Jim Roseberry

Hi Noel, Great to have you here! You can certainly disable CPU throttling. That should be the case (already) with your machine (assuming the BIOS settings haven't changed). If throttling is happening, let me know... and I'll PM settings to eliminate it. Whether you can lock all cores at the highest TurboBoost frequency depends on the specific CPU. ie: The latest i9-9980xe is pushing the limits of that design/architecture. You may not be able to lock all 18 cores at 4.5GHz (and achieve 100% stability). Same with earlier designs Designs with higher core counts typically can't be clocked as high. You've got adequate cooling. In the BIOS, you can change the TurboBoost multiplier to 35 (for all cores). If there's any instability, go back into the BIOS and drop that number down.

If you're building a DAW with a i9-9900k, a 550w power-supply is definitely on the lean side. You want to leave yourself the opportunity to add a GTX video card (video editing), more internal drives, use of bus-powered MIDI controllers, etc.

Not every process in a DAW can be multi-threaded. Performance increase is not a 1:1 ratio when adding cores. (Doubling the number of CPU cores doesn't double performance) Thus, clock-speed is king when choosing a CPU for a DAW. What you don't want to do is sacrifice significant clock-speed for more cores. Xeon CPUs often have significantly slower clock-speed... and can thus result in a significant performance hit. In a perfect scenario, you want highest clock-speed... and maximum number of CPU cores. This is why the i9-9900k is such a great choice for DAW purposes. 8 cores, 16 processing threads that can all be locked at 5GHz With the right air-cooler, it runs near dead-silent To best the i9-9900k, you're talking high-end socket-2066 i9 CPU... which is significantly more expensive. Higher-end socket-2066 i9 CPUs require water-cooling with large radiator. ie: Noctua air-coolers (NH-U14s, NH-D15s) can't dissipate enough heat from an i9-9980xe when all cores are under heavy load. More expensive CPU, Motherboard, Cooler, Power-Supply (it adds up quickly)

I don't partition drives either... haven't for years I have a dozen separate drives in my main DAW. Two conventional HDs Eight SATA SSDs Two M.2 Ultra SSDs

I completely agree with using a smaller boot drive. 😉 Just mentioning the size of the drive itself (unused space) won't affect backup size/time Rather than using a single large drive partitioned Boot/Samples, the best coarse of action is to use two separate drives. With two separate drives, you've literally doubled the performance (vs. a single partitioned drive). Each of two HDs would sustain 190MB/Sec Each of two SATA SSDs would sustain 540MB/Sec Each of two M.2 Ultra SSDs would sustain 3400MB/Sec

M.2 Ultra SSDs use 4 PCIe (x4) to achieve full performance. If the motherboard has two M.2 slots, running the second using 4 PCIe lanes almost always results in the motherboard's last two SATA ports being disabled. You can work around this... Put the second M.2 Ultra SSD on a PCIe host card... and place that card in a PCIe slot that has 4 or more PCIe lanes. 😉

You want to keep the OS drive clean/lean. If you're using a 1TB SSD for boot drive... and only using 200GB of that 1TB of space, backup won't be slow/tedious. Unused drive space won't increase the size of backups.

If you were going socket-2066 with high-end i9 CPU, you'd need large-radiator water-cooling.

To clarify about M.2: M.2 drives come in two varieties SATA - speed is same as 2.5" SATA SSD NVMe (M.2 Ultra) - speed is ~3400MB/Sec for the best drives Conventional HDs sustain ~190MB/Sec SATA SSD sustains ~540MB/Sec M.2 Ultra SSD sustains ~3400MB/Sec IMO, NVMe (M.2 Ultra) is overkill for a boot drive. A machine is going to boot fast... and apps open quickly using a standard SATA SSD. Use M.2 Ultra drives "strategically"... if/when necessary. If you have a particular sample library or libraries where you need massive polyphony, M.2 Ultra SSD is a great solution. If you have a particular library that loads slow, put that library on a M.2 Ultra SSD... and it'll load much faster. ie: I find HALion 6 to be a bit sluggish when loading samples... so I put the library on a M.2 Ultra SSD (now loads much faster). You could run a single/large M.2 Ultra SSD... and partition it for OS/Audio/Samples... but that's not ideal. From a performance standpoint, you're still best having separate physical drives for OS/Audio/Samples. If you're making heavy use of Samples, I'd want those on multiple SSDs (scaled based on your disk-streaming polyphony needs). We have some clients (mostly doing huge orchestral mock-ups for scoring video games) who want to be able to achieve 4000 stereo voices of disk-streaming polyphony. That takes multiple SSDs (including M.2 Ultra)...

Tone-Matching is not the same thing as Kemper style "Profiling". Tone-Matching uses FFT to match the frequency-response of the Amp/Cab/Mic "Rig". Tone-Matching (Impulse-Responses) can't capture/represent non-linear (distortion) components. None of the source amp's distortion characteristics are captured/reproduced. You can actually "Tone-Match" with any AmpSim that allows loading IRs. The FFT process has to be done separately with your DAW. Use an FFT to match the frequency content Shoot an IR using that resultant FFT Load this IR into your AmpSim Bias Amp and ReValver sound nothing close to the realism of a Kemper.

Cab IRs capture the frequency response of a mic'd guitar/bass cabinet. You can then play an Amp signal (real or amp-sim) thru the Cab IR... and it sounds very close to the real Amp/Mic'd Cab. If you've heard of the Kemper Profiling Amp, it sends a series of test signals thru a real mic'd Amp/Cab... The result of what the Kemper receives back allows it to very accurately reproduce the whole mic'd Amp/Cab "Rig". The Rig Player in TH-U has all the parameters that are present on the Kemper. The only thing missing (vs the Kemper); the ability to create profiles yourself. I'm assuming Overloud is doing this for legal reasons. If you could create your own Profiles (and assuming they're as accurate as the Kemper), it's very much a game-changer. The ability to very accurately reproduce the sound of any mic'd amp/cab (with a $200 plugin) would be revolutionary.

Even similar guitars can have significantly different output levels. I've got two guitars with humbuckers in the bridge (one covered and the other open-coil) Using exact same preamp settings, the guitar with open-coil is ~5dB hotter. BTW, This is the reason that all presets are terrible. If they weren't created with a very similar guitar, they're going to sound "wrong" because there's so much variance between instruments/pickups.

Even similar guitars can have significantly different output levels. I've got two guitars with humbuckers in the bridge (one covered and the other open-coil) Using exact same preamp settings, the guitar with open-coil is ~5dB hotter.

Use the input-meter to adjust your gain going into TH-3 or TH-U. Peak/loudest playing should be in the green area of the meter.

Clint, that GTX-1050 is fine. If you have the budget, a GTX-1060 would be even better. For about $100 more, you can get the GTX-1060 with 6GB onboard RAM.

Don't like the stock Cabs (don't like them in Helix, HeadRush, and most other AmpSims both hardware and software). Using my preferred Cab IRs, TH-U is sounding pretty good. Comparing it to Helix Native and HeadRush (hardware) side-by-side, it's holding up pretty well. Overloud has a set of "British" profiles available for purchase for the Rig Player. The included Profiles are (IMO) a little on the lower-end side. Just enough to show what's possible... but leaves you wanting better Amp/Cab/Mic "Rig" profiles. CPU use is pretty low (even when running at 96k) On higher-gain setting, background noise is a little lower than some other AmpSims. Working with guitar/bass pickups in close proximity to a computer (EMI), that's always a welcome thing.

@SomeGuy, I've been building DAWs professionally for 25 years. 😉 I'm well aware of not being able to disable Windows Updates with the Home version of Win10. That's why we recommend the Pro version. If you have a laptop running off battery-power... and you allow full Performance and Power throttling, it's DAW performance will be terrible. CPU throttling causes high DPC Latency CPU core parking (at the wrong time) can cause glitches/dropouts Power-Management shutting down USB Root Hubs can cause attached MIDI controllers and Audio interfaces to lose connection. Regarding Fast Startup, apparently you've not seen the bizarre issues it can cause (corrupt and lost data - especially when dual-booting - even when the OS installs are completely isolated). We've disable this setting on hundreds of machines... and it's never cause an issue. Apps constantly running in the background (especially numerous apps)... and "phoning-home" information to Microsoft is not what you're looking for in a well-configured clean/lean DAW.

Hi John, Either the GTX-1070 or a Vega-64 (AMD's offering that's about equal to a GTX-1080Ti) would both do well. Neither will cause high DPC Latency Both have a 0dB fan mode (noiseless when working with audio).

If you're into AmpSims, Overload has now released TH-U (update to TH-3). https://www.overloud.com/products/th-u-full There's a lot of cool new options/capabilities. One of the biggest being the Rig Player. It's similar to a Kemper Profiling Amp. For the time being, you can't create/load your own profiles (have to get them thru Overload), but hopefully they'll open up that process. With a plethora of stock Amp models, the ability to load your own Cab IRs, the ability to load Rig profiles (Amp and Cab sections can also be used separately), and the ability to alter Tubes in the Pre/Power Amp sections of many models, TH-U is one deep AmpSim plugin. Check out the demo... I loaded it and had a go with some of the (few) included Rig profiles. They sound/respond pretty good to my ears. The SLO and Dumble models were also sounding pretty good.

Hi John, GTX-1050, 1060, 1070, 1080 (and Ti varieties) are just fine.

GTX-1060 comes with either 3GB or 6GB of onboard RAM.

With Win10, there are numerous things you want to disable. Automatic Updates Performance throttling Power Management Fast Startup Privacy Settings The more you're pushing the machine (especially at the smallest ASIO buffer sizes), the more important the OS configuration.

Hi Clint, We've seen high DPC Latency from the latest Nvidia RTX-2xxx series. Nvidia will ultimately get that ironed out... but avoid those for now. No trouble at all with the GTX-1xxx series... I'd recommend a GTX-1060. It'll work just fine for most gaming, AutoCAD, video editing/rendering... and isn't overly expensive. We don't sell individual parts.

That solves the power-supply issue... but wouldn't help with large transformers. If you need several channels of higher-end front-end gear in a small/portable package, you live with the slight trade-off. By comparison, something like the Neve Portico-II channel strip (mic pre, 4-band EQ, compressor) is 2U and 12.5" deep (takes a lot of space).

Yes, I was referring to 44.1k. To get sub 4ms round-trip latency from a USB audio interface, you'll need a current generation MOTU (AVB series or spin-off)... or RME.