1] Wait for the Samsung 960 Pro M2, its being shipped now, and its seven times as fast as conventional SSD at 3.5 gb per second, faster than the 8.50s
2] Don’t know, but sometimes a mobo has an upper limit of 128 gb of RAM. Asus mobos need latest bios. Samsung have just launched 32 gig sticks |(meaning possible 256 gig of RAM, but most boards don’t yet support them - you might find one.
3] The GPU is not that important for Cubase I use a fanless AMD Radeon, for less noise. If you get a top of the range it may actually beg power from your CPU - I hear. I run two TV 49" monitors at 1920* 1080. I find them fine. If I upgraded I would get two 4k TVs even bigger ones but cheap - as you won’t need the bells and whistles. A third monitor to have manuals open on is also handy, but for me I would just have a small one for this. Screen real estate is where its at I have 6ft x 2.5 ft - it’s great!
4] Never done RAID but what I have is fast enough and its less than your spec.
5] I am not sure it will be much - in comparison to DDR4 compared to DDR3. You have to make sure the bios is right as it won’t set up properly by default.
I am also building a HUGE template, its at present 750 Tracks, and rising. I have learnt a thing or two and if you pm me I shall provide a draft of a piece I am writing about the build. Here are a few essentials:
You can run absolutely massive projects on one high spec PC. You dont need Vienna Symphonic Orchestra - Cubase 8.5 with disable tracks function and visibility can do what you need.
Set up Kontakt, Halion, Vienna, and other players so that they dont load unnecessary crap you don’t need. For example in Halion, unload extra channels in the mix tab. You may want to purge - called optimize by Vienna, but then you must remember to unpurge. Using disable, and purging unloads all those unnecessary samples you don’t need hanging around in RAM. Once you have done this save a ‘default multi’. Only after this start creating your tracks. This way there will be no unnecessary overheads.
I write one bar with no music at the beginning of each track, with expression and mod wheel initialization. I also write four bars of music for each instrument family, a C scale written in the range of the instruments. Each track has one four bar track - its easy to make comparisons then, between say flutes. These can be muted of course.
Work with one instrument track, per instrument using keyswitched instruments where you can. I did several weeks of research before coming to this conclusion. Don’t use Multis, for many reasons, one of which is your sanity when routing and disabling.
Set up using folders and sub folders, sometimes sub sub folders. Keep a simple colour scheme for you main folders. Have a colour for Group tracks.
Work with everything disabled until you need it.
I built in three stages: Track entry, routing, mxer views. It’s a LOT of work, but its worth it.
With 750 tracks loaded but Disabled, my machine is currently reading 7.5 gig of RAM and 13% CPU. So, you see, you wont need more than one hot PC, you may not even need more than 64 gig of RAM. Even though you may have thousands of instruments in your Template, you will never need them all at once.
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