Keni Posted October 7, 2020 Share Posted October 7, 2020 I have a friend with a pc setup for CbB which he leaves at his band's rehearsal space. He wants to setup a small system at home just as a scratch pad of sorts. Few if any plugins and maybe a handful of audio tracks. what is considered the lowest realistic specs for such a machine? Thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bradley Posted October 7, 2020 Share Posted October 7, 2020 Almost anything you can buy today will be more than adequate. (Within reason: a 1.3GHz Atom-based tablet with 2GB of ram isn't going to cut it. But any reasonable laptop or desktop with 8GB ram and an SSD of some sort will get you there.) I'm still running a 4-core i7-950 system with 12GB of ram that I built in 2010 (upgraded from win7 to win10 at some point), and I'm able to put together projects with 30-40 tracks of content (audio + fx and VSTi's). Yes, I freeze most of the tracks, but that's not a very big limitation. Just be sure to get an audio interface of some sort (Focusrite Solo is a fine choice). Running a DAW on the onboard Realtek chipset that most machines have is just begging for 'hurt-me' problems. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Keni Posted October 8, 2020 Author Share Posted October 8, 2020 39 minutes ago, John Bradley said: Almost anything you can buy today will be more than adequate. (Within reason: a 1.3GHz Atom-based tablet with 2GB of ram isn't going to cut it. But any reasonable laptop or desktop with 8GB ram and an SSD of some sort will get you there.) I'm still running a 4-core i7-950 system with 12GB of ram that I built in 2010 (upgraded from win7 to win10 at some point), and I'm able to put together projects with 30-40 tracks of content (audio + fx and VSTi's). Yes, I freeze most of the tracks, but that's not a very big limitation. Just be sure to get an audio interface of some sort (Focusrite Solo is a fine choice). Running a DAW on the onboard Realtek chipset that most machines have is just begging for 'hurt-me' problems. Thanks John... I kind of figured this. I’m just not used to spec'ing a minimalist machine. So an i5 3Ghz 4 core with 8G RAM, would be a reasonable machine. I've always been too nervous of anything below an i7. Ha already has a Presonus USB or some such which I know will be sufficient. He has a Presonus Studiolive 24 on his other machine. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
John Bradley Posted October 8, 2020 Share Posted October 8, 2020 (edited) Yep. My 'throw down' system (where I play with all the demos and whatnot, and wouldn't be a huge disaster if I had to format and reinstall) is a i5-9400F @ 2.9GHz with 16GB of memory that I put together last year for $700 (including a $200 graphics card, for gaming). It's a 6-core, no hyperthreading CPU, and it's almost certainly faster than the 10 year old machine I do all my work on... ...though without benchmarking it'd be hard to know. Both machines handle everything I ever throw at them. Edited October 8, 2020 by John Bradley Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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