please advice on my new audio studio pc build

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Hello,

I am going to buy a new computer for studio use.
Presonus Studio one v3 professional is my daw, audio studio software.
http://www.presonus.com/products/Studio ... e-versions
I am an ASUS workstation fan so that is my choice of motherboard.smile.gif
Going for a push/pull config to get lower fan speeds and cooling power when needed,
The eloop 140 fans are in the bottom of the case.
If I need I want to make a stable 1,25V 24/7 OC.

Needed:
SSCIB case
Thunderbolt 3
Displayport 1.2 3440x1440
HDMI 2.0 1920x1080
1x usb 3.1
6x usb 3.0
6x usb 2.0
5x PCIe slot
650 watt psu

MOBO Asus X99-E WS 3.1 SSCIB
CPU Intel core i7 6800k 6 core 3,4 GHz
MEM Corsair Vengeance LPX 32 GB ddr4 2400 c14
PSU Corsair RM650x 650 Watt
Cooler Corsair Hydro h115i 280 aio h2o cooling
Case Phanteks Enthoo Primo Orange SSCIB
Fan 2x Noiseblocker eloop 140 pwm 1200 rpm
Fan 6x Noiseblocker pk-ps 140 pwm 1500rpm
GPU Asus geforce 1050GTX Strix 2GB
PCIe card Asus ThunderboltEX 3 card
Drive 1 Samsung 960 evo 500GB m.2 ssd -> os&studio one
Drive 2 Samsung 850 evo 250 GB ssd -> projetcs
Drive 3 Samsung 850 evo 250 GB ssd -> samples
Drive 4 Samsung 850 evo 1TB ssd -> plugins(including libraries)
Disk 5 Western Digital Desk Blue 4TB -> images/backup
Disk 6 Western Digital Desk Blue 4TB -> images /backup
Optical LG blueray writer 16ns55 ->masters/images/backups
DSP 2x Universal Audio Uad2 Octo PICe card
DSP Universal Audio Uad2 Quad PCIe card

For me this totals at 3200 euro's, going to wait for skylake to buy so then ill just have
the successor parts in the listing(x299/skylake)
How about my drives/disks and my build , does it look ok?

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What's the point of multiple SSD drives? You can just pick one and split it into partitions, anyway. Neither solution will give you any sort of backup, either.

I also think that using 8 "noiseblocker" fans defeats the purpose, you will end up with a loud vacuum. With water cooling the fans might be actually the loudest part of your setup and there's not that much to cool except the CPU. Better just pick dampened case.
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Tricky-Loops wrote: (...)someone like Armin van Buuren who claims to make a track in half an hour and all his songs sound somewhat boring(...)

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Multiple ssd's easyer to replace when broken/needed and its about the same amount of € to pick 2 small ones or 1 double that size.

The fans will be pwm controlled so run at lower rpm, on hot days I want to be able to make music too,the system will go in a noise damping box anyways.

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DJ Warmonger wrote:What's the point of multiple SSD drives? You can just pick one and split it into partitions, anyway. Neither solution will give you any sort of backup, either.

I also think that using 8 "noiseblocker" fans defeats the purpose, you will end up with a loud vacuum. With water cooling the fans might be actually the loudest part of your setup and there's not that much to cool except the CPU. Better just pick dampened case.
What's the point of partitioning, aside from multiple booting?

Also, there's no real point in backing things up to internal drives. You can back things up to external drives (be they enclosed or just internal drives in a caddy and then stored.) Just hope that everyone has their own backup solution. *shrug*
Remember the iLokalypse Summer 2013

Samples and presets and free stuff!

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Just remember with backing up to external caddys, the caddys do have a habit of going tits up when the drives perfectly fine, only problem is when pulling out the hard drive and possibly mounting internally to repair theres a very specific process to follow. This is I understand due to the converter in the caddy with the size of the clusters (thats as far as my technical intellect goes on this, I was fortunate to get some help from a very helpful chap on the Windows forum). I digress. This is from personal experience. To be honest I actually use an internal hard drive to make an image of the rig (normally OS and data drives seperately), using Macrium Reflect. I then copy the image to my google cloud.
Personally I would not use an SSD for projects, of course check the read/write speeds of the drives.

Not sure what you using the rig for, but its a mighty fine rig. Although I would consider i7700k, but that my personal thoguht in going as future proof as possible.

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Thanks for the feedback!
Also I would like to know if my GPU is sufficient for use with studio one using 2 screens.
One via dipsplayport 1.2 3440x1440 60 Hz and one via HDMI 2.0 1920x1080 60 Hz :wink:
Should I get the 4 GB version of the 1050 GTX or is 2 GB version enough?
How much load will it approximately bring to the 1050?

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Also I would like to know if my GPU is sufficient for use with studio one using 2 screens.
All 1000 series GPUs are qualified for 8K resolution. Blitting 2D graphics is not a challenge for modern GPUs.

GTX 1050 can eaisly run older games in 4K: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vl-Nmsgkip0
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Tricky-Loops wrote: (...)someone like Armin van Buuren who claims to make a track in half an hour and all his songs sound somewhat boring(...)

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I agree with the other comments on HDD's / SSD's etc. I'd keep it simple, have one SSD for OS and programs, one drive for samples / plugins etc. Given the number of drives you listed, you could just get 1 500GB or 1TB SSD for much of what you need, then add a 1 or 2 TB 7200rpm HDD for everything else.

I have a pretty big setup, and I just have a 1TB samsung SSD, along with a 2TB HDD. It is enough for me. And then I just back things up offline to an external hard drive.

The other thing I noticed was that you must have a UHD monitor. The key with any audio setup is to keep your graphics demands down, obviously the higher the resolution the monitor, the more demands it places on your system. Sure, much of the duties are given to the GPU, but CPU cycles will be used for GPU stuff as well.

Not that it probably helps you, but unless you need a UHD display, then a 1080p or a 2k display will make less demands on your audio system. That being said, the GTX 1050 will handle your display, but to be honest, if you are trying to push out images for both a UHD display and another display, then the GTX 1060 or even the 1070 will have you much better covered. I run a 2k display with my Nvidia GTX 1070 and it runs great (this is not my audio workstation). For my audio workstation, I am still on a 1080p display, with a GTX 970.

I was going to add that if you are just using your computer for audio-related things, then 2GB of Vram would be enough. The 4GB and up cards are really only needed for games with such high GPU ram demands.

Just my 2 cents. Hope it is of some help.

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This is nice set up. I built Kaby Lake with Z270 motherboard the other month, and the Asus Thunderbolt card does not have any drivers yet.
I would not have backups on Internal drive. The idea is to have it outside of computer in case everything fails.

I always had my projects on HDD because SSDs does not like repeated re-writing. The HDD works just fine.

What kind of software do you plan to use for your synths and samples? My older system maxed out on C drive as well as SATA ports. This time I got 1 TB Evo 960 M.2 and couple of 1TB SSDs. I am waiting for 4TB 950Evo to come down in price, use ITB SSD for Kontakt, 1TB for software synths, and Western Digital Black for contact libraries until I get 4TB SSD.

I have 3000Mhz memory

I can not wait to hear how your Universal Audio works with Thunderbolt 3. So far it listed as Thunderbolt 2. Hope it sounds great. Please, share your experience.

If you have space under your desk, check out BeQuiet cases- the 900 is VERY quiet. It is some what too big but my hardware feels very comfortable in it. And it has beautiful glass window to look inside.

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Astralv wrote:If you have space under your desk, check out BeQuiet cases- the 900 is VERY quiet.
There is also the Fractal Design Define R5 (or R4). I have two of the Fractal Design Define R5 cases, and they are dead silent. Can recommend these cases as well.

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Astralv wrote:This is nice set up. I built Kaby Lake with Z270 motherboard the other month, and the Asus Thunderbolt card does not have any drivers yet.
As long as you have a connection header on the board, the current card and drivers works fine.

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Kaine wrote:
Astralv wrote:This is nice set up. I built Kaby Lake with Z270 motherboard the other month, and the Asus Thunderbolt card does not have any drivers yet.
As long as you have a connection header on the board, the current card and drivers works fine.
How do you know this? I called Asus, talked with 2 untrained tech support persons, who looked it up in their cheat sheets and told me- there are no drivers. I made their manager to call me, the manager had no idea. He promised to me that he will contact the programmers team and find out and contact me the next day. Week later I did not hear from him.

I don't believe what above poster said about the 4K. I have 3 computers connected to 4K and 2K monitor. My new computer has 1060, 6Gb card. My 2 other computers have AMD Radeon 7870 and 7850 cards (not sure specs- it is 2013 cards). 7850 is on my old MUSIC computer, has no issues running my monitors as well as 700 synths and effects. In fact for my old computer I have 4 monitors, and it works (I do utilize onboard graphics as well). For new build I got 1060, but 1050 will probably also work.

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Because I've spent the last 12 months discussing with my local Asus support reps how Thunderbolt works on their boards, as we're their biggest UK system reseller and possibly the only SI partner that sells a full range of Thunderbolt interfaces and other devices. The only team over at ASUS who truly know what's going on seem to be the R&D team at the head office and communication between them and the localized support channels isn't always the clearest when it comes to tracking down and resolving issues. Your phone call story to your local support only echos my daily experiences as annoying as it was.

Their validated list is nothing more than a snapshot in time of what was out there with controller headers when the EXIII came out (as was the EXII list before it), and newer BIOS revisions have added and improved support to most boards out there with the correct hardware header support.

The funniest thing was the boards that were actually listed with support, didn't appear to have been tested after the support was added. I as well as one of my support guys spent about 6 months last year constantly escalating reports of board model after board model that supposedly had official support for the TB3 cards not working, whilst newer boards with no official support worked fine out of the box.

They finally started to see the problems that we did late last year and have since rolled out serious BIOS updates / card firmware updates across the board that should largely clear it all up. The problem your support reps have is that Thunderbolt isn't wide spread enough to pay out for £/$500 worth of random Thunderbolt equipment everytime a support ticket is raised to test it locally. We ended up shipping a large box of random Thunderbolt hardware to Taiwan to be validated and get our Bios updates written, no doubt those should have all been rolled out publicly by this point.
Astralv wrote: I don't believe what above poster said about the 4K. I have 3 computers connected to 4K and 2K monitor. My new computer has 1060, 6Gb card. My 2 other computers have AMD Radeon 7870 and 7850 cards (not sure specs- it is 2013 cards). 7850 is on my old MUSIC computer, has no issues running my monitors as well as 700 synths and effects. In fact for my old computer I have 4 monitors, and it works (I do utilize onboard graphics as well). For new build I got 1060, but 1050 will probably also work.
I'm with you on that, the 1050 can push an 8K resolution, no reason it can't do a couple of 4K's.

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Sorry for t/j, just one more question. I dont usually rely on information from one person on the forum enough to invest $3000 in to audio interface that should use TB3. On the Asus web site, it is almost impossible to find TB3 cards, all search results come for TB2. When I did find it once before, it said, it supports Z170 boards. I have Z270 released this January, and tech support told me they were not tested yet. Have you seen or got confirmed info that Z270 boards working with TB3 cards? Is there a driver for it? Does it need the driver?

Thank you.

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You need driver off course. And you need a thunderbolt header on your motherboard.
Then it should be fine like in the post above.

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