Article: CAPS Twenty | Part Two

Summit · July 26, 2020

No up sampling, no fans and no liquid cooling for me 😉.

Summit · July 28, 2020

On 7/26/2020 at 11:34 PM, Jud said:

Thank you Chris, I'm very appreciative you did this much work on a beautiful machine, giving the rest of us lots of ideas to play with. The ways I would think of to riff on this for my own preferences:

- Yes, definitely dual boot with Linux. That's where I prefer to run HQPlayer, on a lightweight Linux OS like Lubuntu, with a low latency kernel installed. It has a GUI, so you can run Roon if you like. I personally feel it's much easier to get rid of stuff you don't need without causing problems in Linux, and in one of the lightweight distributions there's less to get rid of in the first place. Unlike Windows, everything in the OS is open to you (of course that's an advantage and disadvantage, but if you really screw things up you can blow everything away and start over fresh). Then Windows is available for Audirvana, which like HQPlayer has some filter and modulator flexibility, allows sending DSD512 to the DAC, and doesn't require nearly as much horsepower as HQP.

- I would save on the case and the water cooling personally. They're gorgeous and very classy, but my tastes run to "open look" cases, and less expensive water cooling that also works well. I don't need silence because my server's in a different room than the main system. I could stay with my ancient but still versatile and reliable Antec Lanboy ( https://www.amazon.com/Antec-Lanboy-Air-Computer-Modular/dp/B003WMX3SY - out of production and the looks aren't contemporary, but very easy to work with ), or I could go with something like one of the open look Thermaltake cases pictured below.

- What to do with that money? I'd opt for the ASUS Maximus XII Extreme mobo, which solves the 10G Ethernet problem ( https://www.asus.com/us/Motherboards/ROG-MAXIMUS-XII-EXTREME ). And maybe I'd be a pig and go for *two* RTX 2080 Ti cards in SLI mode (depending on availability). Since I'd be using this computer for more than playing music, I'd also go for very fast storage and try to strike a nice balance between memory speed and latency. I've been happy with Samsung storage and G. Skill memory (lower cost since with lower latency I don't need ultimate speed, and makes pretty LED colors in an open case), though Optane is very tempting for both if I wanted to max out the budget. And yep, I'd go for the i9-10900K, fast as blazes and to me not that hugely expensive.

Just some fun thoughts about what I might do, though by the time I get around to updating my Win-Lin desktop machine, all of this stuff will certainly be outdated.