Well for years I have been running on "budget builds" ... mainly from the point of view that there needed to be a significant improvement in processing and storage management to justify the expense of a new machine ..

My older boxes have been 5 yr old HP 8300 elites (I5's 3.3 Gig) and 16 or 32 gig of ram .. they worked fine but became pokey over the years .. I propped them up with solid state drives to get more life out of them ...

Until now . .

the newest generation of Intel I7's and i5's have dropped in the market place .. I decided to go all out.

The new generation run cooler, have more cores and higher clock rates ... So I went for an Intel i7-8700K
it also requires a new generation motherboard as well ...
added 64 Gig of Ram and water cooling for the processor ... storage is the new m.2 format high speed storage .

let me tell you right now the storage performance is amazing ... if you had jumped from a mechanical hard drive to a SATA SSD that boost was pretty impressive . its the same big jump going from SATA SSD to M.2

The processor is clocked at 5 Ghz. . with 6 cores .

Now here's the funny thing . over the years we have complained about onboard sound not being suitable for recording due to latency ..( or audio quality for that matter)

Jokingly I installed Ableton DAW and ran the onboard sound chip.. the round trip latency was 5.7 ms ... I was shocked ...

So things are getting better ... higher speeds for processing and storage management, cooler operation and better onboard components . and they run whisper quiet.

Anyhow, just wanted to pop this up in case people were entertaining new system builds ... I need more time in my DAW environments (Sonar Platinum, Studio One 3 and Ableton) before I pass judgement but at this point I'm pretty impressed ...