@whale-av Thanks, that's good info regarding the USB busses.

@EEight- Lots of good info and I love that biscuit box PC!!

I have a nice laptop with a touchscreen, but the fan gets loud under load so I'd like to move the audio stuff to an external machine and "remote control" it with OSC, VNC, and or SSH. Keep the graphic/Gui side on the laptop.

I like the RME PCI cards because I've used them a lot with great success on Mac/Win. I'm hoping this box can also be semi-portable, so minimizing the external components is a design goal.

Hi, looking for advice on selecting components for my dream Linux Puredata machine.
-Ubuntu Studio, maybe an RME PCI card
-Really only doing audio (oscillators, arrays, filtering, delays) No graphics.
-Lots of MIDI and OSC.
-Keeping the the machine quiet (low fan noise) is VERY important.

What CPU specs matter most for common audio and MIDI tasks in PD? Number of cores? Thread count? Clock speed?
If I run other apps (VCV rack, Carla, various Jack plugins) will those processes distribute to the other Cores?

Does Pd benefit from a more powerful GPU card? Or will there be no difference if I use the GPU embedded in the CPU? Is it different if I launch Pd without the gui? (-nogui)

Thanks for any advice. I want to build the most powerful machine I can, but I don't want to waste money on extra specs that won't result in better performance.

Ed