How Much CPU and RAM is Enough?

[McLilith]

Yeah, I've yet to use all that RAM, but that was kind of the point. I wanted to have some headroom and room to grow.

My old system was a small, refurbished Dell notebook with a third-generation Intel i5 CPU. It was able to run a DAW and a limited amount of plugins, but it would totally choke on some of the newer CPU-hungry plugins. I used that little machine for several years, and it served me well, but it was time for an upgrade. I recently retired, and I saved up some of my retirement money for this new system. I'm hoping it will last me a long time.

[audiojunkie]

I just wanted to thank everyone for their thoughtful suggestions. After considering a lot of options, and saving up some money, I just finished putting together a system with the following:

Ryzen 9 9950X CPU (air-cooled, with a large twin-tower air cooler)

MSI motherboard with X870 chipset (To get USB4, more PCIe lanes, & other niceties)

One WD SN850X 4TB NVMe drive (I'm sure I'll eventually add more.)

64GB of 6000-DDR5 RAM

It's tucked away inside a BeQuiet! case, and powered by an 850W BeQuiet! power supply. Unless I'm stress-testing the system with a heavy load, I don't even notice the sound of the four case fans, dual CPU fans, or the power supply fan.

I don't have a dedicated graphics card, but that isn't a problem for my DAW work at all. I might get a low-end to mid-tier graphics card in the future, to enhance photo and video editing.

I built it over the weekend, and I'm absolutely delighted by how well it turned out.

Nice! You've got a lot of power there! I'm willing to bet you'll be able to use that for the next 15 years!

[McLilith]

Nice! You've got a lot of power there! I'm willing to bet you'll be able to use that for the next 15 years!

This replaces my small 10 year old Dell notebook computer. The notebook had a 3rd gen i5 CPU. I had upgraded the ram to 16GB and installed a 1GB SSD. It had enough power to run a DAW and a few plugins, but it struggled. A system upgrade was long overdue.

According to the https://www.cpubenchmark.net/ website, my new system should have 25.5 times the multithreaded performance, and nearly 3 times the single thread performance.

Now, I can load my DAW with several demanding plugins and the system handles it without any problem.

One of my primary goals with this project was to build a system with enough reserve power that I didn't have to worry about needing an upgrade anytime soon. I think I've achieved that.

[SiliconDeath]

I think having good CPU is nice, but a lot of the problems is to do with OS bloat, and how corrupted your current OS (usually windows) install is. So if you can manage to debloat or de-clutter your OS install (usually fresh install is best for this, but optimizing some settings/removing programs may get you there too maybe) will give you better performance on your existing hardware, so much so that you might be able to use current hardware for a little bit longer (since there's a new performance ceiling).

It depends what your goals is, but obviously having good CPU helps, but you also need a system around it that works, namely the case and cooling need to be on-par (large emphasis on case and its cooling). I'm saying this because some of the high-end AMD CPUs seem to run very very hot, and cooling them can be very hard (tends to be combination of loud fans, and hot temperatures). You need a large case for them (if you don't have large GPU, then maybe a mid tower will work, but I think if you have large GPU for gaming or soemthing, a high tower might be a necessity, otherwise there's not enough room for cooling to do much, because the large GPU usually blows its hot air directly on CPU), at least 2-3 intake fans on case or more, and 1-2 exhaust fans (if possible, maybe blow the exhaust rear of the case, instead of top.. but that's debatable).

[sl23]

I bought a cheap PC 3 years ago, an Acer TC1660 with core i7 11700. I've changed the cooler from Intel stock to noctua one. Upgraded ram just by adding 16GB, them bought 2TB Samsung 990 NVME SSD and a sabrent adapter and fitted it into the x16 PCIE slot.

My PC boots in under 10 seconds using the original NVME drive for the OS, and I have two SATA SSD one for games one for films. Everything else is on the Samsung 990. Apps, books, pictures, music, and many other unused archives. No slowdown, no bottlenecks, just a very east responsive system.

But... I an not an expert, so it's enough for me for now. Experts are like formula 1 drivers, even the smallest of things can slow you down if you're good enough to push your system to the Max! So what matters to one, doesn't matter to another.

[umd]

In this context, there was a time where we had nothing... now we have a lot more than what's needed in most cases.