Which CPU? E5-2697W or I7-4960K for Cubase 7

Hi All,

I am building a new PC for cubase 7. It will be a VI machine so I need to get as much power as I can into it. Which CPU would you recommend the new I7 or the new E5 xeon?

Which one is more suited to running cubase 7?

Kind Regards

Anthony

Here is the main difference between “I” and “Xeon”.

The current line of Xeons are based on the same architecture as the i7. The difference is usually that the Xeons are the cream of the crop. They run cooler and at lower voltages and are spec’d for 24/7 continuous usage. Otherwise, performance is usually identical. Xeons are able to be used in multi-socket motherboards, where i7s are not (which is why the Mac Pros use them).

The additional reliability of the Xeons is very important in servers, especially rackmount and blade-enclosed servers where the lower heat dissipation and power consumption are essential. These benefits usually don’t mean too much to all but the most extreme overclockers though, so people in the desktop segment usually ignore it due to the enormous difference in the price of both the CPU and the motherboards needed to support them.

thanks for you reply. hopefully someone can chime in with information on which CPU would be more suited to Cubase 7 running on windows 8. Assuming you don’t dual socket the Xeon and are happy to pay for the extra reliability, would it actually make much difference performance wise?

will cubase 7 utilise all 12 cores on the E5? will this mean it outperforms the i7 even though it has a high clock speed?

more cores low freq is very bad for daws i learned it the hard way…

i have dual xeon with 48gb ram and i still have spikes.

i’m gonna switch it to 4930k oc that and that is the perfect solution.

cubase 7 support up to 32 cores as windows 7/8 does but music is still prefer high freq.

and windows 8 is not recomended at all but if you gonna use it You Might as Well install windows 8.1

" and windows 8 is not recomended at all but if you gonna use it You Might as Well install windows 8.1 "

If your audio drivers support win 8 then I would highly recommend it if you wish to use the system for things other than your DAW. If you use the Metro apps and don’t accept background processing for these apps, then you have the ability to run these apps and know that they are not going to affect your performance when you swap back to the DAW.

Says who? A bunch of Apple-paid tech “journalists”?

Cubase runs fine on Win 8, actually even better than on Win 7.

BTW, don’t bother with the Xeons. A huge waste of money. If a good i7 is still insufficient for what you do, consider buying extra computers and networking them via Vienna Ensemble Pro. 2 or even 3 i7 machines will completely crush any Xeon-based machine and cost about the same.