I finally managed to upgrade and set up my new studio machine. My previous one was from 2009 and it was getting at the end of it’s career - it wouldn’t run any of the newer Kontakt libraries without choking up in CPU limits. I got a bit too frustrated and decided to upgrade to a bit more higher end system and ended up with these specs:
Asus X99-A II Intel LGA2011-3 ATX
Intel Core i7-6800K 3,4 GHz LGA2011-3
Intel 600p M.2 SSD 512 Gt SSD
Samsung 850 EVO SSD 500 Gt 2,5" SATA3
Samsung 850 EVO SSD 1 Tt 2,5" SATA3
Kingston HyperX FURY DDR4 2666 MHz CL15 16 Gt x 2
And damn it’s fun! First time in my life I can load whatever I want into Kontakt and it loads fast and silent and when I dish out more tracks the CPU load stays below 50%. Here’s my first epic try that I produced fast and dirty in a few hours last night:
Featuring Hollywood and StormDrum2 from EWQL, some 8Dio libraries and You Wa Shock for that nice compression. I couldn’t have run even one track with these libraries on my previous machine. Production motivation rose to the nth degree <3
I’ve been Cubase user from the beginning and haven’t really managed to work with other DAW workflow. Cubase 9 at the moment in Windows 10, works ok so far!
Glad to hear the update went well for you! Great setup. I would say the multiple SSD’s are really the game changer. When I went that way early last year, everything in my workflow improved immensely - especially DAW bootup and Kontakt loads. Exciting track!
Intel 600p M.2 SSD 512 Gt SSD for OS i suppose
Samsung 850 EVO SSD 1 Tt 2,5" SATA3 for sample, Kontakt Lib only ?
Samsung 850 EVO SSD 500 Mo 2,5" SATA3 for Cubase project only ?
I went for quite simple solution and reserved the M.2 drive for the most high end libraries. Mainly 8Dio Kontakt libraries and Hollywood Strings as I had the most trouble with them on my previous machine.
I installed OS on the 500 GB SSD and don’t have any music libraries there.
The bigger traditional SSD is meant for sound libraries that are not “highest end” and I could play with even with the older system.
Great studio set up!. I also like the epic song, congrats!. Some libraries that are currently used nowadays are so large that it actually seems mandatory to have a good machine like yours.
Thanks Yes indeed, especially many Kontakt libraries tend to use pretty heavy scripting which brings more strain on the CPU. In the beginning of 00s the Kontakt libraries were mainly just wave file sample banks, but nowadays if you hit a key, it actually processes and combines quite a few wave files together driving them through filters and processors which eventually lead into situation where I couldn’t really play for example Hollywood Strings without CPU hitting quite soon 100% usage.
