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From experience, Asus and Gigabyte both provide good, solid and reliable motherboards.

The fastest processors on the market currently are the Intel Core I7's, they have beat all the competion in tests, but thats not too say the competition is rubbish. But, if you know what you are doing you can buy an Intel Core I5 for a nice bit cheaper and overclock it too around 4ghz and get pretty much the same performance as the I7, you can buy them pre overclocked and they come with the advantage of a warrenty. The AMD processors are still quite powerfull though, and are cheaper, which is a bonus. Just make sure you have a good bit of ram aswell, 3GB is the minimum you want really in this day and age, if you want more than that, make sure you have a 64bit version of your chosen operating system.

I will also add, you do not want to skimp on you power supply, PC components are very sensetive and can be ruined the smallest amount of extra power, also cheap PSU's often have a higher rated wattage than what they actually give out, resulting in underpowered systems which could result in it only being a matter of time before the whole thing fails. The amount of computers ive seen in the past where everything including the processor, hard drives, motherboard and graphics card have been blown because of a cheap PSU is untrue, all because the cheap PSU cannot provide a constant and stable power supply too the components. You can get good quality PSU's starting from about £40/50 anyway, so its not like its even expensive.

A very significant reason is also audio related, the cleaner and more stable the power to your audio card (if it is PC powered) the better your DAC and ADC will perform.Of course your studio not burning down and stuff like that is important too.

The life of components will be greater when there are less surges, spikes, fluctuations
in voltage. And there is nothing worse than your PC breaking and there is 25pct chance it will be PSU related
if it's £14.99 a cack one.

SilentPC have plenty of recommendations of the best kit for building silent PCs, obviously good if yer into muzak production ---> http://www.silentpcreview.com/section5.html

i barely even touch the processing power on my i7 and 6 core is just overkill, especially if you're just using it for audio

I'm gonna have to respectfully disagree here. Overkill as of 3/30/2011, maybe. Overkill as of 3/30/2012? Doubtful. Ableton 8 is multi-threaded, so 6 cores will give you more instances of Massive than 4 cores will. How can that be overkill?

As soon as Abelton or Reaktor or whatever comes on in x64, quad core will damn near be a requirement. We need to make sure this new PC were building will still be usable for the foreseeable future, don't ya agree?

Also, it also depends greatly on what interface OP is using in the new build. A USB interface requires more CPU cycles than a PCI interface. I know from experience.

No overkill here.

I'm a computer Tech, and I say go ASUS for the motherboard. I always do. Also, as safeandsound mentioned, don't skimp on the PSU. I prefer Antec PSU's.

+1, +1, +1, and +1.


So, to answer the OP's original question:
ASUS M4A87TD/USB3 AM3 AMD 870 SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 AMD Motherboard
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

With the AMD Phenom 1090T black.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... -_-Product

I recommend these from personal, first hand experience. I built a system using this mobo and processor just this past Friday, 3/25/2001, with 16GB of RAM. Good shit, and OP can cross the border into Detroit (i think ypsi) to visit MicroCenter and get a pretty sweet deal on the combo with a rebate.

Deadly, not picking on you man. I think this is probably one of the few times I didn't agree with you. But since were on the topic:

yea here's my build for my current DAW/gaming rig
Mobo: Gigabyte GA-X58-USB3
CPU: Intel i7 940 2.93GHz
RAM: Patriot Viper II DDR3 Triple Channel @ 1600MHz 12GB
Vid Card: Gigabyte HD 5770 Super Overclock 1GB
PSU: COOLER MASTER Silent Pro M600 RS-600-AMBA-D3 600W ATX12V V2.3 SLI Certified CrossFire Ready 80 PLUS Bronze Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply
Case: Rosewill RSV-R4000 Black Metal / Steel, 1.0 mm thickness, 4U Rackmount Server Chassis 8 Internal Bays, 4 Included Cooling Fans
HDs: a couple seagate barracuda @7200 SATA drives one 500gb one 1tb
DVD Drive: LITE-ON Black 24X DVD+R 8X DVD+RW 8X DVD+R DL 24X DVD-R 6X DVD-RW 12X DVD-RAM 16X DVD-ROM 48X CD-R 32X CD-RW 48X CD-ROM 2MB Cache SATA 24X DVD Writer

All that system, and your OS still loads from 7200rpm hard drives? Now that's what I call UNDERKILL. Fuck, i woulda went for 8GB of RAM instead of 12 and bought a 64GB SSD for Boot drive, and called it a day. Now I feel a new thread coming on.

ssds aren't stable enough or cost effective enough for me quite yet
and honestly i don't see the need to be running a quadzillion instances of the same synths half the time
but to each their own

What do you mean by not stable enough? If anything, the spinny platter thing worries me way more. All it has to do , the R/W head, is touch the surface of that disk once and you're fucked. I have zero stability issues with my SSD, windows 7, latest firmware.

And I totally appreciate what you're saying about this:

and honestly i don't see the need to be running a quadzillion instances of the same synths half the time
but to each their own

The alternative is to render or freeze the track, making it a Wave file. That will free up CPU cycles, but bog down the HD. 7200's can read only about 100MB/sec sustained, on a good day.

As of 2010, a typical 7200 rpm desktop hard drive has a sustained "disk-to-buffer" data transfer rate up to 1030 Mbits/sec.[51]

1030Mbits/8 = 128.75MB/sec So you can only freeze/render so many times before your SATA bus runs out of bandwidth. All the while, ableton live and the OS is reading from and writing to the same drive (likely). So, you're damned if you do and damned if you don't.

Hence me getting all puffed up about SSD and as many cores as the budget will support.

http://www.networkcomputing.com/backup- ... -rates.php

like i said they're still relatively new so not enough data for me to take the plunge yet

As we discuss in our article "Pay Attention to Flash Controllers when Comparing SSD Systems," it is reasonable to expect seven to ten years of life out of today's SSDs with the capabilities of today's controller technology, which is really beyond the life of any enterprise primary storage device.

<--------Last paragraph of the article u posted.

Dude, doesn't the link you just posted, support my position, which is that they are stable and mature?

Expect 7 to 10 years.... is more than I ever expected out of a platter!!!!!



I aint trying to convince you Deadly, as your mind is made up. But I am gonna stick my neck out and call the stability issues "bullshit". This is a 16 year old technology. Older than half of the DSF clientele (im kidding).

To each his own. My DAW will jog circles around the rest of yours until you all feel comfortable

well seeing as i have no loading stutters or anything with anything i've thrown at it yet...
and read the comment on said article