via add in card in a pcie slot ? ive googled crazy cant find how many m.2 nvme can be accommodated. reason i ask is lots of pc's often these days come with no spare m.2 slots ? and pcie 4 is double throughput...over pcie 3.
why is this important ?
well...i want a new pc with 3 m.2/nvme ssd's...which are blazing fast for running biab/rb/reaps/dealing with complex song projects....ie.. ..one m.2 drive for win 11/programs. ..one m.2 for recording to/playback. ..one m.2 for vi's//orch libs.
any input gratefully received from people running multiple m.2 via pcie etc...as i'm lacking knowledge in this area.
There is absolutely no advantage to running multiple SSDs unless you require a) more storage space than one will allow or b) you are able to format them as RAID 0 for increased speed if your PCI architecture allows for more than 4 lanes on the bus (most can't). With a typical 4 lane bus, a single blade is faster than RAID 0. You can get them up to 8TB if the cooling is good enough.
NVMe 3 x4 m.2 blades come in inexpensive 'slow' such as the Crucial P2 or expensive 'fast' types such as the 970 EVO.
What i find interesting , is, at the retail level and manufacturers of desktop pc’s web sites…it seems difficult to get deep specs on pcie implementations…thus.. I suspect some people are purchasing desktops with the older pcie spec..ie 3…which is slower than pcie4. Which i understand is 64gb/s ?...then there is new pcie5 ?
As to ssd’s or any drive…i like to use a divide and conquer strategy…thus the 3 ssd idea. Cos if i slap everything on one drive, like some folks do…if it goes on the blink i’m in the proverbial….the main reason being how BIG orch libs are.
om, I have three drives on my music computer. The C drive, and SSD, is for programs only. All of my sounds are on another SSD while my data is on a 7200 RPM HD. Everything is backed up.
If possible one should never put their sounds/patches on the same drive as the program. YMMV
Seated at the restaurant, He "Darling can you say something that makes my heart beat faster"? She "Your wife just walked in"!
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
I’m same as you… re ssd drive organisation. Ssd’s are cheap. I’ve never looked back.
The more i delve into advanced vi’s//orch libs the more i’m aware the importance of using the right configged pc. Otherwise one could end up with a lemon pc that doesnt do the job.
Re…importance of lanes. More the merrier ? so one doesnt get bottlenecks in a pc.
Yesterday i came across this very interesting article from a custom builder of recording studio pc’s…and it clarified lots for me…particularly how certain cpu’s support more lanes than others. Why am i doing this deep delve into pcie and lane support by different classes of processors ? Because ive realised impact on performance. For example some processors support fewer lanes (highways) than others. The following explains why lanes matter.
But looks like its gonna be a few years yet for it to trickle down to us consumers.
I urge any daw user to delve deeply into pcie and cpu lane architecture before next purchase of a pc for daw work, particularly if one anticipates heavy workload. This stuff aint trivial....and these articles and others of their ilk might save buying the incorrect pc vs workload.
What jumped out at me was the power consumption and the amount of cooling needed. Thus the bigger heat sinks and fans needed for cooling. If one is doing a lot of audio recording I wonder how loud those fans are? I'm sure that liquid cooling is another option is it not?
Seated at the restaurant, He "Darling can you say something that makes my heart beat faster"? She "Your wife just walked in"!
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
If you look around the above site as well as other recording studio pc builders sites…there is a wealth of nice info and config guides.
I personally will prolly go upper end i5 or ryzen with pcie 4 support. Cos i’m not doing huge orchestral live sessions.
Definitely pcie 4 is a nice improvement over old pcie 3 , but i dont think i need pcie 5. i also agree with the microsoft guy pete that has a nice studio...will go desktop this time. more flexibility than laptops.
did you notice the no of lanes supported on xeons and threadrippers viz normal consumer cpu's ?..WOW ...support for more lanes. no wonder big studios often use such. but the price is too rich for me.
Btw i showed my wife your ‘time gag’ in your sig. We cant stop giggling. Keep the gags coming…they are fun.
Real soon I will be in the market for a new music computer. My friend whom used to own a computer store sold out and moved so I will have to look at other sources. My main problems are I'm on a fixed income, chip shortages, and raising inflation. Not to mention the things around the house that need repair.
I will go PCIe 4 also. I need a desktop as I need a number of USB cards installed; I have a number of MIDI controllers and other USB peripherals. My music computers have always been the most expensive computers in our house. At my age this may be the last computer I buy so I am going to try to go big, like I did 11 years ago.
Seated at the restaurant, He "Darling can you say something that makes my heart beat faster"? She "Your wife just walked in"!
64 bit Win 10 Pro, the latest BiaB/RB, Roland Octa-Capture audio interface, a ton of software/hardware
Bleeding edge always costs high but becomes mainstream remarkably (alarmingly?) quickly.
The PCI lanes article to which JOM linked dates mid-2020 and lists mostly generation 10 CPUs.
My local independent is listing mostly series 11 and 12 CPUs and has chipsets like Z690 and Z590, multiple PCIe 4, multiple M.2 on its mid-range (~$140) motherboards and H610 on most its lower-end motherboards(~$80) and even most of those support series 10 CPUs.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. Kawai MP6, Korg M50, Ui24R, Saffire Pro 40. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11; Win8.1: Scarletts BIAB2022 UltraPAK, Reaper, a bunch of stuff.
What ive found doing my deep google dives is that ‘sometimes’ one is better buying...next cpu down but its top version instead the base cpu in the next higher range. Eg the top of the range i5 instead of the base i7.
I saw one report of a comparison whereby getting a top range i5 one saves quite a bit and the next cpu level up one wouldnt notice huge processing time diffs due to other factors. Dont know veracity of such.
For example , if i remember i found an upper range i5 cpu on benchmark.net with single thread score of over 3000. I would recommend cpubenchmark.net for cpu/price/performance comparisons. they have great tables of passmark scores for all cpu's. ive been useing em for ages.
Gordon.
Hey hampshire ..your a better man than moi. That silent pc article on lanes was the best i found after many many deep dives in google cos there are so many sites with little info i found.. So if ya got better please post back mate.
In addition ive had difficulties finding how many ssd’s can hook up into pcie. or even put in the new desktop vendors pc's. So if you know , i’m begging you..lol…tell moi. Optimally i want to run 3 fast ssd’s //m.2/nvme.’s i really dont care how they hook up, as long as they perform uber fast and dont hog resources/bandwidth from other components or each other.
I dont need gigundous ssd’s as i offload a songs traks to multiple backups once a song is done and store backups at various off site (from home daw pc) locations.
Hey hampshire ..your a better man than moi. That silent pc article on lanes was the best i found after many many deep dives in google cos there are so many sites with little info i found.. So if ya got better please post back mate.
No, nothing better. I was only a little aware of it, which is partly why I read the article.
I don't tend to dig too deeply into these things as they change too quickly. What's new today is everywhere in six months and "old hat" in 12.
The things I tend to note regarding performance are (a) that i7 and i9 seem to be more geared towards interfacing with graphics processors, rather than towards audio processing, so that part of the extra power is just not of much use, and (b) that a larger number of cores and threads is useful provided the applications use them ... I think most now do, certainly in the DAWs area, anyway. Number of data lanes will be similarly important I'm fairly sure ... certainly on the embedded stuff I do, DMA channels and busses are similarly important for getting data into and out of the CPU(s).
My buying philosophy for a long time now has tended to be to buy current mid- to upper-mid-range kit, working on the basis that the latest and greatest will just be the norm in a few months time and I'd have wasted lots of money just "driving the machine out of the showroom".
Actually, AFAICR, the only time I ever spent as much as I could possibly afford was on my very first PC ... AMD383SX40 with about 1MB of RAM and a 10MB hard drive. About 1.5k somewhere around 1986/7. Since then it's been bang-for-buck rather than bleeding edge.
If it's of interest, I usually use these people +++ Novatech +++, but they're not music specialist, or one of a couple of ITX places. My studio PC is rack-mounted.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. Kawai MP6, Korg M50, Ui24R, Saffire Pro 40. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11; Win8.1: Scarletts BIAB2022 UltraPAK, Reaper, a bunch of stuff.
om, I have three drives on my music computer. The C drive, and SSD, is for programs only. All of my sounds are on another SSD while my data is on a 7200 RPM HD. Everything is backed up.
If possible one should never put their sounds/patches on the same drive as the program. YMMV
No reason to do that on a new PC unless terrible performance is the goal.
SSDs do not access or store data like HDDs. Get one big enough to hold everything. Do not partition or split onto multiple drives. Never, ever, ever run any so-called disk optimization utilities — the good ones do not run on SSDs but there is crapware that does.
For years it was standard procedure in win based studios to use multiple seperate drives. At least 2 separate drives…one for win and one for recording activities. Various user pro recording threads/sites reflected this.
The introduction of massive sample libs further complicated matters,.... Thus lots of studios would add more drives.
The reason that win had its own drive was it was found that otherwise having all on the win drive could lead on larger trak counts to ‘audio stutters’ cos sometimes win interrupted to do a win os task. I personally experienced the stutter problem on one drive pc’s. As soon as i gave win os its own drive the stutter problem ended. Now admittedly this was in the old drive tech era. But i know loads of studios have carried the divide and conquer idea into the ssd era. even tho' we now have higher bandwidth. i gotta say seperate ssd's have worked great for me. and i'm not alone in this.
Maybe things are different on the mac ? Perhaps you might explain further reasoning behind your position ?
Prolly a response to ryzens ? and apple going with its own silicon ?
note the no of lanes !
Happiness om
Interesting that they divide many CPUs into "performance cores" and "efficient cores" and state the clock rates supported and consequential power dissipation by each. By using "efficiency cores" at a lower power dissipation, then can increase the number of cores within the dissipation envelope available. This could be simply to make the chip appear better by having more cores, without having it really work any better.
It may just be me, but I have a tendency to look for parts with the better power efficiencies, i.e., lower TDP. There are several reasons I do that. Lower TDP means cooling the chip is easier, so I can run quieter fans or cheaper heatsink+fans or even no fan; lower power also means less energy wasted.
To be honest I find the whole variants business with CPUs really rather unmanageable now ... the 12th generation i5 alone has 26 variants, the chipsets have another whole raft of variants, and all of that is still dependent on what the motherboard makers do with them.
Out of curiosity I used Intel's website and cpubenchmark to compare i5-12500T, i5-12600T and i5-12600K. What differs between them and what doesn't differ between them shows how fraught and confusing it can be trying to make sense of it all.
Life's too short to get hung up on too much of this, especially when it'll all have changed anyway in a few months time.
Regarding performance with single or multiple drives, I believe a main issue is seek time on hard drives. AFAICS, seek time on SSDs substantially irrelevant as there's no head to move.
Jazz relative beginner, starting at a much older age than was helpful. Kawai MP6, Korg M50, Ui24R, Saffire Pro 40. AVL:MXE Linux; Windows 11; Win8.1: Scarletts BIAB2022 UltraPAK, Reaper, a bunch of stuff.
For years it was standard procedure in win based studios to use multiple seperate drives. At least 2 separate drives…one for win and one for recording activities. Various user pro recording threads/sites reflected this.
Mike can answer this as well but I think on his post he meant partitioning a single physical disk into separate drives. I also agree on that one. Yes, it's good to use and save data on separate physical drives. Just don't split a physical disk. Keep it as individual.
Gordon. Yep good points…its all getting confusing with all the various processors. Thats why i look up passmark ratings on cpubenchmark.net. There is a very looooong but interesting thread on gearspace.com bout building a recording pc….
Over 500 pages…go to the latest few pages….cos thread has gone over a long time.
Steve.
To clarify i never partition. I use physically separate ssd’s cos dirt cheap. Tho’ i know other people have had a ssd fail. I never have even tho’ i use em’ tons. (never had an old tech drive fail either.)
Steve i know ya got a superb pc…is it pcie 3 version only ?? Frankly i still get lured back to monster refurb HPZ//lenovo//dell off lease workstations…lol…but the older pcie aspect has me concerned. What i still love bout em’ is often they are superb monsters ideal for daw and are expandable and ive seen em’ as low as a few hundred bucks with 1 year warranties. My ‘refurb guy’ sells loads of refurbs. Never put me wrong yet…and sets em’ up to be really fast // boots etc.
P.S. - I also have a M.2 dual card on this machine too. I haven't invested in an SSD to put in it at this point since the machine already had a normal SSD drive in it. Looks like I could put up to 4TB in it. I imagine that would be fairly expensive.
Edit: Looks like it would run $400 to get two 2TB SSDs. Popular one on Amazon below:
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