easyjoey
Kev999,  that is my exact debate!  I can afford a new system but if my existing system is powerful enough, why do it?  I am having some issues with Platinum and Maschine and was curious if a new system would help but it doesn't appear so.

 
I also wonder if your new PC is powerful enough why on earth would you want to overclock it unless you are playing Couterstrike? In the real world it's not going to make any difference to a DAW environment apart from perhaos making your warranty invalid. Even 5 year old PC's seem to run a DAW environments quite happily.
 
BTW I don't think your issue with Maschine is performance. After exhausting all possibilities (drivers, plugins etc) you should try rolling back to a previous Maschine version and wait for 2.3.2

I added some SSD's to my machine and my ole 2600K is good to go!!

I thought the same as Joe...my system works perfectly, but I think that 5 years on a system is pushing your luck. You might get 6 years, you might get 8 years, but after 5 or 6 years motherboard capacitors get old. Power supplies have been through hundreds of cycles. If you use platter drives you take a chance every time it spins up after that amount of time. I've made it past 5 years on a gigabyte motherboard and platter drives. I think it's time to look at a new build. Many of the new motherboards have heavy duty capacitors and gold connections for the cpu socket..probably improvements over past systems. HDD I/O technology has gotten so much better in the last 5 years.
I am looking at Asus X99 motherboards now...but I have to admit that Gigabyte has been very faithful to me. Bios is old technology and has been augmented with UEFI and allows a lot more adjustment to your system. I would rather have a system with overkill than a system that chokes, and who knows? The next generation of software might need more computing power. My 5820K X99 system will still be a far cry from many others but it should hold me over for at least another 5 years. I plan on Noctura cooling which should be just as good as a water cooler. I'm not spending a fortune on a video card since I'm not really a gamer. I will post my build when I get it completed, but I'm taking my time..a luxury I still have as of today.
 
You can certainly build a good system with 4790K and the old 1150 Z chips but this is basically older tech and is being replaced with 2011-v3 X99 chipset motherboards boards. The new cpu's have more lanes and cores and the new motherboards are just faster with the right HDD,SDD configurations. Bottom line- Value for money is 4790K. Performance and future upgrade potential tilts toward Haswell-E. Neither is a bad choice.
 
If you want to take advantage of the maximum number of lanes don't buy the 5820K. I believe it only has 28 lanes compared to 40 lanes in the higher ended chips. I settled for the entry level chip.

 I got 8 years out of an Asus AMD motherboard. It was a dual core board. People were experimenting with the bios and were able to run Phenom II quads.  Asus adopted it and the bios was official.  The board finally died. There's a whole forum devoted to the Asus M series with nForce chips.
 I still have a Phenom II 945 with an nForce chipset.  It's not fast by today's standards but it can still do DAW work. So can my Intel Q6600 system. 

Curious.... Approximately how much would it cost to build something like this?

Price taken from Newegg, random brands with price rounding.

PC Case __________ 100/=
PSU ______________ 50/=
i7 4790K __________ 340/=
1155 1150 Motherboard __ 85/= (edited)
DDR3 (2x8GB) _____ 75/=
Fanless Graphic Card 30/=
SSD 500GB ________ 160/=
HDD 1TB __________ 48/=
 
At around USD 888/=. Very basic power supply and default cooling system.

Prices aren't that much more to build a 2011-v3 Haswell-E compared to the older setup above. Just a thought. It looks like roughly 20% to 30% more but you get DDR4 memory and the option for more cores.
I picked up an ASRock Extreme 4 motherboard  for 169.00 and I get a 30.00 rebate.
http://www.newegg.com/Pro...x?Item=N82E16813157543
My build was around 1500.00 . I could have made it less but I decided to splurge on a really good power supply,cpu cooler, memory and  three SDD drives. That price even includes a Fractal Design case. This didn't include a monitor, but it does include a decent two port HDMI video card and firewire card. If you were cutting corners on a 2011-v3 build and only one SDD you can take 300 off of that build easily , especially if you go with more basic case and power supply....and my build is inexpensive compared to a high octane gamer build...but it should fly running Sonar.
 
You could do the i7 4790 for less.Maybe at around the 12 mark.  You could certainly do an AMD build for less than that. I have seen basic AMD systems for around 5 bills already made at Costco. Nothing fancy but it would do the job on basic projects. Only one hard drive but four cores and probably fast enough for a lot of things.
 
This is why I opted to build my own though, because I am in charge of the component selection  I didn't want an already made machine, but if you're on a tight budget you could do that too.
 
In terms of sheer performance on a DAW system the 5820K chip I chose isn't really head and shoulders above the i7 4790. It does beat it by a small margin in some areas, but mainly you gain increased throughput in using DDR 4 as opposed to DDR3 memory and can take advantage of new SATA technologies. If you over clock the 5820K to around 4ghz it smokes the 4790 every time. At 4ghz the chip isn't very hot with good cooling.

I was raised to never overclock a cpu , if one wants it to last a long life...even with heat sinks or water cooling of the best sorts...
 
I also believe at certain points in overclocking, some things do not time out well...if say a outside clock is synced to the system... odd things happen, you end up frozen....or locked up....if it is true or not...??... I never went there to find out.
 
I am glad some can overclock without issues....Yet for my reasons above, I do not do it at all.
 
I have a good system build with Thunderbolt 2 Asus Quad deluxe board..z87 spec below...I think the TB interface helps relieve the memory/cpu access via directly using memory without cpu intervention.....rather than cpu being the director....So it relieves more bottle necks in that, and less hickups with audio irq issues, which to my mind with Firewire 400/800 cards from TI and LSI and others seemed to plague that PCI x1 firewire solution..or pci e card solutions with noise clicking and popping..., I once used....
 
As for USB audio...I am trying a motu 4 pre, on one machine...had lots of issues in the first run under win 7...but it is now working ok, after a few driver upgrades , on a older 2011 socket board with a 6 core...Streams video and audio well...and internet is ok...But I rarely use this for audio mixing or such in recording...Mostly a play back, all in all system .
 
My new X99/2011-3 5930 (Asus ) 32gb,ssd build, and red drives,is still being tested, also with Thunderbolt add on card (Asus) added,  has moved into the recording area, to tie into the other systems for video and audio production testing....Seems to be very fast, and stable with Sonar and Studio one 3, with Motu Thunderbolt 828.
 
Mac Pro 8 core, runs the Allen and Health x2 mixers, over Thunderbolt 2 now, and has been the 8 core champ in all...Logic and Studio one 3 and pro tiools are on that with sound forge...and has two video cards for the video end of things, when I get the software for that.
 
All this, and other systems for midi/softsynths/dmx lighting...are moving into place also, to be farmed, or synced to the master  Mac machine...
Dmx and such lighting to be added next....So when tempo and metronome are needed ...a light can run the tempo to the session room...to help keep time...and or control stage lighting....(As a click in head phones is never loud enough for the people playing live as a hole band together)....So light timing might be a solution for me...and dmx lighting is run off of midi/metronome click
 
I guess if one machine is suppose to run a audio system only...4790k and good MB will do..with 16gb of memory or more and a 2gb video card...setup right, can be fruitful to work with under win 7 and up . 
 
I think the x99 is more robust for multi tasking video and audio though, and sure as hell will do it without too much hick up or noise, or sqweeling...and might do it a bit faster if utilizing all the speed these new boards can utilize...usb 3.1, and M2 ports, and on some thunderbolt supoort....I'd say a well built system exceeds the Mac pro...at way less a price!...value?...proven reliable?....still new, and being developed win 10...is bound to be a fixer for a while more...but seems to be stable at this junction .
Mac is also being updated and some issues with....so bliss is what you choose to make be that bliss....if it is obtainable totally yet?...no not yet, but sure is around the corner, over the hill, and not too far away!
 
 
cheers.
 
hope this helps unconfuse via confusion methods tested so far,the right choice out of the wrong ones I made first .......wink....Thunderbolt, with firewire adapter // works better than firewire ever did for me..
 
And we hope CW has fixed the lost audio device issue....as I have read they did find something odd in code...so that is next fix, to solve for...and then maybe it is bliss.

Great points Sir Les. Since I don't use thunderbolt this was never a consideration but I'm sure many out there will.
 
I have a Presonus Firetube Studio not to be confused with the firestudio. Mine has tubes in two of the preamps. I hardly use all of the I/O it has but wouldn't be without all of the monitoring options it offers and I didn't want to part with it just yet so a PCIe solution with the texas instruments chipset looked good for me. If anyone wants to know the specs of the card that is rated to work with firewire audio interfaces I'll post that link here. Cracking and popping is common on some chipsets.
 
The ASRock motherboard I ordered has eight memory slots. I opted to start out with 4gb x 4 or 16gb  G SKILL Ripjaws DDR4 with room to expand. I'm not rendering video but I like that the motherboard has more slots if I need them.
 
From all of my info Win10 runs Sonar very well, aside from the privacy issues and automatic updates which don't seem to get in the way of performance if you unhook the lan during recording ( see other post). I can't report on my own experiences yet. USB 2/3.0 seems to be  dominant in consumer, semi pro audio recording I/O, but I'm a firewire diehard. Works fine for my setup and even for larger throughput. I don't think FW is dead, but the hardware makers don't include it on the new boards, but then neither is thunderbolt in many cases. An individual decision. Thankfully we can still get add on cards.
 
If Cakewalk ported to Mac I would be very tempted..can still run it with bootcamp, but why? Like you say it probably isn't an advantage. I would love to play with Logic sometime. 
 
Overclocking has changed a lot since the old days. It once was viewed as taking a chance. In some cases depending on what you're attempting to do it can have a bad outcome. The 5820K is a robust chip that can easily handle overclocking within reason and with good cooling. In many cases it's an automatic setting within motherboard UEFI software. It can determine what your system can handle and set your overclock automatically. Takes the headache out of overclocking safely. And the nice thing is if it doesn't work you simply change the settings.

Yes sir...Throughput, or channeling through PCI lanes....bigger lanes, more of em, more throughput of data flow...= more tracks?...better management of?...Guess we will see, in the next few weeks how x99 Asus deluxe Preforms with the Motu TB 828....I have high hopes, it will be better than the below spec I posted....Soon to change I am sure.
 
A frozen PC or Mac due to overclocking, is in my mind no way to shut down and reboot...If working on a very important project, and when moving to save save save...it flakes out before doing so....well you know why I do not go to that overclocking process, if warned not to by some very learnt people....I even turn off speed stepping and vt in bios if possible....can't take any chances , i say...Stability starts by being careful with the devices, and the usage of the parts there in with respectful intent.....Good in...Good out...should work in my understanding of scripture,...used for the Good, in Good of all...is best treated to enact better performing Processes in principle terms!
 
 
I believe Asrock boards may support a TB header...if you find your firewire card / causing issues with your audio...try the TB and TB addapter for it...You may get better preformance out of it, it the board you sought out does have it...a TB ard is a option then.
 
Options eh...
 
Be well..