Shane_B.

I'm so far behind the times. I just discovered last night that Presonus was bought by Fender a few years ago. Or if I did know before, I forgot. Nothing seems to have changed though except the push for subs, and I see more complaints about bugs and crashing. Stability used to be their claim to fame. Same thing happened with them as with others. The more features they added the less stable it became. I can remember having a hard drive crash one time and I literally ran S1 on SD cards without a hitch and the same latency as I had with my HDD. Doubt it would be that way nowadays. I guess I don't care about this stuff as much as I used to. I still have my 4 and 8 track machines, Alesis drum machine, guitars, hardware mic pre-s, hardware mastering comp, and Korg keyboard. They still work like new after 40 plus years so I'm good.

I guess we'll all need some time to reflect on this.

I looked up the specs on it. It can take an enormous CPU fan. Very nice case. Don't look at the granddaddy of all CPU coolers. The Noctua NH-D15 G2. Resist the urge to click the link. I'm warnin' ya ... I'm going with an i9 14900K. It has a reputation, but the problems have been resolved with a bit of BIOS tweaking and BIOS updates. Everyone says it requires liquid cooling, but I don't overclock. I run at standard speeds and I may underclock this. From what I read it somehow increases performance? I don't know. People run it without liquid, but you need a really really good CPU fan. I'm going with a mobo that supports full direct lanes to the CPU without splitting them and reducing the GPU and first M.2 SSD drive speed, as well as stock DDR 5 RAM that is not overclocked. It took a lot of research to find all this compatible stuff but I did it. There are brand new intel CPU's that run at the same speed as the i9, but they use a lot less power and don't heat up nearly as much. Only about $600 more for the CPU and compatible Mobo. Not worth the extra cost, especially if you aren't planning to overclock. In my opinion. My old i7 6700K runs just fine for me, but it was old when I built it. This time I want to get the fastest I can that's still current gen. The only reason I'm even thinking about upgrading is because the 6700K won't support Windows 11, and I have to have it for work. If you need any input on anything feel free to ask away. I've been diving deep into this the last couple of months because I have to build a new PC before Windows 10 dies in October. If you are planning on using an M.2 SSD, make sure you pick a motherboard that does not split the lanes with the GPU. Don't get a cheap M.2 SSD because the cheap ones don't have cache and run a lot slower. Inexpensive non-lane splitting mobo's are out there, but you have to download the manuals and read through them to find out which one. Lane splitting is when you buy a PCIe 5 motherboard and it cuts the lanes in half when you put in a GPU and M.2 SSD in the Gen 5 slot. The GPU and M.2 Slot 1 SSD bypass the hard drive controller and go directly to the CPU making them work theoretically faster/smoother. The GIGABYTE Z790 AORUS Elite X WIFI7 does not split lanes. It's the one I'm going with. No GPU supports PCIe 5 right now, but will be in the future. It's ok to put a current PCIe 4 GPU in the 5 slot.

Which CPU are you going with?

Thermaltake makes good cases. One thing you have to research is, some of the cooling fans for cpu's are so large now, they won't fit in every case. The fan for the build I'm doing now is so large that I was only able to find one case it would fit in. The other requirement was I had to have a 5.25" bay to put a Blueray/CD player/burner in and they are very rare now. There was only 1 case that was wide enough that had a 5.25" bay.

i9 14900k CPU just went on sale on Amazon. Just an fyi ...

I install and service P.O.S. systems. A lot of them are going to Android for their operating system now. I used to install and service systems for KFC. Back in the day they used Panasonic, but it was mostly hardware based at the time. I see a lot of McDonald's are using Panasonic now. DQ is using something else, but the independent franchise owners are forced to. Headquarters connects directly to their system overnight, and takes their cut immediately. I could imagine a day when DQ won't accept cash just so HQ can have their cut instantly. I've been out of the fast food end of it so long now, I have no idea what everyone is using anymore. But the systems I do work on now all use Android. The purchased and the free systems. Edit: To clarify purchased vs. free ... there are companies out there now that will give you a free P.O.S. system if you give them a cut of your credit card income. That's why you see a lot of places adding a 2.5% ~ 3% markup when you use your credit card now.

I'm in the process of building a new PC. Everything has gone up in price in the span of the last 2 weeks. To buy everything for one PC I'm going to have to get the various parts from Newegg, Amazon, and Best Buy. eBay is a cheaper option, but the return process is horrible if you get a defective item. The system I was going to build went up from $1130 to $1380 in just over two weeks. I had everything in my cart on Amazon for a while, all in stock. When I went to order everything this week the mobo, M.2 drive, and ram were out of stock from Amazon. My options were "Used like new" or to buy from independent sellers who are price gouging and have terrible return policies if something is received bad. I'll wait to see what happens. My current CPU doesn't support Windows 11, so I have till October when they stop support for Windows 10. I'm building the system I always wanted and don't want to settle for something less, but I can wait.

Found a reasonably priced mobo that will let you use the gpu and first m.2 slot directly to the cpu without splitting the PCIe lanes. Everything else goes through the z790 controller. I can't believe my old 3060 12gb video card is still going for $700 new. Crazy.

Here's a link to their native 5600 ram. https://www.kingston.com/en/memory/client/ddr5-5600mts-non_ecc-unbuffered-dimm

Ok. I think I got this figured out now. At true native 5600, CL is 46. Any variation of that is considered overclocked. Kingston does actually make true 5600 CL 46 memory. It's their ValueRam line and actually costs more than their Fury line. From what I can tell everything else is 4800 and overclocked. If it says 5600 or higher ... it's actually 4800 OC'd. And that's fine. Every manufacturer now seems to just accept people are going to do it and actually set you up to do it easily. Also, cas latency isn't what the name implies. The actual latency is calculated by a formula. Here's a link to a calculator. https://www.omnicalculator.com/other/ram-latency

Straight from the horses mouth .... "Hello Shane, The JEDEC standard timing for DDR5 5600MT/s is CL46. anything outside of that would be considered overclocking." They replied again and said it is confusing and as long as the Expo or XMP logo is somewhere, they can advertise whatever speed they want with the risk of instability. That said, I've yet to find anything actually 5600. It all seems to be overclocked with a default of 4800. It's odd, because the motherboards say they support 5600 native. I must be misunderstanding something and maybe it is actually available and I just can't find it. I've been perfectly fine with my 6700K and 48Gb of Kingston Value RAM. That has to be CL50 or more.

Thank you! I'm getting frustrated. The motherboard I'm looking at natively supports 5600 DDR5 and 3 other lower speeds. 6000 requires XMP and I don't want to use that. I'm also finding that all stated speeds, such as 5600 or 6000 are their tested overclocked speeds. Every one I've found actually runs natively at 4800, and it's usually only listed when you download and read the spec sheets. All I want is native 5600 CL30 or lower RAM but it doesn't seem to exist. I want to stick with Kingston and they seem to be the clearest/most honest about their specs. We used to use Corsair at work and I used it at home for a while and it never lasted. We switched to Kingston and I can honestly say that in 20 years at work I've never had a bad stick of Kingston ram and my last 3 builds at home all had it and I never had an issue. G.Skill shows the exact ram in looking for on their site, but when you dig deep it says it's actually 4800 and you have to use xmp to get the "listed" speed.

The base/default speed for ram on the system I'm looking to build is 5600Mhz max. I can't find 5600 with a decent latency but I did find 6000/CL30. Can the 6000 be safely underclocked to 5600 and will it negatively effect latency?

I've never understood the purpose of phase alignment or how to implement it. Probably should have paid attention during DAW class I guess. Is it a track by track, bus, or master thing? I know my best mixes have always been on all analog, and there's no phase thingamabobs on it, so I never looked in to it on my DAW.