I am a home music hobbyist who wants to get into the world of DAW music creation. For the VST I want to use Komplete 12 Ultimate. For the controller NI Komplete Kontrol S61 MK2,even though I have a home full of MIDI keyboards and arrangers.But since I will only be using the MK2 to input MIDI, and will not using any live audio, I am thinking Cubase Elements 10 will be all I need for MIDI sequencing.So since I will only be sequencing,I am hoping my old gaming PC will at least allow me to get my foot into the door of VST Orchestration. The PC components are: Intel Core i7-2600K 3.4 Ghz 8 MB Cache Quad-Core processor,an ASUS P8P67 Deluxe LGA 1155 SATA 6Gbps 2400 ATX motherboard and 4 sticks with a total of16 GB of DDR3 1600 MHz Ram.So is this PC powerfull enough.If not,than can I spend in the neighborhood of 2000 dollars to build a new gaming pc and use it also for MIDI VST sequencing?Thankyou in advance for any help you can give me.
HI Roy
The only way you can find out is to give it a try. I ran Cubase 10 on an Dell T3500 with a 3,6 Ghz Xeon processor and never had any issues.
What you haven’t told is what soundcard you are using. You need something that is ASIO compatible and the inbuilt soundcard won’t work.
If you mainly only want to use old MIDI stuff, I don’t think you will run into problems.
But give it a try and see how much juice you can pull out of the system before it crashes.
Go to the steinberg site, look up the minimal system requirements.
For some this will be enough to do what they do with Cubase, others will need a faster machine.
Anyway this is not somethig that somebody else can decide for you via the internet. If in doubt, use the trial version - that´s what it is there for.
The Core i7-2600K CPU will get in you in the door, for sure… But really, it’s single core speed would be the achilles hell by todays standards - particularly if you’re using Komplete suite and loading up single tracks with multiple plugins.
That said, The oldest machine i have is an i7-4790 and it ain’t too different to the 2600k and that can run things fine. The main thing is that your 2600k has AVX support, so if you get the new version of Massive as part of the Komplete suite it will run (Requires AVX support on the CPU).
If you haven’t got an SSD installed, i would invest in one, as that will provide a big difference on older machines. Plus they’re such a good price nowadays.
One other thing, live audio being recorded into a DAW takes less resources/CPU power than MIDI controlled VST Instruments such as Komplete. But luckily it’s easy to convert VST instruments into audio tracks should you need to recover CPU overhead.