How to speed up your music production PC
6 min read
One of the most important things in your studio is your PC. And having a fast PC is crucial to being able to handle large projects and produce music swiftly. This guide will look at the three main upgrades for improving your production PC.
One thing to note, upgrading a PC is cheaper than building a new one, but if your computer is really old, you will be severely limited in how much you can upgrade.
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This is down mostly to the motherboard, and so if you feel like the upgrade options aren’t enough, you may be looking at more of a PC rebuild than an upgrade. In that case, you can keep components like your hard drives and graphics card and refer to our guide on building a music production PC.
You can think of upgrading your computer like upgrading a car. If you want a new engine, you can’t fit any engine, it needs to be one that will work with the rest of the car. Likewise, if your car is small, you won’t be able to add massive wheels to it.
SSD
This is the first thing I’d advise you look at as it is the least limited in terms of compatibility.
Solid state drives (SSDs) run much faster than old hard drives because they don’t have moving platters to read from. An exaggerated example would be comparing reading a song file off a USB drive vs a vinyl record, though even hard disk drives (HDDs) run much faster than record players.
If you can upgrade your main boot drive to an SSD, you computer will see a boost in overall responsiveness. This will include the time it takes to boot up and load Windows, as well as opening apps and projects.
SSDs used to be a lot more expensive than HDDs, but nowadays, they are much more affordable.
I do recommend also buying a large HDD as a secondary drive, as these are now dirt-cheap and you can buy several terrabytes of storage for under £100 which means older projects and large video files can be stored cheaply. This frees up space on your fast SSD for the important files and applications that need to be accessed more frequently.
There are two main types of SSD available at the moment. Your traditional SATA SSD will directly replace your normal hard drives and they use the same cabling.
This is a case of just unplugging one and replacing it with the other.
The second type of SSD is newer and it is called an NVMe SSD. These plug into dedicated slots on your motherboard (found on newer motherboards) or expansion cards for older motherboards.
NVMe drives are significantly faster than normal SSDs, with the best ones being able to read data at more than 3GB a second.
You’ll have to refer to your motherboard manual to see if it has an M.2 slot, but chances are, if it is more than a few years old, it won’t. This means you can either stick to the traditional SSD style, or grab an expansion card to be able to accommodate an NVMe drive. Do note that these cards will take up a graphics card slot on your motherboard and you’ll need to make sure there is enough room for one.
SATA SSDs
NVMe M.2 SSDs
NVMe exapansion cards (allows you to plug in an NVMe drive on older motherboards)
CPU
The main bit of hardware to look at upgrading is your central processing unit (CPU). This is the brain of your computer and handles all the calculations for pretty much everything.
Upgrading your CPU can be a major hassle if you don’t know what you are doing, because only a few are compatible with each other.
The main board on your PC, which everything plugs into is called the motherboards, and motherboards only accept a few types of CPU each (normally within the same generation).
To find out if you can upgrade your CPU, you’ll have to do some research. You’ll need to know what CPU you already have, and what motherboard you have.
Generally speaking, newer CPUs perform better. They have faster clock speeds and more cores. (Think of clock speed as how fast it can do tasks, and cores as the number of “brains” it has to work on multiple things)
When looking for a new CPU, find out what motherboard you have and you will be able to look online to see what CPUs are compatible.
There are a few things to note here:
Firstly, some CPUs require more power than others. If you have a really small cheap PC with a slow CPU, upgrading it can draw more power than the computer hardware can supply.
Secondly, some CPUs come with integrated graphics. This means they have a graphics card built in. If your planned CPU upgrade doesn’t come with integrated graphics, then you’ll need to buy a cheap graphics card (or if you plan on gaming, a more expensive one).
A quick tool to check what CPU you can buy is UserBenchmark. Put in the motherboard you own, and it will filter out the CPUs that aren’t compatible. You don’t need to go through the rest of the tool as it is designed for people who build their PCs from scratch.
Top things to look out for:
- Much newer generation (that is still compatible with your motherboard)
- Faster clock speeds
- More cores
- Features such as hyperthreading
RAM
Random access memory doesn’t contribute directly to PC speed in most cases. What it does mean is that more files can be stored in fast memory for you. If you are a music producer, you’ll probably have lots of samples in a project that need to be played back immediately, instead of being read off a slow disk. RAM can help with that.
I recommend 8GB of RAM at a minimum these days, and if possible, go to 16GB so you can have some other apps running in the background behind your DAW.
Some plugins such as Kontakt use large amounts of RAM (sometimes gigabytes) so if you are using high-end plugins, more is essential.
You will need to check what type of RAM your motherboard supports. Most people will have either DDR3 or the newer DDR4.
These aren’t interchangeable.
DDR3 is older and rus a bit slower. It is also limited in how much RAM you can add to your system. Most people with older computers will be currently using DDR3 RAM.
DDR4 is newer and runs faster. You will see it can have larger sticks with more GB on them. I recommend going for sticks with a clock speed of at least 3200MHz for best speed.
Your motherboard is how you can tell what RAM you need. Give it a Google and see what RAM it can take.
Most motherboards come with more than one RAM slot. It is not advised to use two different models of RAM, so you may be best replacing it all with a RAM kit (e.g. buying two 8GB sticks instead of adding a single 8GB stick from a different brand to the RAM already installed).
Good DDR3 RAM Kits
Good DDR4 RAM Kits
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