Need help picking a budget machine build for video and audio podcast

My roommate wants to get into video and audio podcasting and he currently has a machine from Micro Center:

I3-4340
8GB DDR3-1333

I have a 4770K that we can drop in it, he bought a Crucial Ballistix 2x8GB 9-9-9-24 kit that is defective (we tried it in my machine as well and Windows won't even boot - his threw a billion BSODs), and he bought a Soundblaster Audigy for the sound card.

I'm thinking if he threw an SSD in there and reinstalled Windows 10 on it that getting a Corsair 1600 kit combined with the 4770k that it would be more than sufficient but I don't do any of that stuff so I put together a build for 525 for him - http://pcpartpicker.com/p/r7Rr99

What do you all think? I really think the performance on his machine is because he's using platter drives really, especially since the smallest is 1TB and its not partitioned plus he did an upgrade from 8.1 to 10 and doesn't want to listen to me and do a reset. Obviously the sound card would go into the new machine and the power supply is my old Antec True Power 650W so he should be fine there.

The board in his current machine is a crappy ECS board but it's an H81 chipset and supports the 4770k and up to 16GB DDR3-1600 (2x8GB).

 

Is everyone a streamer/podcaster these days?!?
I swear, anywhere I go I see blokes who stream their stuff.

Anyway, since it's that neighbor of yours from the other thread, I wouldn't bother with him and show him the finger.

 

Lol as much as he drives me nuts sometimes, he's not a bad roommate and he's become a friend. He eventually apologized for blowing up at me, he was just upset because he paid the bills early (he doubled the payments) so that he will have a whole paycheck for Comic-Con and he could have used the upgrade money on groceries instead.

I also looked and it seems like the best bet is to upgrade him to a Z97 board, 16GB of RAM, an SSD and my 4770k. I looked at Anand's Skylake benchmarks and the 6500 is a massive downgrade from the 4770K.

I switched to this instead

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/XRWbtJ

 

Have you soon some if the cheap x99 xeon processors going for under $200? There's only clocked at around 2.2ghz but they have 10 or so cores. X99 MBs have come down a ton now. The only caveat is you'd need to do a little digging on compatibility. They don't work on every MB.

 

Is all that really necessary for someone just doing a podcast though? That's the thing is that I know absolutely nothing about this stuff. He isn't a gamer, this is purely a video podcast where they talk about comics, movies, etc., so I am not sure he even needs more than he has right now (the 4340 isn't a bad chip for a budget processor at all - 2 cores, 4 threads) except maybe an SSD (hard sell with him) and 16GB of RAM along with a clean Windows install (another hard sell but if he gets the SSD or if I build him a new machine altogether that he has no choice) but like I said, I've never done a podcast and I don't ever intend to. I just know that people have been doing them for years with much less without a problem.

 

No, it's not necessary at all. A 4770k would work a treat. Of course, if you just want to put a machine together without too much fussing around.

The thing I like about the Xeon is the price, and it lends itself to someone's needs growing as they hone their craft. Especially when rendering out video's and inevitably at 4k.

Possible could even ditch the Sound Blaster. They're not such necessity as they once were. I've left most of my music hardware in Oz I do a a fair bit of music production and have found little reason to ship my sound card to myself in Japan. So many times the recording static people get with onboard sound is usually because they don't 'separate the input jacks as independent input devices' in the Audio Manager.

 

The Sound Blaster was my idea. He wanted the highest quality audio that he could get without breaking the bank and the Audigy FX does 192kHz/24-bit without an issue. He's been happy with that change.

The Xeon is out if he's not going to let me reinstall Windows. I mean he has so much autostart crap that its not even funny plus having a single 1TB partition for a boot drive is just retarded, especially since WIndows 10 lets you actually move your documents and such to another partition or another drive entirely.

What software would you recommend? He doesn't like Audacity at all (I used it for years to direct-record my DJ mixes straight from my DJM-600 and never had a single issue but he doesn't like it) and he's been using Hangouts since apparently he can upload it directly to YouTube. He was talking about going so far as using Reason so he can insert clips and such live which I personally think is total overkill.

 

Fair enough then, you can do 192kHz/24-bit with onboard sound so it's more of a placebo that anything. But sometimes a placebo is what's necessary.

If its for laying down tracks its hard to recommend.
I started off with FL Studio, dabbled in Reason and Ableton Live, then went back to FL Studio. Then moved over to Logic on Mac which is technically superior but got nothing done because relearning things I already knew was soooo frustrating. I went back to FL Studio again since it's the devil I know and I can always get out whatever's in my head, it's been about 16 or so years since I started using it.

I'm not sure what Reason is like these days.. but I'd say any kind of live VJing is going to be pretty crud on a spinner, even on a SSD for that matter. I could imagine there would be a ton of underruns. I don't know this to be a fact though.

Audacity is a good recommendation for everyday recording that's pretty straight forward. I haven't done a live recording in a long time. The last time I actually used Audacity in the background for the first time and it worked a treat.

I'm no OBS guru, but that's a pretty solid program if he's looking to do all kinds of things at once and have it recorded. I would have thought that would be the best all-in-one for a podcaster / streamer .