For what it's worth, if you're on the fence about buying a 9950x, the gains over the 7950x are only about 5% from benchmark tests. But in real applications, it won't be noticeable at all. My buddy just built a rig with the 9950x 128gb ram, we loaded a project with about 75 tracks, tons of waves plugins, heavy master buss chain, many of it MIDI with, serum 2, nexus 5, etc which ran perfect on a 7950x 128gb ram and we couldn't tell the difference on the 9950x. Set the buffer down to 32 and it still played without hiccups. I can't justify spending that extra money just so you can have the latest CPU. The 7950x is imo the standard for a professional studio PC if you're going the AMD route.

 

Did someone try already the intel ultra 9 285k? Since I´m using ableton live 12, for me the single thread performance is more important.
As far as I know, the I9-14900 has also really good single thread performance.

What about the 7950x?

 

Sincerely think it's maybe overkill, if you are going against Mac Mini M4 Pro, 9700X is similar ballpark option and even better (some DAW's can utilize all cores and etc on Windows), without you spending crazier amounts on cooling, case and etc.

 

I have the 9900X. CPU resources are never the problem. What I have notice become more of a problem is poor implementation of graphics with some plugins and no user settings to improve it (ie, the ones with a 'turn off opengl' or related user controls usually aren't the problem, and if they are the dev has given you the solution to make them not the problem). Actively using a second monitor and/or having a widescreen noticeably exacerbate graphic performance issues (this is just inherent to how graphics processing works, but don't want to assume every user also has had a pc gaming rig or something where this is much more common and upfront). I would hazard a guess that dual monitor setups apply to most users of these chips. Configuring a performance load app like Process Lasso greatly helps to avoid crashes or hangs due these plugins. Combined with a dedicated graphics card it mostly resolves these issues, ime.

So with that I'd consider if a graphics card might benefit you more and a certain point of return. If money is tight and shifting the cpu bucket to a cheaper one opens up enough that you could pull together 300ish for a previous gen card, the GPU may well give you gains well beyond the difference between chips.

CPU wise, you could go back maybe 3-4 generations on the AMD workstation chips and not have problems (not suggesting you do, just highlighting that the last $200 on a current flagship chip isn't buying anywhere near what the first $200-400 is).

 

Ram depends on how many samples you have loaded, but the CPU is in the latest generations, so it will technically do better than everything older than it. There are still plugins (more specifically some presets or fx algorithms) that can eat your CPU for breakfast. Regardless rest assured that the CPU keeps up with the best of them.