New build advice - Adobe CS suite, multichannel sound recording

[dhex]

Any help is appreciated! Thanks in advance.

1. What your PC will be used for?
-Graphic design, mostly print, and mostly photoshop, illustrator and some indesign.

-multichannel sound recording - maybe* - in reaper. there's a decent chance my delta 1010 will not work in a windows 7 64 bit environment, in which case i'm going to have to hunt down a stereo usb interface until i can scrape enough money together for a presonus livestudio and a firewire card.

-some games, 80% of which will be stone soup or age of decadence if it comes out. not a lot of fps games, though will likely put skyrim et al though the paces to see what they look like.

2. What your budget is?

$1200-ish


3. What country you will be buying your parts from?

USA

4. Do you have a brand preference?

intel for processor

5. Do you intend on using any of your current parts, and if so, what those parts are.

- i may pull the evga 8800 gts i have in the current machine, presuming it didn't die when my existing mb decided to go south.

- DVD Burner

- 2 Sata HDs (750 and 320mb respectively)

6. Do you plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds.

Default speeds
7. What resolution will you be using?

1680x1050

8. When do you plan to build it?

Next three weeks, give or take.

9. What are some other considerations you have?

- definitely want to limit noise, which is why the list i've put together below features an r3 case. however, i may be screwing myself for the summer as the only room available to me will not have AC and nyc summers are super lame. may eschew a separate video card until it gets cooler.

PROPOSED BUY LIST BELOW:
Fractal Design Define R3 Arctic White w/ USB 3.0 ATX Mid Tower Silent PC Computer Case

Seagate Barracuda Green ST2000DL003 2TB 5900 RPM SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5"

SeaSonic M12II 620 Bronze 620W ATX12V V2.3 / EPS 12V V2.91 SLI Ready 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular Active PFC Power Supply

CORSAIR Vengeance 16GB (4 x 4GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CML16GX3M4A1600C9

ASRock Z68 Extreme3 Gen3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard

Intel Core i5-2500K Sandy Bridge 3.3GHz (3.7GHz Turbo Boost) LGA 1155 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor Intel HD Graphics 3000

XIGMATEK Gaia SD1283 120mm Long Life Bearing CPU Cooler bracket included LGA 2011 i7 i5 775 1155 AMD and dual fan push pull

Crucial M4 CT256M4SSD2 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC Internal Solid State Drive

 

[mfenn]

Your list looks fine but some parts are a little expensive. Also, I'm curious what you were planning on putting on the SSD that requires the 256GB version?

Check out the list in this thread (feel free to swap the case and double the RAM).

 

[dhex]

i had planned on using it for os/apps/steam* drive, as well as a current projects workspace for whatever designs i have going on at the time. And also a recording drive, though i've wavered on whether the 256 ssd was overkill. i have read conflicting reports on audio recording and ssd drives.

at the moment i'm only recording eight channels at 24/44.1, but at some point in the future i want to move up to an interface with 16 ins.

i'm open to whether a 128 would make more sense, particularly if there's any truth to the notion that audio recording is particularly harmful to the lifespan of an ssd.

* if either the existing gpu works or i get a lower end card that's not too loud - the 8800gts is so dang loud even with conservative fan control settings.

 

[Ken g6]

I don't see any good reason to record audio onto an SSD. Your sampling rate with 16 channels and 16 bits per sample is ~1.5MB/s, something any current mechanical drive should have no problem with, as long as it's dedicated to sound recording. If there's any issue at all, a RAM disk of half your RAM should store ~1.5 hours of audio at that rate.

 

[mfenn]

I agree with Ken. A mechanical HDD is more than capable of handling many many audio channels before reaching its limits. Audio recording is a pure sequential operation, which HDDs excel at, even the fastest SSD is only 2-3 times as fast in sequential writes.

 

[dhex]

thanks for the advice - crucial m4 128gb it is!

i'm figurin' 20gb for win7 install, about 8gb for the cs5.5 standard suite, sound forge and reaper another 1 gb total (if that), and whatever steam games i have installed at the moment presuming i buy a new vid card. even presuming reaper projects with a ton of tracks and very image heavy pshop files, 128 should be sufficient.

thanks again for weighing in.