Windows PC desktops we use.... Practical experience, tech data.

Let's start discuss what Win desktop PCs we use...

It may be help and inspiration for others. It is hard to guess, mainly for beginners, how strong PC they need. One does not anticipate, that music production needs often pretty strong PC and buy too weak computer.

It has happened to me, when I have started. And I am in computers for 40+ years.... I have bought two core i7 notebook back then.... and quickly found out that no go... I switched to old four core i7 notebook... It was OK for few years, until I started use larger Kontakt libraries.. Had to double RAM to 16 GB. Also found original HDD slow and replaced it by SATA SSD. But shortly even that was not enought. And CPU had also hard times....

I did not want huge PC tower eating 800+ W and I did not need notebook really as I had notebook anyway attached to monitor, keyboard and mouse.... But I wanted be able to transport PC easily. Sort of compromise between notebook and desktop.

I found this.

ASRock barebone MiniPC. I have AMD Zen3 Ryzen7 APU (8C/16T 4GB+ clock), 64 GB RAM (2x32GB), 2x 1TB NVMe SSD and Noctua low profile cooler.

One could add up to two 2.5" SATA III discs. They may be only 8 mm thick. I am planning to add two 2 TB HDD. Bigger do not fit in, they are too fat.

It is real small (15x15x8 cm - only 2 litres) and silent. CPU takes cca 80 W at most, usually 10-30 W.

It has plenty of USBs (I bought optional USB expansion set to add few more) and one can have up to 3 monitors...

It cost me about 1 000 EUR including VAT in September 2021. It would cost less, now.

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Experience.

1) Stock cooler that comes with MiniPC is rather noisy, to my ears.

2) Stock cooler that comes with AMD CPU is better. It fits inside, if one removes upper ring of the cooler to make it less high.

3) Noctua is great.

4) 64 GB might be overkill. 32 GB would do for my use case (at present), 16 GB would not.

5) Using 2 x 1 TB was not the best decision. My Kontakt libraries and Expansions do not fit on 1 TB... So, part of it has to be on system disc. Would be better use smaller SSD for system disc and 2 TB SSD for Kontakt and so.

6) I recomend using fast NVMe SSDs, they are way faster than SATA SSDs, not speaking about HDD. Some Kontakt libraries are real big and projects would load minutes even when using SATA SSD....