If you're running a mastering studio, yes. For mixing, every track is on a separate thread in pretty much every DAW you could think of.

 

Not really. Audio PCs rarely had Thunderbolt to begin with since it's expensive and not really needed. On Mac it's a different story, because Apple decided to force Thunderbolt on everyone, so hardware manufacturers decided they might use that as it's already available. Not too long ago you couldn't run UAD stuff on Windows through Thunderbolt since there were no Windows drivers at all. There's a reason why UAD went with Firewire/PCI for PCs and just started to add Thunderbolt Windows support as devices come along that have Thunderbolt ports.

You could play with UAD using Satellite USB/Firewire or the PCI cards for way cheaper than it costs to get Thunderbolt + UAD gear that uses it. Or just go with Dante if you're really all about the latency advantages.

 

add a i9 9900k and a 32gb of ram and you'''''''''''re set for life , Ryzen3k is a good reason to wait for a while , foremost add as your OS HDD make it SSD install windows on top of it , by the way a good midi piano for whoever hasn't clicked a couple of midi keyboard keys in his life the X-Key 25 usb or air whatever your wallet can handle , i have bros and sisters that made top10 hits using only a couple of hjits on the keyboard and midi keys

 

The i9 9900k is total overkill for music production. Your DAW will barely benefit from the extra power and you'll probably only see a 3-5% reduction in cpu usage if you compare it to an older i7. Terrible bank for your buck.

 

It is not just the DAW. many plugins use multithreading independent of the DAW (such as Kontakt, U-he Diva, Mercurial plugins). They use it for internal calculations such as EQ, FFT analyzing, etc.

 

this depends on which plugins and how they are distributed across the project, for ex. if there's a big mastering chain and few busses, not all stuff can be processed simultaneously

 

I would strongly recommend a Ryzen build.
In the past al my builds we're Intel, since i switched to AMD i noticed better performance in DAW-use.

 

its the only good reason to run win10

 

"Thunderbolt"

to be perfectly honest, I'd say Thunderbolt is overrated;
even current TB3 is slower than old PCIexpress 2.0, so only obsession people make are because its "external" nature, and maybe versatility?

when I check USB 2.0, I can see it can handle about 70 audio channels, USB 3.0 can do much more,
similarly 1Gbit ethernet can comfortably handle 128 audio channels (all sorts of audio over ip solutions like Dante, AVB, Ravenna do run on Gbit speed fine),
speaking of video then, it's PCIexpress for interfaces, and optical wiring for transfers where losless 4K requires no less than 12Gbit wires to run at;
on top of all that, Thunderbolt isn't free to implement and use, so many manufacturers in past used various solutions based on PCIexpress custom cards anyway

 

It is. That's why new AMD Mainboards now have a TB3 header included, for future USB4 Upgrades .. check this.

https://www.pcbuildersclub.com/en/2019/03/thunderbolt-3-is-royalty-free-and-integrated-into-usb-4/

 

Its all about workflow, type of work you do and compromises.
I would have to disagree.
A year ago i upgraded from an old but good i7 3770k to a 8700k.
Big difference, a lot bigger projects are possible, faster responding daw. More vst instruments, plugins, a lot more, you have more creative freedom.
Today i would totally get a 9900k.

 

In your case you went from a 3rd gen i7 to an 8th gen one. Of course the performance difference is huge. But compairing the 8700k to the 9900k is a complete different story. The 99 is obviously faster but you are not going to see much difference in some real world tasks because there are always other reasons for your performance to be capped other than CPU performance

 

If you are saving every dime to build a workstation than a used 8700k would indeed be a very good option, otherwise the 9900k is only a 100$ more expensive, yet you get two additional cores, faster speeds, newer architecture, etc.

 

oh my bad, thanks for heads up

I briefly checked some other information at various sources, and it's a bit tricky anyway because TB3 controller will allocate/consume 4 PCIex lanes, which means AMD will need to provide enough lanes with their CPUs on top of the GPUs and NVME drives lanes also provided from PCIex

 

Intel faces the same problem with socket 1151, but AMD with x570 motherboards
have PCIe 4.0 twice the bandwidth of PCIe 3.

 

(moved to a new thread....sorry, don't know how to delete from here!)

 

Last edited: Aug 21, 2019

Thanks for everyone's help and input, I appreciate it greatly.

I've ordered an i9 9900k based pc. Was going to build it myself, but by the time I'd bought all the parts the saving was only around £100 on having it built for me. I don't mind building pc's, I don't like having to wait around for all the components to arrive or keeping a track on where I've bought something from should a part go bad.

Bought it around a month before I originally planned, who knows whether prices will be negatively affected or not post the proposed Halloween Brexit in the UK?