Hi.
I Have a i7 700x with 6 cores 12 threads, 32 GB RAM DDR4 1.2mhz.
Im thinking on upgrading my system. The first goal is to be able to work with eavy projects ( lots of vst and audio files with uad and waves plugins) with my buffer at minimum ( 32) to get lower lattency possible.
I was adviced to upgrade to an AMD Ryzen 7 5800X (or even the ryzen 9 3900x) but i never worked with AMD processors and cubase always has intel processors for twenty years… Any one can tell me about there experience with this processor and cubase performance?
In passmark tests my i7 as 12720 , and this new amd 28660 ! almost 3x more can i expect this kind of better performance in cubase ? could cubase 11.5 take full advantage of this processors?
Thanks for any help!
I’ve seen reports by 2-3 people using AMD TR for a DAW with good results.
As for EPYC it’s not really a line of CPUs that are meant for these kinds of workloads. The clock speeds are in line with other server lineups so it’s not really what we need I think. In addition to that AMD only yesterday released news on their Zen 3 EPYC CPUs, so the Ryzen series has had Zen 3 for a while now whereas EPYC just got it.
In the context of a DAW, it’s important to understand the difference between single-core performance and multi-core performance when looking at performance scores.
A DAW can be bottlenecked by low single-core performance.
And as @MattiasNYC alluded to, CPUs designed for server platforms often have lots of cores (bringing up some performance scores), but relatively low single-core performance.
For the ultimate DAW machine, you want both:
High clock speed, so each track can be processed really fast; this is especially important for
– tracks with fancy reverbs and other high CPU fx
– tracks with modelling (not sampled) type instruments (often high CPU)
Lots of cores so you can have many tracks distributed across many cores
And ideally also another thing:
Lots of PCI lanes, so all of those NVMe SSDs with humongous sample libraries and your epic 500 audio track symphonic orchestra and giant choir can talk to the CPU at full speed in parallel with your fancy audio interface and potentially a powerful graphics card that allows you to make funky YouTube videos and become an independently wealthy influencer/creator
Sorry i got a bit confused. what its most important to look for? less cores with high single-core performance or more cores with low single core performance ?
Better can you suggest the ideal processor at this time to buy in your opinion?
Much like looking for the ideal spouse, there’s no such thing as an ideal processor for everyone.
What’s best for you depends on your priorities. In my prior post, I’ve tried to articulate which parts of the computer are important for which kinds of situations, so you can can make an educated guess of your most likely needs.
For myself, I would try to pick a CPU with close to 5 GHz maximum clock speed, and as many cores and PCI lanes as my budget allows. Also important: The motherboard needs to be good enough to support all of the PCI lanes available on the CPU.
I don’t have strong opinion on Intel vs. AMD, because having AMD this strong hasn’t been the case for a long time, and therefore I have no experience with AMD.
For low latency, the audio interface makes a really big difference, since some companies write really good and fast ASIO drivers and keep supporting their older hardware with updated drivers for a long time. – And other companies not so much.
My first goal is to achieve low latency. My audio interface in lowest buffer 32 allow 1ms off latency. But rarely i can use This buffer because off audio dropouts and overload performance. What the most important to look for ?
As Nico said it depends on what you’re doing. Generally as far as I know you benefit more from a faster CPU when you have a long chain of processing- meaning the signal flows from one process into the next, then another, then another and so on in series. Having a lot of processing in parallel often will load more cores.
I asked you to search because I even started a brand new thread a while back because people keep asking this question and never seem to do a search on the topic. For benchmarks we currently have mostly ones for AMD’s previous generation 3xxx-series. You can find DAW specific benchmark results at SoundOnSound and Scanproaudio. The test is called DAWbench… Find the latest article and you can then compare different CPUs.
The test has a “DSP” part which is basically just a heavy plugin, and then it has a VST instrument part which is a combination in which the list how many voices can play back from a sampler. In both cases they increase the load until there’s crackling.
The latest 5xxx-series CPUs from AMD should be significantly better than the previous generation btw.
Then you can read the following thread starting at the end:
If you don’t find what you’re looking for you can ask for recommendations in that thread for either Intel or AMD.
As for PCIe lanes the “consumer”/“prosumer” lines from Intel and AMD have roughly the same amount of lanes with the exception of the latest AMD generation supporting PCIe gen 4, which has higher throughput. So hypothetically you could bottleneck an m.2 NVME SSD drive on an Intel setup but likely won’t do that on an AMD setup. If you want more lanes though you end up with what’s more of a “workstation” platform from either company, and that’s going to be pricier and generally lower clocked CPUs. In addition to more lanes though you can get more cores, more memory channels, and some other goodies.
My hunch is that on the AMD side you really should be looking at a 5xxx-series Zen 3 Ryzen CPU, not previous generation. I think Intel just made public a new lineup which could be competitive in price, but that also means that AMD might respond by lowering their prices - assuming they can keep supply up. Right now CPUs are a bit expensive…
Then first ensure you have a real good low latency audio interface.
Latency also depends a lot on the plugins you’re using. In the Cubase Plugin Manager you can see how much latency is introduced by each plugin.
And if you run high latency plugins in series, it can add up.
For example a high latency compressor and a high latency reverb as audio inserts in a regular channel plus a high latency multiband compressor in the master mix end up being 3 effects in series, each of them adding to the total latency between you pressing a note on the keyboard or plucking a string or hitting a drum and hearing the result of your action.
You need a DAW Software that also can scale to utilize all cores. Cubase seems to be stuck to only use one thread plugin GUI so that is one bottleneck.
this is somehow misleading… they provide PCIe 4.0 lanes
the software (drivers, OS) has to be compatible and of course hardware with PCIe 3.0 or lower will work with reduced speed
