Originally Posted By: sslechta
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


This is a really good idea when buying a used machine. There are a lot of corporate places selling off machines of this type. A lot of times the want to move off the Microsoft platform and go to something much more professional like UNIX. If it is mission critical it is probably not running on Windows.

A good idea I had not thought of for a while.

THanks,

Billy

Steve, check this one out. https://www.ebay.com/p/2286707950

Last edited by Planobilly; 11/16/20 07:06 PM.
“Amazing! I’ll be working with Jaco Pastorius, Charlie Parker, Art Tatum, and Buddy Rich, and you’re telling me it’s not that great of a gig?
“Well…” Saint Peter, hesitated, “God’s got this girlfriend who thinks she can sing…”