Originally Posted By: Planobilly
There are other things I am doing on the computer beside music. Video for one thing.
...I don't know what I may want to do with a computer in the near future so I set a budget of around $2000 and want the best machine I can build for that amount of money.

I was in a similar situation. I've mostly got Dell refurbs for years and wanted to upgrade my Dell Precision T5400 Engineering Workstation a couple of years ago. I too do video editing and also fly flight simulators (Big resource hog). It would take about 30-45 minutes to render a 5 minute 4K video even though the specs were good. I got real lucky on Ebay and found a Dell Precision 7920 Engineering Workstation (basically a server in a PC case) that had stacked features in which it would have cost about $10K at retail price. I found it from a reputable seller and was able to get it for $3K. That 5 minute 4K video now takes only about a minute or two to render. Lots of time saving. Going from 8 to 64 cores really helped on that. Needless to say that flight simming and music production are a breeze on this monster. Once the pricing comes down a little, I could even expand on the CPUs but I think I future proofed it by getting what I did. I shouldn't have to upgrade for years.

Basic specs:
128 GB RAM
(2) Intel Xeon Platinum 8153 CPUs @ 2 GHz each, 16 cores each processor for 32 cores total, 64 cores including logical.
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1070 Graphics card - Barely wedged that in the case.
C:\ 1TB SSD - Operating System & Apps
D:\ 2TB HDD - Media Storage
E:\ 250GB SSD - Working drive for music/video projects

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CPUs.jpg (141.62 KB, 120 downloads)
64 processors baby!


Steve

BIAB/RB 2022, Pro Tools 2020, Korg N5, JBL LSR 4328 Powered Monitors, AKG/Shure Mics.
PC: Win11 PRO, 4 TB M2 SSD, 2 TB HD, 128 GB Memory