CPU Followup

WaveLab
1

HI all,


Ive read the earlier posts about CPU recommendations. so I now understand that the turbo speed and NVM2 SSD are some of the most important factors in rendering files. Im mostly rendering individual montages with master bus plugs.
My question is Im trying to decide between 2 powerful mini PCs. Both will be equiped with large (2TB) NVMe SSD & RAM.

Could someone please throw their opinion in here for preference & why?

PC1- Minisforum H31G
Intel 9700f Clockspeed: 3.0 GHz
Turbo Speed: 4.7 GHz
Cores: 8 Threads: 8
Typical TDP: 65 W
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050Ti

Or

PC2 - Aspen by SimplyNuc
AMD® Ryzen™ R7-4800U Clockspeed: 1.8 GHz
Turbo Speed: 4.2 GHz
Cores: 8 Threads: 16
Typical TDP: 15 W3
AMD® Radeon™ Vega 8 Graphics (built in)

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated!

2

PC1 will obviously be faster: the same number of true cores, base CPU frequency, external GPU.

3

these are completely different systems
the Intel is a desktop CPU the AMD a mobile one…
the difference in the TDP makes the most difference between them

4

PG,

Thanks for the response.

I think what is most confusing is why the 4800U has much better benchmarks that the 9700F.
Is that due to the 16 vs 8 threads?

CPU Mark Rating
As of 7th of October 2020 - Higher results represent better performance
AMD Ryzen 7 4800U
17,248
Intel Core i7-9700F @ 3.00GHz
13,767
PassMark Software © 2008-2020

5

What is important is the number of true cores. The difference 16 vs 8 threads can only make a (small) difference and only in certain benchmarks.
Anyway, a single benchmark does not tell much. What is important is a benchmark for the type of applications you are using, it it exists.

6

PG,

Thank you. Would you be able to make a judgment with these benchmarks? Im not sure which would relate to audio rendering, as no one really uses audio software for benchmarks (unfortunatley)

7

It seems they’re not very up to date anymore, but maybe you can still find some useful info here:
http://dawbench.com/index.html

8

Thank you Arjan, but its not very relevant. Seems like a good idea that was never followed up on.

I still dont really have a definitive answer to my question, oh well!

9

Hi gsmaster. Maybe the CPU Mark Rating difference is based significantly on the TPD that sd10ss was talking about. or the running cost:

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i7-9700F-vs-AMD-Ryzen-7-4800U/

If it comes up with a blank list, just add 9700f and 4800U and click Compare.

I obviously don’t know a whole lot about what all is considered in that rating, but If you’re mostly interested in Wavelab render speed for any given montage, I did do a bunch of testing years ago based on cpubenchmark’s Single Thread Ratings, which I thought correlated VERY well with how quickly a given montage with all it’s plugin processing and everything else would render on a Mac or Windows machine with a given processor. If you check to see the Single Thread Rating for your current computer, I think you can just compare the numbers by percent to see how much faster either of these will be for a given montage. As PG said, the Intel will be faster. Probably not by a lot, but some. They’re both faster than anything I have.

I’m basing this on the assumption that all montage renders are still running in a single process, so single core, but maybe that’s changed for some montage render methods (?) Really not sure.

If you’re interested in batch processing with multiple cores, that would be a different consideration, but they both have 8 cores anyway.