AMD Threadripper 1950x and Cubase

Steinberg Lounge Computer/Studio Hardware & Setup
#1

Hi guys.

I’m interested in doing an upgrade to my workstation and I’m curiously looking at a 1950x, but so far I’m unable to find much relevant information about this CPU and Cubase.
I’d like to know if there is anyone out there that has seen a stable system running this processor with Cubase 9.

Now I know that at the moment there’s a huge debate online about number of cores, threads, realtime performance in audio and buffer size and whatnot, but that’s exactly what I’m trying to avoid. I just like to know about people that used it in a studio environment and how it behaves in a rather general way with Cubase. I don’t care about latency issues, as I usually do not drop below 128 samples buffer size. I just don’t want there to be any major incompatibilities that would break workflow during arranging, recording and mixing. My major plugins are Kontakt and VEP. I don’t really care about the rest.

At the moment I’m using an Intel 5820K as my CPU with Windows 10 and sometimes it does suffer from audio dropouts, unless I set Cubase to Realtime performance in task manager, in witch case it works without any issues.
I want to do this upgrade because I also edit 4k footage and Premiere and Resolve do benefit hugely from 32 threads. I’d just like to know if this is a SOUND investment (pun intended) audio-wise, since audio production is my main activity.

Thanks!

#2

I think some people on Gearslutz have tried the Threadripper with Cubase. Do a search there.

If you want to cut 4k video then I’d consider “peripherals” as well. When you start looking at what you might hook up to your CPU you could end up in places where it gets tricky. The three things to consider (for video) off the top of my head are:

  1. For software like Resolve the encoding/decoding is on the CPU, and the effects are run on a GPU. If you add a dedicated GPU - meaning you have one regular video card for your GUI and one connected to nothing that only does effects - then you want sufficient PCIe lanes to accommodate for that. Some Intel CPUs won’t give you that many PCIe lanes and that may be a problem. All Threadripper CPUs on the other hand give you a ton of lanes.

Add to that a Blackmagic Design PCIe card to output video to a reference monitor (not GUI), maybe a PCIe audio card, and maybe more…

  1. Also there’s the issue of streaming data off of drives. One thing speaking in favor of Threadripper is that many motherboards have 3 m.2 drives piping data straight into the CPU, and AMD just released a free software to create a RAID 0 or 1 array on those m.2 drives. So with RAID the bandwidth is ridiculous. As far as I know most Intel x299 motherboards will have m.2 drives go through the chipset, and the chipset has 4 PCIe lanes (x4) to the CPU, which in turn means that a single m.2 drive will come close saturating that bandwidth all by itself (and on that same x4 link to the CPU are a bunch of other things including SATA etc).

  2. Thunderbolt. You want it? No go on Threadripper just yet. Maybe one current motherboard will get it, but right now it’s a no-go.