Sorry for the lack of output lately! My studio computer stopped working! I walked into the studio, heard this loud POP! and it was gone. Experts say it was a transistor on the motherboard. Rather than repair this 12 year old friend, I ordered a new one from AVADIRECT. A custom H570 desktop with the following hardware:
- Define 7, No PSU, E-ATX, Grey Mid Tower Case
- TUF GAMING H570-PRO WIFI, Intel® H570 Chipset, LGA 1200, DP, ATX Motherboard
- Core™ i9-11900K 8-Core 3.5 - 5.3GHz Turbo, LGA 1200, 125W TDP, Processor
- 32GB Kit (4 x 8GB) HyperX FURY DDR4 3200MHz, CL16, Black, DIMM Memory
- PULSE RX 580 8G G5 Video Card (already owned, thank goodness!)
- PRIME Ultra Platinum, 80 PLUS Platinum 1000W, Fully Modular, ATX Power Supply
- Dark Rock Pro 4, 163mm Height, 250W TDP, Copper/Aluminum CPU Cooler
- AS5-3.5G, 3.5g, High-Density Polysynthetic Silver, Thermal Compound
- 1TB XLR8 CS3140 2280, 7500 / 5650 MB/s, 3D-NAND, PCIe 4.0 x4 NVMe, M.2 SSD
- WH16NS40, BD 16x / DVD 16x / CD 48x, Blu-ray Burner, 5.25-Inch, Optical Drive
- Dynamic X2 GP-12 Black 120mm, 1200 RPM, 52.3 CFM, 19.4 dBA, Cooling Fan
- Standard Wiring with Precision Cable Routing and Tie-Down
- Windows 10 Pro 64-bit DVD OEM
I went with the H series chipset since I only run one monitor. It should be interesting to see if the XLR8, running PCI-Express 4.0, is as fast as they say it is. Advertised Sequential Read of up to 7,500 MB/s and Write of up to 5,650 MB/s. The expanded processor speeds going from a 4 core 2010 I-7 processor (INTEL, Core™ i7-920 Quad-Core 2.66GHz, LGA1366, 4.8 GT/s QPI, 8MB L3 Cache) to the latest 2021 I-9 processor (Core™ i9-11900K 8-Core 3.5 - 5.3GHz Turbo) should also help. I considered an AMD processor but was told by experts that Intel is still the best for audio file processing. Also, the motherboard has an expansion card to add Thunderbolt 4 capacity if I need it later.
Inside Cubase 10.5, my old system would hesitate if:
- too many effects side processors were open
- 10 or more audio files
- running 1080p video tracks
I will post more info on capacity later once I get setup.