New PC incoming - and I want to use a DAW (as a newbie). Specifications required?

[musicbassman]

Hi guys,

My old PC (11 yrs old) is slowly dying and my son, who is a skilled engineer, has offered to build me a new one rather than have me run along to Currys. He has previous experience of building PC's, so I have no worries there. But I'd like to start using a DAW (maybe Reaper) and I'm still not really clear as to what PC spec is required for running a DAW, apart from the fact that you need a decent amount of RAM. Back in the day, you used to need a dedicated soundcard to run a DAW, but this doesn't seem to be mentioned now - is this because you can rely on the built in sound processing on a motherboard these days? Or have I misunderstood something? Any advice welcome - here's a screenprint of what he's proposing to use:

[Newfoundfreedom]

I'm no expert. My PC was anyway pretty high spec so I didn't really need to look into it. I would say you're correct about ram. The more the better.

 

I don't think a soundcard really matters because your audio interface would bypass it anyway. 

[NickD]

I replaced mine last year, nothing too flash.... i7, 16gb RAM, etc. Prior to that I was running Cubase Elements 10 on a 9 year old Toshiba Satellite with 6gb Ram, and never really had a problem. It was video editing that it struggled with, and the recent updates were slowing it down generally due to its age. As above, as I understand it your audio interface essentially acts as a soundcard.

[BigRedX]

Start by looking for the minimum and ideal hardware requirements for your DAW of choice on their website.

 

Then think about what you want to do with your DAW. Is it just going to be digital multitrack recorder and mixer or will you be using lots of virtual instruments (synths, samplers, drum machines etc.)?

 

Then think about what else you want this computer for.

 

More memory is better, but past 16GB you only really need more if you intend to run lots of sample-based virtual instruments, in which case you might want lots more. So start with 16GB and leave yourself with at least a couple of free slots, and the capability to be able to install at least 64GB RAM.

 

Ideally you want a separate SSD/HD for recording your audio onto. It's always best practice not to record and playback multi-track audio from the system drive. I take it the small drive is for the OS and programs and bigger one for data?

 

Graphics doesn't really matter for music use. All good DAWs de-prioritise screen redraw if they start to run out of steam. However you may want to run more than one display, so make sure your graphics card is capable of driving at least 2x24" screens.

 

A good dedicated audio interface will always be better than whatever is built-in to the motherboard. It will have far better quality AD/DA convertors and ideally at least a couple of good mic pre-amps. If you want to record more than two tracks of audio at once you will almost definitely need a separate interface.

 

HTH

[musicbassman]

Thanks for this, @BigRedX.

I don't know why there's two drives, I simply did a screenshot of the info my son sent me, but that would seem to make sense. I'll ask him about this.

And I can now understand that an audio interface is essential. - however, deciding what to choose will have me searching for ideas and suggestions through the numerous other threads on here which cover this. 🙂

[chyc]

What are you thinking of doing with a DAW? Recording? If it's multiple instruments or a mic you'll need something like an audio interface, which these days connects to the computer via USB. Choosing one is a whole can of worms but if you're just starting out, take heart that you can get good ones for not much money. Certainly it's a fraction of what you're spending on your new computer above.

 

Reaper is very efficient. I have a computer of similar vintage to your dying one and am able to run Reaper just fine on it. As others have noted, requirements go through the roof if you have virtual instruments or plugin effects

 

HTH

 

 

[musicbassman]

Thanks, @chyc,

I'm primarily planning on using it to record multitrack MIDI and samples, using the 'piano roll' for notation. ( Not sure if I'm using the right terms here) Apart from a bit of guitar and bass not a whole lot else going on in terms of live instrument recording.

No one seems to say too many bad things about Reaper, which is why I'm drawn to it, but there is an occasional reference to latency if you're running many different VI's or effects. But I guess that's going to apply to any DAW.

[WinterMute]

 

14 hours ago, musicbassman said:

Thanks for this, @BigRedX.

I don't know why there's two drives, I simply did a screenshot of the info my son sent me, but that would seem to make sense. I'll ask him about this.

And I can now understand that an audio interface is essential. - however, deciding what to choose will have me searching for ideas and suggestions through the numerous other threads on here which cover this. 🙂

Seconded on 2 counts of BigRed's advice, if you don't want to stick a really hot processor in it (the i5 isn't regarded as powerful these days) then at least 32Gb of Ram is very useful. An audio drive is essential.

 

If you're going to using a lot of soft synth and samplers, another drive for libraries might be in order and you really should look at a faster processor with more cores.

Edited January 6, 2022 by WinterMute

[BigRedX]

While Reaper is cheap (it's essentially free unless you really want to pay the £60 licence fee) you don't get a lot of bundled plug-ins for effects or instruments with it. I don't know how much the fully featured Windows DAWs are these days, but Logic Pro X on the Mac is £199, and by the time you've shelled out for a few virtual instruments to make up for what is missing in Reaper, you will have probably exceeded this without factoring in the cost of Reaper itself. A decent drum plug-in will be over £100 on its own.

 

Regarding audio interfaces have a look at the various offerings from Focusrite. If money is no object look at RME.

Edited January 6, 2022 by BigRedX

[fretmeister]

The M.2 drive will be for the operating system and anything else you want on start up.

 

The larger SSD will be for anything you actually do. But you should have a 3rd somewhere or a web-based back contract with someone to keep your data safe.

 

That Power Supply is too small.

Modern Power Supplies can have manufacturer warranties of up to 12 years so over-spec that to allow you to be able to power any future upgrades. I'd want a 650W in there at least. 

 

There's no mention of a GPU on there at all. While onboard graphics are tolerable for many things if you want to do any video work with Reaper or OBS or Da Vinci Resolve then you will be underspecced. Doesn't have to be a stupid money GPU like the current generation that cost more than the rest of the machine put together, but a RTX1060 (That's 2 generations ago) would do the work far better than whatever onboard graphics are on that motherboard, and at a reasonable price.

 

32GB Ram is pretty much essential when you start adding plugins into Reaper otherwise you'll bog down quickly.

 

 

 

It might be an idea to give us your desired budget and we can all go off to the various companies Configurators and have a play.

[musicbassman]

Thanks @fretmeister

I'm not planning on doing video editing or anything fancy, I just want a typical Home PC for regular use (I'm not a gamer) but I want to make sure that it's not going to have future problems running a DAW. Some people on here are saying they're running Reaper on 10 yr old machines, but I do appreciate that plugins can start weighing things down a bit.

Total budget is around £1K inc 28" monitor. And I'm glad to say my son will happily build it for free as a present for his dear old Dad 

[fretmeister]

Cool.

 

I'll have a go on some of the configurators over the weekend. Most of the established brands have good ones - of course the fees includes a build fee so that can be ignored.

 

Although sometimes a prebuilt can actually work out cheaper if they have economies of scale.

 

I know you are not interest in graphics performance, but just as an example - it is cheaper to buy a really really crap entire PC and spec it with a high end GPU like the RTX3090 and then throw away everything apart from the RTX than it is to just buy the GPU off the shelf on it's own!

It's madness caused by supply shortages and that non-scalped units go directly to builders and not to the shelves in the local parts shop. I know a few people who've bought entire PC's that are actually incapable of even turning on while the RTX3090 is installed! Not enough power to even get the lights on. But it saved them nearly £1500 even after binning or ebaying the crappy stuff.

 

AMD and nVidea have no downside and they are raking in the money due to low supplies. Now that Intel are coming into the GPU market and have 4 times the combined revenue of AMD and nVidea it should shake up the market and bring the prices back down. Intel can actually afford to launch their GPUs at a loss to gain market share and cause a price war.

 

Fingers crossed!

[BigRedX]

12 hours ago, musicbassman said:

Thanks @fretmeister

I'm not planning on doing video editing or anything fancy, I just want a typical Home PC for regular use (I'm not a gamer) but I want to make sure that it's not going to have future problems running a DAW. Some people on here are saying they're running Reaper on 10 yr old machines, but I do appreciate that plugins can start weighing things down a bit.

Total budget is around £1K inc 28" monitor. And I'm glad to say my son will happily build it for free as a present for his dear old Dad 

 

It's is also worth considering that the plug-ins that come included with the more expensive DAWs tend to be optimised for the DAW in question then therefore have a lower processor and memory footprint. 3rd party plug-ins are written with maximising compatibility for as many DAWs and operating systems first and foremost, and can work out more expensive in the long term in terms of hardware requirements as well as the upfront additional cost.

[justgone1]

1k will afford you a pretty good PC for running a DAW IMO. 

I spent around 600 quid Building it myself, and works great tbh, and I use some vst instruments etc which are quite heavy on RAM. 

My specs are primarily Intel i5 6 core cpu, 16gb RAM, and a moderate n-videa 4gb graphics card. I did go for a super quiet cpu and case fan though, but weren't really that expensive at the time. Same with the power supply. 

I believe the newer i7/i9 cpu's are excellent, though more expensive. 

I am running  Cubase Pro 11. With steinberg/yamaha 6 input interface. 

Hope this helps.

[justgone1]

Oh, depending what USB inputs are available on the motherboard, you may consider adding extra USB add on card or similar, trust me you'll be glad you did. 

[Sibob]

Really, most DAW's will run on most computers, they themselves don't need a great deal of juice. Once you start building larger music projects in your DAW though, be it lots of midi or lots of audio....or both, that's where you need to consider the performance of your computer. 

If you want to record one bass/guitar track along to a backing track, a lower spec will be fine. If you're looking to actively learn about music production and envisage building larger and larger sessions as you get better, then aim for a better spec off the bat, budget permitting.

Personally I'm a Mac/Logic user, but if I were going PC, my minimum spec would be i7, 16gb (with room to increase), 1TB SSD. So you're largely there, the i5 will be fine I think, and you might be able to plop an upgrade in at some point if you run out of juice (motherboard permitting).

 

You will also want an audio interface of some description if you're looking to record bass/guitar. Most newer MIDI devices connect over USB, so:

A) You won't necessarily need an audio interface with MIDI Din connectors.

B) As has been mentioned, ensure that you have plenty of USB sockets on your motherboard choice. If you have to add a USB Hub to your setup, not all are created equal, research what works well for music production.

 

For a PC DAW, I'd go Reaper or Cubase. Pro Tools on PC isn't great in my experience. Ableton Live & FL Studio are typically more for electronic/clip/sample based music generally. Logic is Mac only.

 

Good luck

Si // Focusrite

[Kiwi]

I have a 250Gb SSD on my machine. Windows apps on my PC seem to be suffering from a significant amount of bloat as they are updated and I had to reduce the number of apps it was originally installed with.  One of those was Cakewalk - the amount of space it took up was horrific but it's not the only one.  AutoCAD is also space hungry but this is an essential app for me.  I think it's worth asking how much space your must have applications are going to take up and sibob's suggestion of a 1Tb SSD for system stuff is what I was going to suggest also.  Also, you can use an external drive for additional file storage and it's an extra failsafe in case anything happens.  The motherboard suddenly died on my PC late last year and, if I hadn't had a lot of business related items stored externally and accessed via laptop, it would have been difficult to function.

[justgone1]

Thumbs up for the ssd hard drive storage👍

I have two drives installed. 1x 500gb ssd and 1x 1tb 3.5" drive. 

I typically just use the ssd to install all apps/programs, and the 3.5" drive has all my utility files for Cubase, including project files and vst instruments samples etc. 

It's worth noting that many DAWS have A LOT of Gb's of instruments which include vast amounts of samples (Cubase certainly does). 

However, it is prudent to instal/store said samples etc on a second hard drive as I have done and someone else mentioned. It will help keep your main ssd drive clear of clutter, and help programs to run much smoother etc. Ssd drives are so much quicker at loading programs, I was astonished tbh. 

I can only vouch for Cubase, though I have tried Reaper and did like it tbh, but I found certain editing etc to be better with Cubase. Plus Cubase has a "control room" function which works great for me, including "cue" mixes, and headphone mixes. 

Hope this helps. 

Jg. 

 

[Guest]

Picked up from a google search \ reddit:

 

"I recently put together an 11700k build with 32gb DDR4 3200mhz using all nvme storage and it absolutely flies. I'm yet to hit a ceiling with it in Reaper with boat loads of plugins. That's using the integrated UHD 750 graphics on the 11700k. Generally speaking though 16gb of ram should be fine, and you can always upgrade that later easily enough if you need to. "

 

Some plug-ins will be CPU intensive so adding the extra grunt of an 11700K may prove beneficial but at the end of the day it is all about balance and trying to ensure you don't have an expensive component that is bottle necked elsewhere and you seem to have a good starting point. The motherboard seems to have plenty of connectivity options and 5 X SATA connections for disks. 

 

https://www.gigabyte.com/Motherboard/Z590-UD-AC-rev-1x/sp#sp

 

If you are running windows then as others have said; have separate physical disks - one for the Operating System and  one for Applications and you might want to separate out audio \ project files onto another disk (or even onto another 2 disks which you could then configure in a mirror so that if one failed you would still have a copy on the other disk). I'm not so keen on using RAID for the OS or applications as you can just reinstall them should the drive fail but losing all your work is more of a pain. Depending on your level of paranoia you could also can also budget for some sort of backup device (RAID won't help you when you accidentally delete something you didn't mean to but a backup copy will save you grief). 

 

Disk 1 - Operating System

Disk 2 - Applications

Disk 3 - Audio \ Project files (with the possibility of disk 4 if you want to mirror disk 3).

 

You could also consider an external hard drive so that if you do head somewhere without your desktop you could copy the audio files onto this and take them with you (on the assumption that you would be taking them to somewhere \ someone who had a computer where you could access them). The options to spend ever increasing amounts of cash are many and varied ... just like with the bass ... good luck!