepermen]

well, what else. i use windows 7 32bit, no problems at all so far. haven't moved to 64bit yet, so can't comment on it (but heard a lot of success stories).

and btw, my huge passive cooler, i don't know it's name right now. you can see it here in this pic:



blurry phone cam pic

[Punky921]

I'd like to keep the budget down below ~$1000. Preferably closer to $~750.

EDIT: Let me know if that's profoundly unrealistic.