Upgrading my current rig and Im considering the 5820k.Also considering the i7 4790k as it will work out cheaper but don’t mind spending the extra cash for the 5820k for the extra power and its at least a 5 year investment.Dont want to over spend either as the price of ddr4 and the x99 platform is a good bit more for the 5820k.I use a lot of virtual instruments/sample libraries etc so Im leaning more towards the 5820k but if the 4790k would do the job Ill go with that.Anyone using either of these?
I’m using the 4790K, built my DAW last July when it came out. So far so good. I’m not a real power user, so I can’t give you a bunch of geek talk, but at the time it was available for the same price as the 4770K, so I felt why not.
I have 2 5820Ks unopened sitting behind me.
Intending on building 2 new boxes, soon.
Went with the 5820K over the 4790K mostly for the DDR4 memory (a bit faster), and the x99 (cutting edge!) chipset.
The typical x99 motherboard also allows for 64G of RAM (though I’m starting with 32 in each).
Hugh
Since even the 5820K wouldn’t play all my VSTs and their inserts (and all my Group Channels), in real-time, I decided on a bounce-in-place as you go workflow. The 4790K overclocked to 4.6 is doing that for me with some CPU to spare.
I can only do a large buffer and 44.1Khz sample rate. Both of which I was fine with (I mostly compose by mouse).
I don’t think the 5820K would quite break that threshold of being able to go lower for the buffer setting, so the 4790K was at the sweet spot for my needs.
If I didn’t overclock the 4790K, the 5820K at stock would have been required to run the effects I needed.
The 4790K is very stable even when overclocked. The 5820K probably is, too.
Your needs will surely be different, but thought I’d share.
I’ve just bought my first ready built desktop, from Scan in the UK, based on an Asus X99 Pro motherboard, 32Gb memory and a 5820.
Early days for me: I’m still at the point of optimising it for Cubase 8.10. I think I’ve just got rid of a frequent but irregular spike using BFD3 - and if I have, it’s because I messed about with different USB ports.
Like Jalcide says about the 4790, the 5820 seems very stable and cool; Scan have overclocked mine to 4.2Ghz and it’s aircooled. Machine is almost silent, which is a real bonus. Early days, but I’m currently running my UR824s with a 64 sample buffer size at 44.1Khz and it seems to be soaking it up very well.
I have no idea yet how much impact DDR4 memory is having on the speed of the DAW, but I’m certainly happy to have splashed out on 32Gb because I can load any number of big vstis (BFD3, Trillian, Halion 5, NI Session Horns, Studio Drummer) and they get soaked up without any problem.
So: first impressions of the 5820 are positive, but that might change at any point if I find the spikes come back and I can’t get rid of them…
Interesting.Ya it seems to exactly what im looking for.Hate always having to eye the cpu metre and calculate exactly how much instruments in kontakt I can use before the ram runs out(not a lot with 4 gigs lol).Sounds like ii will be well worth the investment.Keep me posted on the spikes btw.Hopefully they dont comeback 
I have the 4790k on a new machine I built a couple months ago with 16 gigs of ram. So far, no problems at all. The SSD drive is amazing as well. Really speeds things up. I am not a power user by any means though. I am a bit more of a traditionalist… put mics in front of players and record. That being said, I do use some VSTi’s, especially BFD when composing on my own without the band. I am mixing a new album at the moment and the current song I am working on has about 40 tracks, all audio, running 40 to 50 plugins and one tiny use of ‘Spector’. It runs without a hitch and the asio meter is hovers around 25%. The 4790k so far has exceeded my expectations, mostly because it was a vast improvement over my old machine (which still runs quite well) and has basically been trouble free (knock on wood!)
I think you would like it. Again, all the VSTi’s might be a different story though…
Cheers,
Dean
I have the 4790k in my new build and it munches anything I can throw at it, especially combined with my RME. It really is a bizarre feeling being able to simply pile on the plugins without a care and gives fantastic freedom when mixing.
Just as a footnote, I ended up turning off Asio Guard and found better performance and zero weird behaviour versus having it on. Worth trying if all else fails.
I’m on 5930x and all working well. Again Asio Gaurd off working better here as long as you tweak your system for a while for powersaving etc.
Thanks for all the replies.It seems either one will be pretty powerful and a huge improvement by the looks of it.One question though,with the 5820k having more cores that would surely mean more processing power?Not so beneficial for gaming(which i have no interest in) but for cubase,the more cores the better right?It is a bit slower than the 4790k but Id happily trade some speed for that extra bit of processing power.
4770 here and no problems.
my current template has 30 kontakts and the max cpu I have seen is around 30%
Thats great to know.Im currently on AMD phenom2 quad core with 4 gigs of ram,32bit,windows 7.Im just hanging in there lol.I can manage an ok session but im always cautious with what gets loaded up and regularly have to freeze.Not great for a productive workflow.Im 99% sure Ill go with the 5820k now anyway.Might be overkill but it should serve me well for the next few years at least.
Just to update my earlier post: the BFD3 spike has not returned. I think my solution was to change the usb connection for my UR824 sound cards. So, early impressions of the 5820k are very positive, I’m looking forward to using it more substantially this weekend.
Steve.