Hello everyone! Dorico slows down on large scores, such as opera scores, etc. I decided to upgrade my computer. Please advise which Ryzen to replace my 5600x with? If multithreaded, do I need Ryzen 9 5950X, or with a large L3 cache Ryzen 7 5800X3D? There is also one with a higher frequency for a single core, this is 5900 - but in multithreaded mode 5950 will be better because of the larger cache, but not much… Is Dorico multithreaded?
From this thread:
There is a thread with some Dorico benchmarks here. I had a 5950x build for several years, first with 64GB then eventually 128, but recently sold it off for parts. On the 1000 bar condensing test described in that thread, I had the following times:
Enabling condensing: 3857 ms
Disabling condensing: 3649 ms
(For reference, my M3 MacBook Pro with 36GB is substantially faster: Enabling condensing: 2681 ms, Disabling condensing: 2074 ms)
If you’re looking to replace your 5600x with a 5950x because you can keep the same mobo, RAM, etc, I doubt you are going to see much improvement with Dorico use. CPU Benchmark rates the single thread performance of the 5600 at 3451 and the 5950x at 3469 so not much improvement to be had there. If you really want to improve performance with Dorico, I would look at that single thread benchmark list and get the fastest your budget allows, even if that means waiting until you have funds for a new mobo.
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Well now. If you have courage you could simply overclock, assuming a grunty enough PSU and good cooling. Install AMD Ryzen Master and learn about PBO to start with. Then, you’ll find instructions here:
In the timewarped computer world we live in the Ryzen 5000 series is old now. You don’t mention whether you can upgrade your MOBO but if you can, go for the latest high end Ryzen you can. I am using a Ryzen 7 9800X3D for my Dorico system. For me, it’s way overkill, but I don’t do big opera scores, merely very complex ones.
I would also add that I don’t really know what determines the throughput of Dorico on current CPU’s. How much of Dorico is multithreaded and how much processing has to wait for single threaded rendezvous is entirely hidden to us and very hard to determine. So it’s hard to know what sort of ultimate CPU may be suitable. And then there’s RAM speed to be considered, and adequate RAM for projects, SSF speed and general computer throughput which is a function of many variables.
I looked up CPU Benchmark figure for my Ryzen 7 9800X3D and the single threaded mark test which I ran is 4320. For a greatly more expensive CPU than yours, that’s only 1.2 times better overall. This CPU excels at other things it would seem (in fact some of the other tests are insane!)
There’s a law of computing which states that no computer is ever fast enough for your application. With my state of the art, frightfully expensive Windows 11 Pro machine, I find it surprising (although I should not, given the statement of the law 
that things still take time to happen (although it boots to usable desktop in about one second after login.
By the way, the official Steinberg system requirements for Dorico 6 are the usual absolute minimum baseline specs, no use at all when trying to design a high end system.
I think a search of the forum would show a lot of Dorico benchmarks people have run.
This was with 5950x, Gigabyte X570S AERO G mobo, G.Skill Ripjaws V 64GB (2x32 here, later 4x32) 4000 MHz DDR4 RAM, Corsair liquid cooler, and everything on Samsung NVMe drives. You could always do the 1000 bar condensing test (Silence template) on your 5600x and compare times. If there’s enough of a speed difference, then upgrade, if it’s minimal, then wait until later.
(This was a reasonably expensive build at the time, but I was blown away at how much faster an M3 MacBook was. I hadn’t owned a Mac in 30 years but the speed difference with Dorico got me to switch.)
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Platform change, but you may want to read this topic:
Looks like Mac kicks it out of the park.
Same, as well as the laptop hardware experience. I’m never going back to a PC laptop.
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I’m in the process of buying components for a new computer and I’m going with Intel 285k for the CPU, for the simple reason that it outperforms most current Ryzen for audio and especially Cubase underperforms on Ryzen. I don’t know how this translates to Dorico exactly but since the Dorico audio engine is based on Cubase it is likely a similar situation.
The latest Ryzen processors are great but performance with games and video editing and productivity software don’t always translate to audio performance.
I also hope that a native Dorico for Windows ARM might come at some point as I suspect it would perform similarly to the high end Apple Silicon chips.
Based on my personal observations of the market in recent years, upgrading an existant build just with a stronger CPU is rarely worth it if single thread performance is the main bottleneck. As it seems, single core performance within a single manufacturer’s portfolio is mostly determined by two factors: allowed power consumption and silicon generation. Compare for example an i5 and an i9 from the same generation and TDP class in their single core ratings in Geekbench’s database, and you will realize that there’s not much of a difference - at least clearly not enough to justify spending money for upgrading only the CPU. It might be slightly different if you happen to have the first generation of a particular socket and the latter is extraordinarily long lived though, so you can skip at least one or two silicon generations while remaining on the same mainboard.
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I agree completely.
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