Matthew Young' Post

Building a PC for Music Production and Digital Audio Workstations

music-production-pc

PLEASE NOTE: While this article (and its example builds) are some years old, we now have a thorough, regularly updated big guide article on building a PC for Music Production over on our main site. Check it out!

Now that you have read our warning, you may return to the content of the outdated article:


One of the most popular requests we receive is a build guide for a music production PC that will power digital audio workstation (DAW) software and sometimes external hardware similar to external preamps, My friend would use Graham Slee HiFi here. These are computers specially built for editing and working with audio and music.

Professional music production PCs often come with plenty of RAM, powerful CPUs, and the quietest components you can afford. If you’re looking to build your own professional music production PC, we’re here to help you get started.

Note: before we start, don’t forget to get the right equipment to accurately monitor your mix. It is always a great idea to get the best studio monitors so you have the most authentic representation of your mix without it being coloured by lower quality equipment. Accurate frequency reproduction is paramount to allow the mixer to be very precise with their stereo image.

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Haswell-E or Broadwell-E? Intel i7-5960X vs. i7-6900K vs. i7-6950X

Intel-Broadwell-E

What is the best high-end CPU? The 3 best consumer-grade options are the Broadwell-E i7-6900K and i7-6950X, and the older Haswell-E  i7-5960X. We previously recommended the i7-5960X over the newer i7-6900K in our build guide for NVIDIA’s GTX 1080, because of the older CPU’s superior overclocking potential. Here we will compare the pros and cons of these CPUs in more detail, so that you can make the best choice.

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Building a PC That Beats the Xbox One S

xbox-one-s

The Xbox One S is releasing on August 2, 2016, bringing the power of the original Xbox One into a tiny form factor. Releasing at $399 for the 2TB version, this brings the cost of console gaming back up to budget gaming PC range.

Today, we’d like to find out how powerful of a PC we can build for the same price of the Xbox One S. As it turns out, you can build something surprisingly powerful.

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Building a PC with the GTX 1080

gigabytegtx1080

Get ready for the GTX 1080 era. The GIGABYTE GTX 1080 G1 is just one of many GTX 1080 models.

NVIDIA’s GTX 1080 is the most powerful graphics card currently on the market.

A single GTX 1080 is capable of achieving smooth game play on highest settings even at 4K resolution. When two cards are paired in SLI, even the most demanding games hit 60 frames at this resolution.

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Building a PC with AMD’s RX 480 Graphics Card

rx480specs

The flagship of the red team’s new generation of graphics cards, AMD’s RX 480, is finally here. The 480 aims to be a groundbreaking card for the mainstream gamer. With prices of $199 and $229 for the 4GB and 8GB versions respectively, the card is squarely in the mid-range price point, but with significantly more power than previously seen in a card at this price. The card performs just slightly above the GTX 970 or R9 390 — cards that cost $320+ until very recently.

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