First Time Music Production PC Build. Need advice from Micro Center and/or current builds

Greetings,

1. Yes, you can certainly speak to one of our BYOPC reps in store and they can help you. I would probably suggest coming in and speaking to them first to get started.

2. Possibly, if they're in our website inventory we can have them delivered. We are getting in new inventory very frequently, it may very well be available when you're ready to go.

3. Yes, if you can't locate the part in our store you can bring it parts from another retailer. The only issue we have here is that we can't RMA the part if it's DOA. We would have to ask you to pick it up and RMA it with the other retailer yourself.

Otherwise, you're right on for music production. CPU and RAM are your main concerns. GPU is secondary, but you do want a decent card. There are several plug ins  used for music production that do utilize GPU rendering. It's a relatively small work load for the GPU so you won't need anything crazy here.

A GTX 1050 would be fine. Without seeing the full list of parts, it's hard to say where you could save cost. In our PC builder tool, you can actually share your build with us. Click "Share", then URL, then copy the url it gives you and paste it in a comment here and we can view it. 

Thanks for providing that info!

The easiest area to save cost would be on the CPU and motherboard. There's almost no reason to get a 9900X at this point in my opinion, especially at that price. The Intel i9-10900k is also a 10 core/20 thread part just like the 9900X, but can be paired with a much more reasonable Z490 motherboard for saved cost. Those two by themselves could save you ~$500+ on the total cost of your build and you wouldn't lose any performance. 

I'd also put in a good word for the Ryzen 9 3950X. It's a 16 core/32 thread part and can also be paired with a reasonable X570 motherboard. In my opinion if you're looking at CPUs in that price range/category, it's just the best overall option. It has more cores/threads and still packs in good single-threaded performance. It also supports PCIe 4.0 if that's something you're interested in, which the Intel chips are lacking right now. 

The one reason to get a 9900X or another extreme series Intel processor would be if you specifically need a larger amount of PCIe lanes on your system. Otherwise, I would personally choose the Ryzen 9 3950X at that price point, or go with the 10900K if you really want to go Intel. 

Pricing on parts will be the same in-store as what's listed online, so if you put the build together with our configurator and add the items to your cart, you can view the cost of all the parts. 

If you want us to actually build it, we have our custom build pricing listed here:

https://www.microcenter.com/site/service/instore-service-complete-build.aspx

Just scroll down to the bottom of the page and it will list the different tiers of builds we offer and pricing. Click on each tier to view the exact details for what it includes.