I’m planning on building a new PC before the end of the year, my 5yo 4790k (Asus Z97, 16gb ddr2) is getting a bit old for my mixing habits.
What I need it to do:
run Windows 10, host an RME MADIFx card with 2 32ch AD/DA’s attached, run Cubase Pro10 (and to a much lesser degree Protools). I have a passively cooled nVidia card that I will port to the new build (if the built-in VGA isn’t good enough) - it needs to power a 27" UHD and a 4k TV.
I mostly record and mix audio at 96kHz, projects are 80% audio, 20% VSTi with long chains of plugins, lots of parallel paths and often over 50 channels of external FX involved.
low latencies are great but I don’t need ultra-low buffer settings. Whatever is auditioned live can be auditioned directly via totalmix.
I was thinking about a build based on the upcoming i9 10980x, Gigabyte aorus mobo, 64gb DDR4 and 3 M.2 970 drives.
But then I see that at the same time of the release of the Cascade Lake X cpu’s there’s also a new line of Ryzens being released. Price difference doesn’t seem like a whole lot and I noticed I’m still a bit scared of an AMD build. … anyone on this board with some well-founded knowledge of what to choose?
We can’t really know much for sure about the upcoming CPUs, we can only make educated guesses. AMD has generally speaking completely disrupted the price/performance situation, and on the high end even taken the performance crown per socket (i.e. server). So waiting is the smart thing to do if you can.
I posted two links in a new thread in this section exactly about questions like yours because people keep asking them, so search for that thread and follow those links.
My perspective is that both companies are somewhat intrusive but Intel is the lessor of two evils. AMD has graphics cards that need drivers that are currently fighting with my Win10 driven Intel DAW. This has never happened before but it seems AMD insists on a place at the table with their control center. I am very sure, were my PC AMD driven, I would not be having the issue I am having. AMD driver: 26.1309.05
Like puppies baby zebras have the most flavor when eaten alive, so no problem there.
They acted unethically in a capitalist marketplace in my opinion. In some markets (paraphrasing) they basically offered customers deep discounts to block out not just a competing part but all AMD from the customer’s product lineup. So if you were a maker of laptops and were looking at Intel for the high end and AMD for the low end Intel would discount the high end if you didn’t buy any AMD CPUs.
They’ve also been worse in advertising than AMD has been in my opinion, at least in the past 3-5 years.
Intel is simply not good for competition in the market place and that’s why we saw little development in core count for years as long as it could strong arm the market. As soon as AMD got competitive technically we went from 2-4 cores standard to 8 cores standard and now this November we’re looking at max 16 cores for the same (technical) market segment. There’s close to zero chance we’d have been here today if it hadn’t been for AMD not just becoming technically better but also having survived Intel’s unethical behavior.
So, I kind’a detest Intel. I’ll gladly admit that they at least had the best CPUs money could buy, but at the budgets I and many can afford I see close to no reason to buy Intel right now…