looking to tap the minds here - parts questions for a new DAW build!

With much respect, and gratiude I come back to the well for real world knowledge! I have reviewed previous threads (and I'll probably keep reviewing them) on this very topic, but i am left with a few unanswered questions.

I've been waffling a bit on replacing my Intel Q6600 based DAW, but I can waffle no more. I need access to more memory, and a faster processor wouldn't hurt. 6 GB/s SATA is also important.

I've narrowed my choices as best I can, and I'd appreciate it if anyone who has used any of these parts might speak up if they see something that worked really well, or maybe did not work well for them.

I am also very curious about the real world performance differences between various parts. If anyone has any thoughts I'd really appreciate it. This is, of course, an exercise in optimization, which is to say I know the new machine will be faster than the current one, and I don't need it to be the fastest machine on earth, but I would like it to last a while.

So...

CPU - the price difference between the 3.6GHz and 4.0GHz i7-4970 is running around $50 - $60. Does that last 400 MHz make a real difference in the number of plug-ins I can run? And if it does, is anyone overclocking the slower part?

Motherboard - I've settled on the ASRock Z97 Pro4, it has enough PCIe and SATA-III ports for my needs, and it includes an M.2 port for when I get rich/adventurous. I have built a couple game machines for friends and family using other ASrock boards, and I was pleased with them. I also tested one of them with my Dakota and Montana PCI cards, and the cards worked. This will give a little breathing room to recover from paying for this machine before I buy new audio and MIDI interfaces. (A whole nother topic<G>!)

I wish it had a second NIC, I wish it supported more than 32 GB of memory, I wish I knew if the built in TB will work with a UAD Apollo... but for around $100 it looks like an excellent value that I won't outgrow. And when I really need 64 GB or more of memory I'll build a slave.

Memory - I found DDR3-1600 memory operating at CAS 7, for around $330. There doesn't seem to be any significant savings till your increase CAS to 9, at which point the price drops to about $200, which is a significant savings. So will the 2 extra cycles have a real impact on loading samples or processing plugins? Seems to me like it might.

SSD for OS - Crucial MX100, Mushkin, PNY, pretty much everyone makes SSDs in the 250 GB to 500 GB range. Are there any that are particularly troublesome? And at what point do leaps in IOPS make a real difference for the OS or apps? Am I going to notice a difference between 60K and 90K random reads, or 45K and 90K random writes? I'm also assuming that I do not need to worry about sequential access for the OS and applications... am I correct?

And one of the things that always made a big difference with spinning drives was a separate drive for swap, picture cache, and other temporary files. With an SSD is that still benefitial?

SSD for Samples - I have about 500 GB of Kontakt libraries, so I'm going to go ahead and get a 1 TB SSD for them, since I imagine I'll buy more<G>! Here I'd expect IOPS reads to be important, but is there a real world difference between 80K and 95K? The same names crop up, Crucial, and Samsung seem to have the best specs at the larger capacities.

Unless folks can convince me otherwise I am going to keep my current 2GB SATA 6GB/s HDD for the rest of my sample libraries, loops, one-shots, etc. I'll also keep a copy of the Kontakt stuff there for a while.

I'm also going to leave my 500 GB HDD (SATA 3 GB/s) for projects alone for now. And I will keep a another 500 GB drive for other data, downloaded installers, and the like.

For now I plan to use the Graphics adapter on the CPU. It'll rob me of a little bit of memory, but I have 32 GB, wihich is 4 times what I have now. If this becomes a problem I'll get a low end dual head video card.

This is going in an existing rack mount case.The power supply is rated at 400W, which ought to be fine with half the HDDs replaced by SSDs, and no video card. But the power supply is older, and not "Haswell Certified". Is that important? For less than $100 I would hate to skimp on the power supply.

Lastly - anyone have any good experiences with the trayless drive holders that squeeze 3 drives into two slots? I've used a couple different makes, and both of them had fan failures in 6 months. One of them also developed an alignment problem where one of the bays required trickery to get the drive to connect. I have more than enough slots to just mount the drives, but I really like the trayless caddys, and I like saving a little space for future growth.

thanks to any and all that can offer advice!

Hi Tom,

Thanks! I've already sent an email to Jim to schedule a consult.


Your point on the power supply is one of the bigger challenges, silly though that may be. If you add up the power for the motherboard, CPU, drives, etc it comes up less than 400W. Of course I want some headroom - as you say, sag sounds great on my BMP, but causes nothing but gremlins in the computer.
 
This stuff ought to be easier - it used to be when there were fewer choices<G>! But then Jim and Scott would have to find other ways to keep a roof over their heads!

OK, you got my undivided attention LRR!
 
And not just for the 2GB typo!!!
 
Please tell me more about how you are using the Apollo. Are you using the TB or FW output from the Apollo, I may be missing something but I didn't completely understand your description. My plan was to simply go FW out of the Apollo into one of the approved FW cards in the PC. Is there a better way?  (And yes, I am aware that MS is holding up the works for TB, just like they did for FW.)
 
Also, what sorts of latency do you get with your setup?
 
Thanks!!