VORTEX ULTIMATE 8 CORE MEGA PC?

Hi all,

I am in the market to upgrade my i5 16gb Ram music pc. This is the machine that I have been quoted for. I use a MOTU Ultralite soundboard and was wondering if the performance meter in Cubase wouold be drastically reduced (I know that CPU usage and performance in cubase are not strictly related).

I use a lot of VSTS such as Spitfire Mural, Redux Percussion, Omnisphere, Trilian, Stylus RMX, and many more orchestral based VST’s, and I am bored with having to program notes in rather than play them due to the huge sample buffer rate I have to use (1024). Will this system do the job? Many thanks! And can I get away with a standard hard drive for my projects folder?

Asus X99-A Socket LGA 2011-V3 Mainboard
Crucial M550 1TB Solid State Drive x3 (1 for programs, 1 for projects and 1 for samples libraries)
Asus GT640-DCSL-2GD3 4 Head Fanless
Crucial 64GB DDR4 2133MHz RAM
INTEL CORE I7-5960X 3GHZ 2011-V3 8-Core
Corsair CX750 Modular PSU
NH-U9DX i4 Xeon CPU cooler LGA2011
Window s 7 Pro 64 Bit
DVD-RW Dual Layer DVD-+R 24x SATA

That config is pretty close to what I just built. Mine uses an Asus X99 Deluxe and Noctua cooler with the slightly newer 850 series Samsung drive and Corsair 2666 LPX DDR4 RAM. In any event, mine is stable running at 4.5 Ghz and so far so good. I have noticed (and this will come as no surprise) that performance improvements are contingent on whether the plugin uses multiprocessing or not. For example, Ozone 5 runs on CPU 1 no matter what so it does not leverage the 8 core platform. All in all I have roughly doubled my plugin count (coming from an 17 2600k), at least where the plugin seems to (or Cubase forces it to) use multiprocessing so I can’t complain. Good luck with the new rig.

Great. Ok, so will the Motu Ultralite be able to deliver low latency? And would it be better to have my projects folder as a standard hard drive rather than an ssd?

Cant speak for the Ultralite as I have never used it. One thing to consider: the X99 Deluxe has onboard Thunderbolt support if you add an ASUS Thunderbolt EX II PCIe Expansion Card (around 70 bucks). This would provide connectivity to Thunderbolt-enabled converters like the Auroras w/ the Thunderbolt i/o option installed.

SSD - I would run everything on the SSD, no exceptions. You might want to consider the 850 Pro series though. It is the newest Samsung SSD and uses V-NAND technology which outperforms its predecessor.

128GB should be plenty for OS and programs. It will be half empty if exclusively for DAW use.

Unless you are doing accompanying videos (800MB for 5min FHD@50fps), higher sample rates, huge numbers of audio tracks and/or have plenty of clients, 256GB should be plenty to hold all your projects.

If using lots of large sample libraries, consider splitting the libraries over 2 x 500GB to get better aggregate performance.

Spend the money you save on two of the SSDs towards getting a NAS box for your backups!

SSDs beat all HDDs for performance, and have:
a) no head chatter
b) no vibration (no isolation required)
c) little heat
d) so light they can be safely mounted anywhere using one screw.