Please help me to choose my new hardware setup

Hello there,
I’m going to put my actual setup (i7-920 Based) on retirement.

I’m planning to build a new rig based on AMD 3900X (maybe 3950X).
After days reading on the web about specs/tests/reviews/… I believe that you guys could give me some help.

PC Purposes:
-Cubase DAW → 90% of my concerns are to obtain rock solid stability and performances using Cubase
-Reaper DAW → I use it as Video Rig synched through MTC
-Premiére Pro editing → I need to use Premiére Pro for Editing of sometimes large sessions, but it’s not everyday use like Cubase

In Cubase I compose/produce/record/mix
I use VEPro slaved to Cubase to host my Orchestral Libraries (on the same host, but I will transfer on a Server in future)

First of all, my assumptions (arguing is very welcome):
-Right now AMD seems a better value for music production/composition/mixing than INTEL.
-Intel seems to have a little edge over AMD on single core processsing (and overall on the non parallelisable processes), but it’s a small edge
-AMD seems to have a significant edge over INTEL on multi core processing (cause of its pipeline and core number)
-AMD seems to exhibit more “cross core data latency” than INTEL, which manifests in ASIO spikes and general instability at lower buffer sizes. However it seems that it mostly mitigated in the AMD 3000 series, and even with this “issue” AMD perform better than INTEL (at least in the same price league).
-AMD seems to be very sensible to RAM speed and timing than INTEL. The “cross core data latency” issues seems to be mitigated a lot using faster RAM.
-AMD CPUs seems to greatly benefit in stability when used in tandem with AMD Graphics Cards (ASIO Spikes are minimized). AMD with NVidia seems to not work well (ASIO spikes seems way bigger with NVidia GPUs)


Doubts
-Is AMD really a Good Choice for a Cubase based DAW in 2020?
-Which Motherboard/Chipset do you guys suggest me and why?
-Do you suggest me a liquid cooler?
-Which RAM brand/speed/timing (or simply which product) do you suggest me? I’m planning to buy 64GB, eventually expand it to 128GB in future.
-Premiére seems to work a lot better with NVidia GPUs, so does it’s really needed AMD GPUs with Ryzen CPUs, or is it more cause of AMD GPUs bad drivers/past-records?

My actual INTEL Based Rigs lasted around 10 years, never a trouble, and since Windows 10 1603, it’s rock solid stable, never a crash.

My setup is built around
Audio Card: RME HDSPe MADI FX
Interface: Orion 32
Windows 10 Pro 1909
Cubase Pro 10.5.12


The latency roundtrip it’s acceptable even with a ASIO Buffer Size of 256, but sometimes it’s better to have 64 (or even 32) when recording vocals or similar.

Any suggestion is very welcome
Thank you

P.s. I worked as System and Network Administrator in the last 15 years, so I’m not a complete noob in the IT field, feel free to talk technical.

Computer/Studio Hardware & Setup forum

  • I think AMD is a decent choice, just like Intel. Scanproaudio has DAWbench charts which it seems you might have read already so you probably know what you’re getting into. Gearslutz.com has some threads about both Ryzen and Threadripper in the computer section and it might be worth checking them out.

  • Off the top of my head the AMD x3xx-series (which I have) is probably a bit too old to bother with. They might work fine with Zen 2 CPUs but there are probably a few things missing, like StoreMI etc. The latest x5xx-series has PCIe 4.0 which may or may not be of interest to you. So I would probably get the latest x5xx-series even though some get the previous generation to save some money. No views on which boards to choose.

  • It seems to me that using a liquid cooler is possibly a bit overkill. From what I understand there are many cases where the main benefit of it is that it keeps lower temperatures longer, but ultimately it ends up being the same if the stress/heat generation of the CPU is maintained over a longer period of time. And then conversely it’ll bring the temperature down to the idle level more slowly than air (because the liquid takes a bit longer to change temperature). So basically it might not make sense. I think it seems like more hassle than it’s worth. My Ryzen 7 1700 overclocks to 3.6-3.7GHz with the stock air cooler without it even making much noise… so…

  • RAM brand… no idea. People recommended Samsung B-Die for the actual RAM itself for Zen 1 as it clocked higher, more reliably, and with lower latency. Right now I’d say the one thing to pay attention to is the Infinity Fabric speed which is tied to the memory speed. If I recall correctly it’s at one speed until memory goes above a certain speed at which point IF drops to half. I think it’s around 3700MHz on the memory. So once you go above that point what you gain from faster memory you lose in lower IF speed basically.

  • If Premiere likes Nvidia then use that. I had issues with my Radeon VII until I successfully used “DDU” to delete old drivers before installing new ones. So from what I’ve seen a lot of users have had bad experiences when they switched from Nvidia to AMD because of old driver files lingering on the system. Deleting them thoroughly was a bit of a hassle without “DDU” and that’s why people had issues. I’ve had zero problems since I did this. In my case I wanted to start messing around in Davinci Resolve, and PugetSystems has a bunch of benchmarks for both it and Premiere. The Radeon VII performs really, really well in Resolve and the only two drawbacks are that it’s discontinued and draws a fair amount of power. But I got mine at less than half the price I’d have to pay for an Nvidia card with the same performance. 16GB of HBM2 memory. Pretty great. But absolutely get Nvidia if that performs better in Premiere. Should work fine with Ryzen.