My first question is, how many cores does Cubase best run on alongside plugins such as Acustica, Slate Digital, Fabfilter, Soundtoys, Waves, Kontakt, Sylenth, Arturia, Spectrasonics, IKMultimedia, Xfer, Celemony, Valhalla?
Are there specific types of CPUs that work best with Cubase? I see available Xeon, AMD and Intel. Maybe there are others to consider? Which works best?
If anyone has recently build a powerful DAW system this year, is it still recommended to have a slave system or are the new CPUs powerful enough to cope with the workload?
It is usually by the end of production where buffer increases do not fix crackles and pops etc for me, hence looking into a better CPU.
The other possible issue in my case could simply be my graphics card?
Anyhow, have reached here thinking that as my CPU maxes out, a new system is on the cards. I have been advised that a 48% increase with an AMD 3900X, DDR4, 32GB 2666MHZ Ram; would be expected. This would cost £800.
Of course a faster system will help. Preferably more speed and more cores. I would stick to intel but more expensive. But… sometimes it is only one plugin or brand that causes these issues. In a project that is over the edge try disabling plugins and most of all vsti `s one by one to see if it is caused by one. If for example it is a certain vsti, it is easy to freeze that one at mix down. Just the other day I had a project in which by freezing the roland vsti asio load dropped from 90% to 50%.
Is this even officially documented? I have just built an AMD 3900x system which provides 24 cores by SMT and when I tested it without SMT with 12 cores my cpu meter came donw by ca. 20%. I don’t know whether this is specific for this particular session I tested it with or not. With 24 cores it looked like some cores didn’t get used.
Xeon is the server range from Intel, Threadrippers are AMDs server cpus.
This will totally depend on your specific user case.
48% sounds very specific. Either this source of information is incredibly well informed or is comparing benchmarks which might lead to misleading results that don’t translate exactly into the real world.
I did swap out my Nvidia graphic card for an AMD on my old system and the dpc latency came down to 10%. I can’t say how much real impact that had on my system. I’d go with AMD nowadays because of that.
See my system specs below, I build this 2 years ago, I would go with Xeon because it has more L2,L3 cache compared to i7 plus you have to use a video card anyway so you really don’t need i7 or i9 that has built in video chip.
When it comes to video of course the more ram the better but I never had any issue with this setup until I upgraded to 3 monitors of which main one is 21X9 34 inch LG, never had audio dropout but sometimes page refresh is slower.
Most of my recordings utilize sample libraries that are loaded into ram (30GB used) so a very high speed SSD is not critical for me, although I am able to stream dozen of audio tracks. Look at my project on YT below, I believe I used close to 30 tracks mostly sample libraries with Kontakt, it takes a few minutes to load that project completely (probably 3 minutes), now if you are planning to do projects like these constantly then it is better to have a slave system which has lots of ram and fast CPU and your sample libraries are loaded always but your master system does not have to be very powerful except the video card.
