My New DAW

After working on my old DAW since mid 2013, I finally decided it was the time to get a new system. I have been planning for about two years now to get a new system but held off for a few reasons until now.

So let's maybe talk about what machine I had so far and what I was missing from it.

Back in 2013 I got a system that was technically pretty edgy back then with 64GB of RAM and two 512GB SSDs + one 3 TB HDD (one SSD for the System, one for Samples, HDD for Projects and other Data) The CPU was an Intel i7-3930K CPU with 6 cores.

I didn't upgrade much on this system over the years except for SSDs and a simple Graphics Card that would support 4K resolution. About two years ago both internal SSDs died in relatively close succession. They were far from their max TB written limit but some of the earlier generation SSDs so I guess it was an age factor. About a year ago, I also replaced the HDD which was showing signs of declining fitness by a new 8TB Ironwolf HDD. With some external SSDs the last state of the system was 5.5TB of SSD space and 8TB of HDD space which was generally enough to store most of my samples on SSD.

On most occasions, the machine would run quite solid and provide enough power for what I needed. As 80% of my work happens in notation and 20% in DAW, it was quite often good enough for my needs.

There were a few issues though that I had with the old machine. Firstly, USB 3.0 was quite new when I got the machine and the ports were always a bit unreliable. In spite of driver updates and using powered hubs etc. I had issues with briefly disconnecting USB 3.0 devices which was particularly annoying with external drives. Another issue was a compatibility glitch that I had with the newer graphics card which caused the screen to sometimes flicker for a fraction of a second which I also wasn't able to solve.

The biggest issue however was that about 2 years ago, I was changing my DAW workflow to a multi mic setup as I simply couldn't get the sound that I wanted from using just one mic signal of the samples libraries, so I set up my template in a way that all Kontakt instances would have the mic combination that I wanted enabled and routed those to multiple faders in the Studio One to have the balances of these mics in the console and not in the backend of every  Kontakt instance.

Of course this new approach was putting a considerably higher strain on the system with increased voice counts and more RAM demand. Additionally I added some effects plugins to my template that were quite intense on the CPU (but in my opinion necessary to get the sound I want) which added even more strain on the CPU. The cherry on top was when I started to record screencasts for this Patreon in Studio One which used up additional CPU power. In the composition screencasts for OPENING THE PORTAL which are coming up in the near future you will hear me talk quite a bit about this issue when it gets to the mockup. In fact, I had to stop recording the Screencast halfway through the session in order to be able to continue working on the mockup. I was already maxing out the buffer size at 2048 Samples so there was no more place to go from there.

So it was time to get a new system. I was observing the market for quite a while already over the last couple of years and was looking at benchmarks and discussions about these things online.

I was setting one target for the new system which was for it to have 256GB of RAM to have enough headroom for the next couple of years. There was also the target of staying on PC as I have always been a PC guy and just configuring a system with the specs that I wanted on the Mac Pro shop would give my bank account anxiety attacks.

I would consider myself to be halfway knowledgable regarding computers but not knowledgable enough to build my own system. Back in 2013, I got my system from Digital Audionetworx which is the biggest manufacturer for dedicated PC DAW systems in Germany. After I moved to Berlin in 2014, I noticed that they were located just a few blocks away from where I live. As I have been very happy with their service over the last years, I decided to go with them again. Even though getting a system from them would add quite a bit of money on top, having a specialized computer service right around the corner has proven to be very helpful. With the older machine when the old SSDs started to fail and the problem was not quite clearly identifiable I could simply bring the system to them to analyze the issue and was back up and running within a few days.

Digital Audionetworx offers a web configurator where you can build your system according to your needs and they offer AMD and Intel machines. I was very much leaning towards AMD watching Intel really failing to keep up with AMD. Unfortunately with my demand of 256GB of RAM, the current Ryzen CPU's would not be possible as they support only 128GB, so it would have needed to be a Threadripper which didn't have as great Single Core Performanc as the Ryzens.

With also having a look at the performance of my main notation programme Dorico, its developers recommend getting "as many cores as you can afford" for best performance. Now it is not that a notation program seems to need high end hardware to run but there are a few areas where a better CPU benefits the performance which I will talk about later.

So I reached out to Digital Audionetworx explaining my basic needs for the system and work profile asking for an advice on the configuration or whether I should wait a few more months until the next generation Threadrippers with Zen3 architecture would be available.

They very clearly recommended to go with Intel with the reasoning that most softwares including DAW are heaviliy optimized for Intel and particularly Kontakt showed considerably better performance in their tests with Intel CPUs than AMD in spite of the "classical benchmarks" showing different results. I of course asked them where they see AMD systems in the lead as they also offered such systems and they replied that in work scenarios in the audio world they only saw a lead for AMD when needing to record many tracks simultaneously due to PCIe 4.0.

So I left my initial plan to go with AMD and went for an Intel system. They also put a lot of effort into finding and testing the most silent components for their builds which was also a big issue for my purchase decision as I don't have a separate server room for my computers where they can be noisy without me being bothered by it.

 In the end I got a system that almost maxed out what they offer in their configurator:

Case: Fractal Design Define 6
Mainboard: ASUS PRIME X299-DELUXE II
CPU: Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-10980XE CPU @ 3.00GHz, 3000 MHz, 18 Cores
RAM: 256GB (8x32GB DDR4)
Graphics: Geforce GTX 1650
Drives: 2x M.2 PCIe SSD Samsung Evo Plus | 2 TB, 4x SSD 2,5" Samsung Evo | 4 TB
Network: Addtional Network Card 1GBit (recommended for better reliability for VEPro usage)
Power Supply: 850 Watt and their "Quiet Kit Extreme" which comes with several ultra silent CPU and Case coolers.

I deliberately didn't go for any HDDs to minimize noise even further.

This configuration added up to 8.330 Euros which of course is quite a large sum. If however I use this machine for as long as I have been using the old one, it will be an investment of less than 100 Euros per month which I find very reasonable for a machine like this.

With the headroom I gained with this machine I will most likely be able to get through the next couple of years without any need to upgrade.

The transition from the old to the new machine took me about two days with the biggest time taking the samples to copy via network from one to the other but really, I don't get how people claim it takes them weeks to get a new system (install) running again unless you have endless amounts of plugins from all sorts of different vendors but really with most developers and vendors providing installers online it's a matter of gathering all these installers within a couple of hours and installing them, but still nothing that would take weeks.

So I have been working on this new machine for a month now and here are a few observations that I made:

I was planning on using one of the NVMe drives as the system drive and one for the most important sample libraries, however regarding loading times Kontakt libraries hardly benefit from being stored on NVMe drives, Sine libraries however benefit greatly from being stored there. I also put Omnisphere on the NVMe which finally makes it fun to browse through the patches and not being annoyed by the waiting times to load the larger ones.

The CPU headroom in DAW use that I gained is not as big as I would have wished for. However, the bottleneck is not Kontakt which really has a lot of headroom now in regards of voice count but it is more the FX chain that I use in my sessions that seems to be putting quite some demand on one single core. Consequentially, buffer sizes below 512 samples don't work reliably, I'm currently even on 1024 for safety and as I don't record anything in the DAW  I'm not bothered by latency there. I have yet to experiment whether it will benefit to break up the FX chain over several buses to maybe (?) cause them to spread the load out to several cores. 

I was working on a project recently where I didn't hold back as I would have done with the old machine. I used used all the mics that I needed for the sound that I was after, layered all the things that I felt benefited the production and generally just didn't think twice whether that would be too much to ask of the system. I did not surpass 50% of RAM usage with that and also the CPU headroom was considerable. I'm happy though that I got 256GB of RAM as I was nearing 128 with that session (peaked out at about 105GB). I have yet to experiment with the Kontakt preload sizes which might help to reduce RAM usage and load times but having a RAM headroom of 50% even when going "all in" is great to see. Also, having now 20TB of SSD space (including 4TB of NVMe) is really giving me a lot of headroom for the future.

Dorico is considerably snappier. Especially on the small operations that on my old system took a fraction of a second to react, it now is way more instantaneous which of course adds to a subjectively quicker work flow. Also on larger scores things like condensing and other more demanding tasks now work much quicker. I think that for DAW alone, a CPU with fewer cores would have done equally well if not even better (due to higher single Core clock speeds) but as the developers of Dorico specifically recommend lots of cores I went for that option which seems to have paid off in this regard.

The new machine is considerably quiter than the old one. Even under maximum load (a state that I so far was only able to achieve by running Folding@Home on it) it is almost inaudible which is really great.

It creates quite a bit of heat. As I have my work place in a quite small room, it will probably replace my heating in winter :)

The old machine now has become a backup and VEPro Slave. It still has all software and samples on it so in case the main machine fails, I can quickly switch to the backup and keep working reasonably well there which was also a big reason for me to keep it as the few days that I lost my old machine when it broke down really added some stress to a deadline that I was fighting with.

Overall I'm happy with the new "freedom" that I got with this new machine. It might be debatable whether updating hardware more frequently to less expensive machines might be a better approach but having spent quite a lot of money on my old DAW which served me well for many years and being able to quickly have access to a qualified hardware service gave me the confidence that I would rather prefer investing once in premium components and not having issues with them than investing several times into cheaper and ultimately less reliable components.

I feel that I am at a state where I don't want to be bothered by hardware issues anymore that are due to "saving money on the wrong end". I need my setup to work as reliably as possible so with the new machine and the backup being in place I'm relatively confident that I'm not going to lose any precious time anymore due to massive technical failures.

That alone is already worth the investment.