PC build

[sjzstudio]

Are there any recommendations on which parts to build a new PC for? Is it possible to build an efficient ARM based machine? Or do I have to use an Intel or AMD iron?

[bluzee]

I'm not sure how many packages might be available for arm. You can certainly do it but you can build much faster cpu and install more ram into an intel or amd system.

Kind of depends on what you really want to do. If you want full bore DAW mixing a whole lot of channels I don't think i would look at arm.

Thunderbolt might be something needed for future compatibility but for now I'm not even sure what it's status is in linux.

I suspect NVME SSD would be highly desirable.

Avoid nvidia graphics. Onboard intel or amd more than adequate for audio work station.

I like to build fanless however that limits your cpu and the fanless boards are used to buy are impossible to source now.

[GMaq]

Do not buy the latest AMD or Intel CPU's available.

About a year and a half ago I built a Desktop development machine with an AMD Threadripper 2970WX 24 core/48 thread processor, the 2970 series was already one series old when I built it and Kernel 5.10 was just out... This machine was an absolute nightmare with Linux and hardlocked repeatedly until Kernel 5.14... now it is a joy. I was within an inch of switching this machine to Windows permanently until Kernel 5.14.

24 cores/48threads is obscenely too much for Audio work and my intention was 4K Video work and effortless VM hosting which it does very well.. Save your money and buy a CPU that is a series or two old on a very good quality gaming motherboard with electrolytic capacitors and put the money into a good AMD Video card, lots of RAM and as @bluzee suggests NVMe drives. Linux will always lag behind Windows for CPU, mobo chipset support so it is often counterproductive to buy the latest greatest computer components.

[WforWoollyMammoth]

I built a PC with an Intel Core i5-11600K as the processor last year (the 6 CPUs instead of more was a deliberate choice due to temperature reasons). The chip has inbuilt Intel UHD Graphics 750.

With the inbuilt graphics, the JACK DSP performance was plain terrible with DAWs. It might have been that the kernel driver wasn't fine tuned at that point yet (the latest Kernel available for my system was 5.11. then). I chose not to wait for further developments and got a NVIDIA card without a fan (performs modestly, but doesn't have fan noise). Much, much better performance with that one.

[davephillips]

Avoid nvidia graphics.

Amen to that. I recently discovered that my old nVidia-based card was simply not going to work with a system upgrade to Ubuntu 20.04. Alas, fanless video cards fall into the low to lower-middle ranks. Meaning that I was looking at a new video card and I just didn't want to do that dance again. I did two things to resolve the issue, described below.

Onboard intel or amd more than adequate for audio work station.

For listening-only, I suppose so. Otherwise, get a decent external audio interface.

I like to build fanless however that limits your cpu and the fanless boards are used to buy are impossible to source now.

As I discovered to my dismay.

So, the two things that solved my problem: I bought a cheap Radeon card, fanless of course, and threw out the nVidia board. At the same time, I switched my music production platform to a Mac Mini M1.

I've been rebuilding my Linux machine, it's working well but I haven't stressed it yet. This is probably the last time I'll use a home-built machine for Linux. Powerful laptops are available now that perform as well or better than what I have on the desktop (old 6-core AMD CPU) and they're in reasonable price ranges.

Best regards,

dp

[merlyn]

Are there any recommendations on which parts to build a new PC for? Is it possible to build an efficient ARM based machine? Or do I have to use an Intel or AMD iron?

ARM chips are mostly found in phones and tablets. For a desktop ARM machine there's the Raspberry Pi and the other single board computers. Are these powerful enough for a music production machine? Probably not. The M1 from Apple has created some buzz around ARM. The M1 isn't a usual ARM chip. The point of ARM is that it's low power, so phone batteries last longer. To do this it's based on RISC rather than CISC as x86 is. Take an ARM chip, overclock it, not worrying about battery life and we have the idea of an M1. There's a bit more to it -- integrated very fast memory and powerful integrated graphics. The M1 is a technical triumph but the sci-fi level of jump in performance is partly because Intel had gotten so bad in performance per watt. Intel made reasonably powerful chips but they used a lot of power and therefore required noisy fans.

I built a computer last year with a Ryzen 3900x and that is probably overkill. The 3900x is more powerful in multi-threaded performance than an M1 Max. So far I've got nowhere near maxing it out, although I haven't done any huge projects with it yet. I was partly influenced by my brother's advice which was to build a powerful machine and then I never would max it out. I can confirm what GMaq said above that Linux takes a while to catch up with new hardware. In the first few months I saw incremental improvements in performance as I updated my kernel and amd-ucode. It has settled down now, so 3000 series Ryzens are now an option with a new kernel.

Graphics cards, eh? The prices have been crazy for the past couple of years. I had a Radeon R7 260x which used the Radeon driver and was fine for what I was doing. It played nicely with Linux. Unfortunately the fan annoyed me. It's possible to set up a fan curve to minimise noise. The default fan curve is gaming oriented. It's set up assuming the graphics card is going to get hammered most of the time. For a music machine a good fan curve would be to run at the lowest speed most of the time, only speeding up when there is graphics load. With the 260x there was a threshold where it would turn off below about 30% meaning when it came on it was audible. No noise then noise for a short period is more distracting than a constant background rumble.

Looking for a new graphics card the prices were prohibitive. Until I saw a secondhand Radeon Pro WX3100. This is a workstation card, not particularly great for mining or gaming so it was £50. I installed it to find it was also audible with the default fan curve, but could go down to a low, inaudible speed. It uses the AMDGPU driver and works well. The up side of the graphics cards shortage for me was that I would never have considered a workstation card if prices had been normal.

[tavasti]

Is it possible to build an efficient ARM based machine?

In case there is powerfull enough options, there is still one thing: not all software is working in ARM. Even some opensource softwares may require some modifications to work in arm. And for softwares which are available as binary only, most likely you won't get arm-version.

[sjzstudio]

Personally, I like the idea of taking a few steps behind the latest insanity. And maybe there should be some FAQ section that lists good parts to use. I looked at a Mac studio Ultra device that is powerful but priced absolutely absurd. Fortunately, the Linux side has room for choice and thought. We just need more people to do this. Linux for every home and studio

[bluzee]

Onboard intel or amd more than adequate for audio work station.

For listening-only, I suppose so. Otherwise, get a decent external audio interface.

That was referring to onboard graphics not audio. Obviously dedicated audio interface is a must.

Kind of surprising that dedicated graphics would be needed to render DAW software. Maybe just need to update mesa? I think I would still try onboard graphics first. If it really won't work a dedicated graphics card can be added later. They are a big added expense, are noisy and take up a lot of power. Probably want to be able to hook up several monitors as well, but I think that's pretty standard. Spec your power supply to handle one just in case I guess. To big a PS is always better than too small any way.

I've had good reliability from Gigabyte mobos built with the solid capacitors. The fanless embedded boards were AsRock. So far also standing up well.

Make sure your power supply is going to run fairly quiet. There are fanless ones but I'm not confident in their reliability. I tried fanless graphics cards at one point but had failures.

[GMaq]

Personally, I like the idea of taking a few steps behind the latest insanity. And maybe there should be some FAQ section that lists good parts to use. I looked at a Mac studio Ultra device that is powerful but priced absolutely absurd. Fortunately, the Linux side has room for choice and thought. We just need more people to do this. Linux for every home and studio

For the record if you want to look them up, I have no idea if these items are still available new or available at all in the current supply chain nightmare.

My build:

Gigabyte X399 AORUS Pro Mobo
AMD Ryzen Threadripper 2970WX (48) @ 3.000GHz
96Gb of DDR4 RAM running at 3200 (the mobo supports 3600 but 3200 is plenty...)
AMD ATI Radeon RX 570 Gaming 4G Video Card (well supported by 'amdgpu' driver)
*Note I don't have a NVMe drive I was hesitant because at the time AV Linux was on pure Debian w/Systemback and I didn't think I could install it to NVMe drives so I went with a 2 Tb SSD. Now I would definitely go with 2 NVMe drives!

This setup works well, is well supported with Linux and should cost significantly less now than it did when I bought it a year and a half ago.. Of course there are hundreds of equally good options out there..

[bluzee]

NVMe and SATA ssd prices are pretty much on par now too.

One other thing that possibly only applies to Intel is to check if secure boot can still be disabled in the mobo UEFI. It sounds like at some point they are going to force secure boot on us. Not really the end of the world, but if you like to compile your own kernel or patch drivers it will probably make things more of a pain.

[tseaver]

@GMaq:

Save your money and buy a CPU that is a series or two old on a very good quality gaming motherboard with electrolytic capacitors and put the money into a good AMD Video card,

Interesting. I have just recently begun to do video on a System76 Pangolin (Ryzen CPU + Radeon GPU) laptop, and have run into issues with at least some software (DaVinci Resolve appears to want nVidia GPU, for instance). Have you run into such issues?

[GMaq]

@GMaq:

Save your money and buy a CPU that is a series or two old on a very good quality gaming motherboard with electrolytic capacitors and put the money into a good AMD Video card,

Interesting. I have just recently begun to do video on a System76 Pangolin (Ryzen CPU + Radeon GPU) laptop, and have run into issues with at least some software (DaVinci Resolve appears to want nVidia GPU, for instance). Have you run into such issues?

No I haven't but I've never used or even tried Resolve which seemingly has always been kinda sticky about GPU's but afaik it specs Proprietary Drivers but I wasn't aware it would have a preference between nVidia or AMD.. I use Cinelerra-GG which by default doesn't use the GPU directly for rendering so in that case as long as you have a decent CPU the quality of the Video card doesn't have much effect. Sorry to not have a better answer for you..

My primary reason for the suggestion of a good quality Video card would be for good Dual-head support, 4K resolution support for future displays and as you've noted a decent GPU also for future Linux apps that will be able to use it directly for various encoding tasks..

[bluzee]

The thing I don't like about nvidia is that it limits your kernel choices. Most of the time the kernel I'm running can't install the proprietary driver. Without the proprietary driver there is no GPU encode.

GPU encoding works pretty well on the Intel chips.

[sjzstudio]

I ended up ordering:

AMD Ryzen 9 7900X, AM5, 4.7 GHz, 12-Core
Asus TUF GAMING B650-PLUS
Kingston 64GB (4 x 16GB) Fury Beast DDR5, 6000MHz

The machine is now assembled. The latest version of Avlinux MXe was installed without any problems. the machine works like a ready-made product bought from a store. At least Atdour and Mixbus run really smoothly. Promising start with AMD iron.