Most PC build guides focus on gaming PCs. Today we are going to explore a music production custom PC for under £1000. If you are predominantly making music using software like Ableton or Reaper, you have a different set of requirements than a gamer.

This guide will go over these and make sure you stay on track.

In addition to music production, this PC will end up being a very good desktop PC and be able to handle a fair amount of games too – just as an unintended consequence of picking the parts we need.

I will also explain what parts are desirable but not essential – as this build had some room to add some special extras and stay below budget.

TL;DR: the full build

PCPartPicker Part List

*asterisks denote bonus parts not required for the build but especially desirable. Read on to see why I picked three additional SSDs for extra RAID safety.

Project Brief

For our music production PC build we have several important requirements that we need to satisfy to call this a successful build for under £1000.

Firstly, this PC needs to be able to run audio production software smoothly, even with large projects.

It needs to be able to handle many instances of VSTs running at the same time, and have a low latency.

Secondly, we need to be able to have a silent PC, one which won’t make unnecessary noise that will be picked up by sensitive studio microphones or interrupt the mixing process.

Thirdly, we need it to have a safe way to store all of the expensive sample libraries, and your music projects, all of which would be a nightmare to lose.

Finally, we want our investment to last. Ideally we can have components that can be upgraded or added to as new options become available or cheaper.

Do you need a graphics card for music production?

This might seem like a strange question to start out with, but bear with me. It is one of the big differences between audio production computers and gaming PCs (and of course video production workstations).

Music production PCs do not need expensive graphics for the most part.

If you are solely working in a digital audio workstation, the only real need for a graphics processing is to show the screen itself and the VST GUIs.

Neither of these require intense graphical processing and so this build is opting away from a dedicated graphics card.

In addition to this, it will save on power (GPUs need a lot), money (cryptocurrency miners have made them expensive), and noise in the system.

This decision is crucial at this stage because it means that we now need to choose a CPU with integrated graphics.

Choosing a CPU

As with almost every computing process, a faster CPU will always be better. The question is, how many cores do we need? To find this out, we need to find out how popular DAWs utilise multicore and multi-thread performance.

A brief explanation of cores and threads is that each core is like a brain that can run tasks. A four-core system is like having four people work on a task instead of one. This is usually faster, but only if they can do their jobs and don’t have to wait on each other’s parts to finish. Threads are how many tasks are set by the program – some good CPUs can actually handle multiple threads per core!

Some software is optimised to use all the available cores, other software, such as gaming, often struggles to spread its workload over multiple cores because many of the calculations are dependent on each other’s result.

Ableton uses up to 32 cores on Windows and up to 64 cores on Macs. Reaper likewise can efficiently handle multicore processing. The big “but” is that many companies say that faster processors are preferable to more cores.

So considering the above, and the cost constraints, I have decided to recommend the Ryzen 5 3400G.

This processor offers a strong balance of all the above requirements and is incredibly cheap.

It is the latest generation of Ryzen products and will cope with large music production projects quickly.

It will also handle a lot of modern games at at least medium settings.

RAM

RAM is essential for software that requires handling many files at once. If you use Kontakt, you will find that you can’t load the instruments instantly. This is because they have to load into the system’s RAM to be called quickly when you press a note.

Considering how some of Kontakt’s sound libraries are a couple of gigabytes, we want lots of RAM.

8GB will be fine for a lot of projects, as will 16GB, but if you want to make sure larger projects will work and future-proof your rig, I recommend going for 32GB.

This actually doesn’t have to be more costly than a 16GB RAM setup if you shop around.

I have chosen to go for the Corsair Vengeance LPX 32GB kit, which is made up of 2 16GB sticks of 3200MHz RAM.

Make note of the speed of the RAM, you don’t want to find an offer that is much cheaper, at the cost of being much slower. Try and pick a RAM module that is as fast or faster than the maximum supported by the CPU.

Storage

Unlike other PC builds, we are going to focus a lot more on this section. The goal here is to have super fast storage and ensure that we have redundancy so we don’t lose our projects (especially important if you produce for clients).

We want blazing fast speeds for reads and writes and the best solution for that is the Samsung 970 EVO 1TB – NVMe M.2 SSD.

This drive packs itself into a tiny M.2 profile with super fast speeds. This is the recommended drive for installing Windows and running your current projects off of.

It is also a high enough capacity that you could use it as the sole drive in the rig, but we want some more space as well as redundancy.

While it would be cheaper to buy HDDs, they make a lot of noise and that goes against our main aims, so we’ll look at the ever more affordable SSDs.

For this, I just looked up the cheapest 1TB SSDs that still had good reviews. I came across the TCSunbow 1TB SSD.

For redundancy, I suggest setting three of them up in a Raid 5 setup (2TB data and 1TB parity). This means that if one hard drive fails, you can replace it and rebuild the lost data. It does mean, however, that you only get 2TB of storage, because space is dedicated to the parity information.

You could, of course, use Raid 0 for faster speeds and potentially a faster computer as a result, but you lose the redundancy.

Motherboard

The good news is that because we aren’t needing to worry about graphics cards or complexe PCIe setups, we can go cheap on the motherboard.

What we will need is a motherboard that supports the AM4 socket of the Ryzen 5 2400G, has an M.2 slot for the bootable NVMe drive, and at least 3 SATA connections for the RAID SSDs.

If you are a producer, I am assuming you have a dedicated audio interface anyway and so you won’t need to rely on any high quality audio features in a motherboard either.

In fitting with the need for future upgrades, this motherboard has 4 RAM slots which means we can actually double the RAM from 32GB to 64GB in the future (if Google Chrome ever gets made into a VST this will be essential!)

For this build, I went for the GIGABYTE B450M DS3H. Why? Because it was the cheapest with everything we need.

IMPORTANT NOTE: If you do choose to go with this motherboard for the latest Ryzen processors, please read this because you may need to update the BIOS if it is old. This means you should ensure that the shop provides you with a unit with the latest updates otherwise you may need to pay extra to get it updated elsewhere.

Power supply

This is a tricky one to decide on for the reason that currently, our build is actually super-efficient.

PC Part Picker told me that the system was about 194W.

Our goal of keeping the build as quiet as possible calls for a fanless power supply, and for that, we have to pay premium.

I went for the best option that I could find, even though the power it provides is overkill for what we need.

The Seasonic SS-400FL2 was the best option I could find – though prices vary quite a lot from store to store, so shop around.

The case

For the case, we want a quiet design, particularly because fans will still be required. The be quiet! Silent Base 601 was a good option, with quiet design at the forefront.

It is a good fit because it has top panel USB 3 and even a fan speed switch so you can turn the two included fans down for noise-critical sessions.

It has plenty of space for the hard drives and will allow for a water cooling block and other upgrades if you want them in the future.

If silence is not a priority, how much cheaper can we go?

This is the fun part. As you saw, there were a lot of features which we already could freely cheap out on because they were not important to the build, the motherboard, for example, didn’t make a huge difference.

If we don’t mind making noise we can go for much more interesting features.

The first thing we can do is get a cheaper power supply, this will make a big difference to the price, knocking more than £50 off it if you shop right.

Secondly, we can half the price of the storage by changing the SSDs to HDDs. You may notice a bit of a performance hit, but if you work smart and keep your current projects on the M.2 drive, you won’t see a difference.

In fact, if you have your HDDs limited to files that are offline only, and not in use by running apps, they won’t make noise anyway.

Making these changes saves £230 alone, which surprised me – silent PC running really does come at a premium.

Here’s the slightly louder build:

PCPartPicker Part List

If you are a music producer and have got this far, we recommend you check out the sister site to Tech Ordeal, Audio Ordeal.

Changelog:

This article was updated on 12 July 2019 to provide additional information about the motherboard BIOS version issues which have affected some Ryzen 3000 users on Gigabyte motherboards.

Tom Jarvis http://audioordeal.co.uk Music Producer, DJ, total geek. I am the site owner and main writer at Audio Ordeal and Tech Ordeal. My PC screen is normally filled with unfinished Ableton Live projects or Battlefield games. See author's posts

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