How old is your DAW computer?

[crizdee]

Hi,

My Harpertown 8-core intel xeon 2.8 GHZ Mac pro 3.1

10 years old this month

On most days for 10 plus hours


Chris

[Raoul23]

My Harpertown must probably be that old too but I’ve only had it 3-4 months lol and love it. Not once missed a beat


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[Drew Mazurek]

2012 Six Core cheese grater here. With 2 UAD cards, still plenty of juice.

[EGS]

My 2010 self-build is (still) a decent & stable workhorse.

Which raises a question:
What typically dies first? Power supply? CPU? Ram? Motherboard? I'm thinking perhaps CPU due to general heat & abuse. Do you suggest replacing components as a hedge against failure?

[Ben Jenssen]

2008 Mac Pro 3,1 Harpertown 4-core 2,8kHz.
3 HDD
1 SSD:
Partition1: OS X 10.6.8, PT 10.3.10. for DAW work.
Partition2: Mac OS Sierra 10.12.5 for everything else.

Running smooth as ever.
The SSD upgrade gave it new life.

(The regular Sierra installer won't install on this mac, but I found a hack on the web.)

[musicman691]

Originally Posted by Drew Mazurek

2012 Six Core cheese grater here. With 2 UAD cards, still plenty of juice.

That's my current machine that I got a few months back from OWC. From what I could find out the machine's past owner was Sun Microsystems so you know it got a workout. No UAD cards (yet). Runs as cool as cucumber.

My iMac system lasted just about 5 years when it fried it's video card. Also fried the replacement card so I'm thinking something else went bad inside. Not putting any more money into it at this time. I did like having the two machines working together in a client/master environment with VEPro and the cheesegrater.

[albee1952]

My old machine ran for a good 3 years but the motherboard failed. I threw in a similar mobo and went back to work while the dead one went to Asus for replacement. When it came back, I stuck it back in and ran another 2 years before deciding to build a new rig(not because I needed it, but because I felt it was time to rebuild the drive from the ground up, and wanted to do that once). Now that old rig is still in play as a VI host and mastering machine. As for failures, spinning drives are the thing that fail most often here, followed by power supplies In the last 16 years, I've lost 1 graphics card, 2 power supplies, 1 motherboard and probably 6 spinning drives.

[lemix]

I've built my DAW PC in 2013. Runs solid with ASUS P9X79 board. I think it is very similar to Albee's 6 core he was mentioning above.
I'm lucky, only experienced 2 HD fails since the late 80-ies.
In this PC I have a Samsung pro 850 SSD now ( 256GB ) 2x 2GB WD Caviars and 2 hot swap bays . I organize my bare Sata HDs many different ways , so none of them gets over stressed or near full.

I did have a part broken , the same one twice in a year !!
Corsair H100i water cooler . Avoid it !! Using a Cooler Master Hyper 212 EVO now. Fine, thanx.

My MAc mini is mid-2011 ( server, 2x 500GB 7200 rpm ) is factory with 8GB of RAM. It is no longer doing audio duties..Just looks pretty with Sierra on that 27" TB monitor

[The Weed]

Two from 2013 (See the first page of the i7 thread).

One hard drive died in 4 years. I just replaced 3 spinners with 3 Samsung 850 Pro SSDs. I plan on at least another 4 years from these 2 boxes.

[uptheoctave]

2010 Cheesegrater
2015 MBP
2017 iMac 27"