One aspect of this search that I find fascinating is the inclusion of Wi-Fi on most of the motherboards that are available. I have a wired network that I use. I only have a Wi-Fi network in the house for the benefit of guests. For me, it's a useless appendage that will just draw power for no benefit.

One aspect of this search that I find fascinating is the inclusion of Wi-Fi on most of the motherboards that are available. I have a wired network that I use. I only have a Wi-Fi network in the house for the benefit of guests. For me, it's a useless appendage that will just draw power for no benefit.

Yes indeed. I you want a premium motherboard which has better power stages, 8-layer copper, military grade components, better audio, etc. then you are bound to be stuck with things you may not need: RGB lights, wifi, bluetooth, a second ethernet port. You can disable them in BIOS to save power.

@bitman Why the military grade components? I never understood the advantage of that. Also what do you do with the onboard audio? I've never used mine. They always seem to have interference, too much noise for me, so I tend to avoid onboard audio all together.

I have a buddy in music industry he advised I use USB audio devices as I needed to start doing some sound design. He recommended the following and it works AWESOME for my simple narrative tracks and blending music, etc plus was super cheap.

• Rode Al-1 USB microphone input with microphone amplifier for narrating stuff. They may have ones that record multiple channels but have no experience with multichannel / surround sound audio workflow. Virtually noise free.
   
• Audio Technica AT2020 Microphone LOVE this microphone and was CHEAP. The cool thing is the frequency response is very flat, so you can easily shape it to sound like other WAY more expensive microphones in post or with a filter stack.
   
• Audio Technica ATH-M60x headset All the big podcasters tend to like the Sony headsets. I had nothing but trouble with them. They produce shaped sound so when I would edit the audio it wouldn't sound right on other speakers. These have a flat response. They get poor reviews because of it, but are AWESOME for sound design, what they are really intended for.

If you ever plan on getting a NAS (it's AWESOME) you'll want to utilize two ethernet ports. It'll double your transfer speeds.

Updated the motherboard to reflect my preference for the Z790 chipset. ASUS has announced the motherboard but it's not in the channel yet. It may be by the time I'm ready to build.

@weinerschizel Good advice for the microphones,

A secondary ethernet port is handy indeed for connecting a NAS, but a good switch (one would usually need one with all the connected devices in home) can help with that as well. As for bandwidth, I have a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus master which has a 10 Gb ethernet port, so I am not starved for bandwidth, it is more than 2x ports with each 1 Gb...

Regarding military grade components and PCB design, this is often used as a marketing argument, implying in laymen's terms "they are tough", but in really it is more a standardization thing for quality and sourcing. Whether the manufacturing company really uses components according to the various MIL-STD electronics standards or not, the consumer just has to believe the marketing. I am certainly not going the ask Gigabyte for proof :)

Given the component shortages and potential for counterfeiting in the components market, military PCB components cannot be procured from just any company. Any component for a military electronic system must meet rigorous quality standards and be traceable back to a compliant manufacturer or distributor.

For audio I did pick the z690 Tomahawk in part because it had ALC4080 and claimed to use high quality capacitors and isolation. If I don't have to buy more components I'd rather not.

@weinerschizel

I still have an AKG D1000E that I used on stage for vocals. I thought it was middling mic but it could survive in the midst of a set of drums with all the rim shots and cymbals crashing, etc. I also have a pair of Sony ECM-22P Electret Condenser mics from 1970 that I used for live recording in that era. They could use phantom power or they could be powered by an internal 9V mercury battery. Try to find one of those today. I usually try to avoid having my voice appear in any video with few exceptions.

Thanks @RogerS for giving me something to think about while I'm waiting for the distribution channel to fill. Since I don't record on the edit machine, I suspect the only person that has to listen to any difference between on-board audio components is me. The sound is colored by the camera and the device that plays the rendered output. Oh, and my hearing.

@bitman

I worked for the US Air Force briefly in the 1970s building test equipment to repair and certify aircraft electronic components. I suspect the only entity tracing Realtek components back to a compliant manufacturer these day is the military.

In a left turn from my trajectory, I've started to look at the EVGA Classified motherboard. The flow-through design appeal to me. My real goal with a motherboard is that I decide when to send it to scrap, not when it fails.

@john_dennis Many years ago, when animals still talked, I served one year our kingdom in the Belgian army (at that time Belgium still had a mandatory draft). Not long after my tour of duty they abolished the conscription!

@weinerschizel Good advice for the microphones,

A secondary ethernet port is handy indeed for connecting a NAS, but a good switch (one would usually need one with all the connected devices in home) can help with that as well. As for bandwidth, I have a Gigabyte Z690 Aorus master which has a 10 Gb ethernet port, so I am not starved for bandwidth, it is more than 2x ports with each 1 Gb...

Regarding military grade components and PCB design, this is often used as a marketing argument, implying in laymen's terms "they are tough", but in really it is more a standardization thing for quality and sourcing. Whether the manufacturing company really uses components according to the various MIL-STD electronics standards or not, the consumer just has to believe the marketing. I am certainly not going the ask Gigabyte for proof :)

Given the component shortages and potential for counterfeiting in the components market, military PCB components cannot be procured from just any company. Any component for a military electronic system must meet rigorous quality standards and be traceable back to a compliant manufacturer or distributor.

Good point, my ports are 1Gbit, 10Gbit would be more than enough. Never would have thought of the supply chain & quality issues, great point. Curious, are you able to get anything out of the onboard audio? I've never had any luck with them. Not sure if it's due to poor quality components I may have bought or simply not being electronically isolated such as USB.

@weinerschizel

I still have an AKG D1000E that I used on stage for vocals. I thought it was middling mic but it could survive in the midst of a set of drums with all the rim shots and cymbals crashing, etc. I also have a pair of Sony ECM-22P Electret Condenser mics from 1970 that I used for live recording in that era. They could use phantom power or they could be powered by an internal 9V mercury battery. Try to find one of those today. I usually try to avoid having my voice appear in any video with few exceptions.

Thanks @RogerS for giving me something to think about while I'm waiting for the distribution channel to fill. Since I don't record on the edit machine, I suspect the only person that has to listen to any difference between on-board audio components is me. The sound is colored by the camera and the device that plays the rendered output. Oh, and my hearing.

Super cool microphone! I had no clue, my buddy had to educate me on flat, non shaped, audio devices both microphones and listening devices. I was on the cusp of blowing money on Sure or RE microphone setup you see all those Gucci podcasters use. He produces for a big name band and said they don't use any of that stuff. That they look for non-shaped, flat response, microphones. Then put me onto what I bought.

Has anybody had any luck asking Magix what hardware works best? I approached them / tech support with this question but didn't really get anywhere. Would be nice to know what hardware they use when their software guys build the software.

Thanks for putting me onto your thread, I really enjoy hearing what is working for everybody.

@bitman

"Not long after my tour of duty they abolished the conscription!"

Lucky you. My tour in Viet Nam, among other things, changed the direction of my life.

@weinerschizel

"Has anybody had any luck asking Magix what hardware works best?"

No.

Until the forklift arrives, I'm getting everything I can from my current system...

Note the case for getting 64GB of RAM even though paging on an Intel 750 ain't bad, it's still paging.

I would think that the developers would be working with various different builds. To push one hardware over another, and then later have changes that switch, could create more problems than solve.

How much different in actual usage and is it noticeable? And there is the benchmarking that users have participated in.

I put 64GB of memory in my system. Vegas Pro 20 doesn't seem to use anywhere near that much. That's a 4k render to AVC from HEVC & AVC clips. My GPU is slammed though haha

When I ordered memory I made an educated guess as to buy more memory or faster memory. I opted for more memory. The next bottleneck, drive speed (loading clips) is many orders of magnitude slower than RAM so it seemed to me that memory clock speed was a bit of a mute point.

Awesome picture from Vietnam.

@weinerschizel

In my Task Manager screenshot, I was rendering a FHD and a UHD output file from an XAVC source. GPU was off for all functions. I often bury the machine with enough work to keep it busy for a while and go do something else.

While I did opt for faster ram I also don't think it's a serious bottleneck and even drive speed generally not as the GPU or CPU gets overwhelmed before I get anywhere near that.

I can generally edit real time on USB 3 external drives (UHD X-AVC S 8-bit 24p) without issue and it looks something like this:

I put in a M2 SSD (Hynix P41 is on sale- 2GB for ~$170) and it has numbers like this :

So maybe caching or other operations will speed up, but it's likely overkill for anything in Vegas.

Just one note on the poster above who limited to the 13900K at 175w for Voukoder renders- even with my i5 13600K it's consuming close to 230W doing Voukoder x264 with the 4k benchmark project so that may be too low a power limit.

To put it in perspective Puget Systems went through benchmarks of the last 7 years of CPUs in their Adobe test suite and how much the incremental gains add up over time. As I type this on an Intel 7th generation machine with 13th sitting next to it I can vouch for how much improvement you can see with programs like video editing whereas on the photo side it seems like the resources are not used to their potential (Lightroom still slow importing and going from picture to picture). https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/adobe-creative-cloud-performance-intel-6th-gen-to-13th-gen/

@RogerS

"... you only have to go back 4-5 years to find that a modern Intel Core i9 13900K system would give you nearly a 2x increase in performance."

Thank you for the link. It appears that my normal upgrade cycle is sound.

On NVMe drives. The biggest satisfaction I get from electronic drives is file management. I've been working archived projects, lately and I just leave them on the SATA-attached WD Ultrastar drives.

Anecdote

When I bought my laptop it had two drive bays but only a 5400 RPM spinning disk. Because I very seldom use it, every time I turned it on there was so much Windows Update and virus scanning happening to a disk with 14ms access time I couldn't get anything done. Physical disk thrashing really adds up. The first thing I did was replace the spinner with an NVMe disk and an SSD. I still never use the laptop. It's just a decoration in the house.

2022-12-20 Everything I need has been acquired or ordered except the z790 motherboard. I'm in no particular panic since I'm only up to 2012 with my working old projects for posterity. Even my current hardware isn't required for that media.

2023-01-11 All parts that I need to do a bench-build are on-site. I'll pick a day to start when the US West Coast has two straight days without the risk of a power outage or flooding. I recently went through a three-day Internet outage.

@john_dennis

What case did you get for your build?

What made you pick liquid cooling? Having liquid in a PC scares me, I'm building a i9-13900K machine.

Thanks

@Rich Parry

I bought this case many years ago.

LIAN LI PC-90 Black Aluminum ATX Full Tower Case

It has served me well for two machine cycles or eleven years. I expect to use it for the rest of my life.

"What made you pick liquid cooling?"

 Water is many times more effective at heat transfer than air. I worked on water-cooled mainframe computers in the 1970s and 1980s and I'm not squeamish about having water or other coolants in or around electronic circuits or even power supplies. Having changed quite a few water pumps in the middle of the night, I chose to policy replace the AIO cooling system that I've been running since January 2017. It still works, but I'm going to gently lower it over the side.

I just remembered that in the hallway of my house is whole house ventilator that ran for six years as a gate fan from an IBM 3033 Perhaps the last customer to run a 3033 sent it to scrap. It still runs fine and is quieter than any alternative that I've found. I had to fabricate louvers to block attic air from entering the house when it is not running.

For air cooling in a normal computer it will struggle to cool as you get over 200W. The i9-13900K is well over that for peak usage (unless you choose to limit its wattage or voltage) so if you don't want water cooling I'd rethink why you plan to go with an i9. I chose the i5 in part to be able to safely avoid water cooling.

2023-02-24 1258 PST

This post was made on the new i9 13900K system.

Since I installed Window 10 to one of the three NVMe drives on the motherboard, I have to go back to the workbench and install all the spinning disks before I bless it.

See you later.

If you ever plan on getting a NAS (it's AWESOME) you'll want to utilize two ethernet ports. It'll double your transfer speeds.

@weinerschizel  How do you figure? As I see it, you're talking about a config where my NAS has two gigabit ports and both plugged into a gigabit switch, and my computers also with gigabit adapters go into that switch. Sound right?

If a single computer access that NAS, whether the NAS goes into two switch ports or one, your computer is still only gigabit and I believe the switch will route only over one of the NAS-end ports to boot. Even if your NAS could push data from a single file back over two ports, on the computer end of the connection only 1 GB still will get through.

NOW -- if two different network users are trying to access the NAS, and the switch was smart enough to load balance traffic to that NAS recognizing it has two different routes -- I can see it improving throughput.

Thoughts? (not challenging you... just questioning -- an opportunity for me/us learn here :-) )