Studio Computer PC

My 2011 MBP I7 is pretty damn impressive so far, it benchmarks a about the same as most of the quad cor MacPros!

My PC is around 2 yrs. old and i built it myself from quality components.
Funny that you ask, i based the innards on a gaming PC configuration with slight changes.
A largly overdosed silent PSU (800W bequiet), GTX660 GPU, i7@ 3.6GHz, 16GB ram with option to extend to 32, a very silent CPU cooler, 24-7 WD drive (red?)for data, Samsung SSD 256GB for system. High quality case.
I can hardly hear anything from it, it is supersilent. Even if i open the case it is supersilent. I can sleep with my head residing in 1m distance, and i'm extremely sensible for noise...
It is fast, silent and i have no complaints since.
Components were at a higher budget, i paid 1,200 Euros, but that was 2 yrs ago.
Built with patience and care to details on an afternoon.

The studio machine was custom built by a company. Better mainboard, even higher quality components and case, 1000W PSU, it costed a horrid 2300 Euros. Workflow and performance are roughly the same. We just wanted all the bells and whistles and more failure safety.
This said, we wouldn't have a custom build from a company again. Our own builds are higher quality and more attention to details. We had to rework the built and asked for a price reduction (and got it) after we saw the insufficient quality...

I'm going to build a "hackintosh" pretty soon. I will probably also have it be dual boot for Windows.

It's good fun to build a computer. I can recommend the Noctua fans and CPU coolers to keep your sysetm cold and quiet.

I also like the Corsair HX power supplies with modular cabling. CPU you probably want to go i7. Gigabyte motherboards have been treating me right.

My 5-6 year old PC is kind of jogging along due to Windows upgrades, adding extra hard drives, updating Cubase to 8 Pro, using UAD and Apollo. She's not the fastest mare in the stable but mumble mumble gets me where I need to go in style. I do feel like I'm almost itching for a brand new machine with big power and I've already started gathering parts. Then the old hag will be transformed into a mobile recording rig. I can't wait to have two computers.

I built myself a computer 4 years ago by myself, never having any experience before using this guide.
www.tomshardware.com/reviews/build-your-own-pc,2601.html

It was much easier than building a preamp. No soldering, everything just plugs in. Like Legos for grown ups.

Make sure the motherboard & processor are compatible.
Make sure the PS can support everything

Also dont buy more RAM than your OS can use
msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778%28VS.85%29.aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7

I ordered everything from mouser(newegg). Basically you need
case
power supply
motherboard
processor
RAM
Hard drive
(graphics card maybe, newer processors have an integrated one)

I also reccomend putting the OS on a solid state drive, makes booting up a snap

It is pretty true about VSTIs sucking up most of the performance of a modern computer. I use alot of computation intensive VSTis and manage to get our machines having quite some workload on the CPU cores. Pure audio projects barely show any load on modern CPUs at all.
Exception maybe some computationally extreme VST effects like Nebula + Co....

It's correct that many VSTi's may be light on CPU at 44.1 and start to use up more and more computational power at higher/double speed rates.
This is mostly a result of the internal oversampling that *many* of them use. Especially the more quality hybrid synths with sampler engines and all bells and whistles.
Most of them don't have options to turn oversampling off except for bouncing/downmix.
Often used is AFAIK 2x or 4x oversampling. Soometimes even 8x oversampling is used.
You easily can see why this can bring older machines into trouble and forces synth freezing/bouncing in many cases.
Modern CPU and DAWs that make proper use of multicore CPUs can take quite some pound of synths before they come down to the knees. For live playing you can oftenly get "acceptable" latencies as well, depending on driver and OS performance tweaks.
No problem for me, as i am used to have live acoustic monitoring latency from stage experience, but newer generations of musicians "might" have more trouble with it.
If this is a problem, a solution i would use is using a midi synth with hardware synthesis and pick a somehow "prototype sound" from it for monitoring while midi recording and tweak the midi track to fit the software synth later.
Not that much of a real problem for me, but when it comes to midi drum tracking, this may be an issue....

All in all, modern CPUs have great performance for low prices. You can get alot of performance on a budget...

I can offer a few tips I've picked up recently in my quest for a new machine.

1. the sweet spot for CPU power is 6 cores. More than that adds overhead and heat with little or no performance increase for a DAW.

2. You want a Haswell 3rd generation CPU because of DDR-4 support and more floating point calculations per clock cycle.

3. You want an SSD system disk and a 6 terabyte audio drive. Larger or smaller spinning disks increase the amount of data on each platter which reduces speed and/or reliability. My understanding is this optimal size will not go away due to physics.

4. You want USB C and possibly Thunderbolt 3 on the motherboard. Both use the same connecter. This isn't available quite yet.

5. Native support for PCI and PCI-E cards without bridging chips is gone. The future of audio interfaces is USB-C, Thunderbolt and high speed Ethernet.

6. You need a dedicated graphics card. For audio, you want the least powerful one that will do the job because they all eat CPU power as they become more powerful.

I've been told 750 to 1000 watts.