David Bennett: My Custom 3XS Audio Workstation
David Bennet is at the forefront of today's YouTube creators. He’s a wonderful musician with Piano as his main instrument, but crucially, he’s also an extremely gifted teacher. His calm, thorough explanations of western Harmony and well-crafted examples of songwriting styles has led to hundreds of thousands of followers and his videos regularly attract millions of views. Like many of today’s young musicians, he also has to provide regular content at the highest level, and that’s why he chooses 3XS systems to power his output.
When discussing options for David's new systems he came to us with a particular set of requirements for his ideal new setup. With the need to run busy audio projects involving a wide range of sound libraries such as Kontakt along with other demanding instruments and effects, we quickly realised that a powerful CPU with fast RAM and storage would be required. Add to that the need to support video editing as well then it became clear we would need a quick, powerful, yet well-rounded solution to take care of everything for him.
Starting with our popular Intel TZ690 configuration, we find at the heart of the system is the latest Intel 12900K CPU featuring a 16 core / 24 thread design. Already one of the fastest chips on offer, we backed this up with 32GB of the latest high-bandwidth DDR5 memory along with 2 TB of super-fast Samsung NVMe 4.0 storage. By ensuring quick load-times and plenty of bandwidth it means that the combination is more than ideal for handling large data workloads such as streaming heavy audio libraries and editing large video projects.
The system is housed in a Define 7 tower case, the latest model from Fractal Design well respected range of noise optimized cases. We choose to upgrade the case fans to match both the CPU cooler and PSU, with the superb low noise be quiet! Silent Wings 3. This allows us to ensure that we get an efficient air flow throughout the system, whilst still being able to deliver a high-performance specification in a noise sensitive studio space.
To support the video editing requirement, the GPU has been uprated to an RTX3060 with a rather substantial 12GB graphics RAM making it ideal for ensuring smooth playback and editing when dealing with large video projects. The specific ASUS 3060 TUF in use here is a "Hybrid" cooling card, which means that it's designed to run passively under light workloads, such as working within the DAW recording software. The GPU itself should remain silent until the point where more performance is required for video editing, where it will then spin up the fans to ensure it's properly cooled under more demanding loads.
Connectivity includes Wi-Fi and Ethernet for connections to the outside world along with USB and Thunderbolt 4 for locally connected devices, in this instance to allow support for David's UAD Apollo X4 interface.
The system is wrapped up with the latest copy of Windows 11, which offers refined scheduling to support the Intel 12 series chips, ensuring you get the very best out of this extremely powerful spec combination.
You can too can customize your perfect studio system based around the latest Intel 12 Series here:
configure custom system