[bakedbeansrecord]

COVID-19 and the change to the dark side… long time Mac Pro user here. I made the change to Windows 10 for PT HD 2020.3.0 and thought I would share some experiences doing it for those considering the change.

Why: I commonly use a combination of lots of audio tracks and lots of virtual instruments. My 2010 Mac Pro was choking badly when tracking with a buffer less than 256 samples, even with dual 3.46GHz Xeons, all SSDs and 128 GB of RAM. I needed more CPU muscle. A new Mac Pro would be about $12K to make it worthwhile to make the change. Ugh.

COVID-19 afforded me just the opportunity I needed to make the change. Studio shutdown…good thing…it took me over a week to build my new machine, install all of my plugins and VI libraries and shake out all the bugs.
I opted for a Gigabyte X299X motherboard with Thunderbolt 3 and 64 GB of Corsair DDR4 (3200) RAM. All SSDs -- separate ones for: the OS, the session files and for the sample libraries. Also, two HDD drives internally to back up the OS drive weekly and the session files daily (and an external HDD to back up my 4 TB sample drive). Fractal R6-USB-c case with six low-speed “be Quiet!” Fans (3 intake and 3 exhaust, all PWM and vary speed based on the CPU temp. The CPU fan and the 1200W power supply are also be Quiet! Brand. This thing is dead quiet. I cannot hear it from more than 3 feet way. Definitely quieter than the Mac Pro.

Now the hair-pulling. My Avid HD Native thunderbolt would not be recognized in PT. I finally mucked around with various TB BIOS settings and discovered that the “security” setting for TB had to be disabled.
OK, the interface is recognized now, but PT continued to crash every time I tried to set my peripherals page to recognize my C|24 on the ethernet port. Why??? I finally figured it out. The motherboard has built in Bluetooth and TWO gigabit ethernet ports. I had to disable one of the ethernet ports and the Bluetooth in Device Manager – problem gone! Pro Tools does NOT like Bluetooth!

I bought an i9 10940X CPU. I was holding out for the faster i9 10980XE, but they have been backordered for months. With the break in business due to COVID-19, the time to do this build was now. If/when the faster CPU becomes available, I will swap it out. Even with the single CPU, this thing is crazy fast. I can track with a buffer of 64 samples with 24 tracks recording at a time, with a healthy number of plugins active. Bounce times are reduced by about 50%. After one week, not one crash. The old Mac Pro would hang and spin the dreaded beach ball on a daily basis.

Total cost: about $3.5K (I saved some money by reformatting my SSDs from the Mac after backing them all up). I feel no remorse (now, that is – when I couldn’t figure out the crashing issue for a few days, I was ready to throw in the towel!). Saved some serious bucks.