Hello everyone, I'm building a new desktop DAW soon. I'm looking into processor choices, and I'm stuck deciding which one is the suitable choice for me.

My main job is song-production and mix-down plus occasional mastering. I prefer to run with live VSTi inside the projects as long as I can (I love to tweak), but I'm not planning to do live recording in any foreseeable future (can't afford multiple mics ). I understand that for now Sandy Bridge is the king of the performance per core, but I want to know how AMD's 8 Cores scales up to Intel's 4 Cores/8 Threads in real world's applications like FL Studio, Reaper and ProTools 8. Please advise me. My budget limit is up to $2500. But it would be better if it is under $1600.

If you all advise me to wait and see how AMD's Bulldozer based new desktop and server chips will turn out against Intel's Sandy Bridge-E or Ivy Bridge, I'm more than welcome to wait. I don't need to get a new DAW immediately. I'm just researching my options if I really have to buy one in 6 months. Please forgive me If my questions are not clear. English is not my strong suit.

 

Is Ivy Bridge the one that will be based on 3D architecture? I'm curious about that myself...

And clearly you are not a native English speaker, your grammar, syntax, and spelling are FAR too good lol

 

As far as I understand, AMD and intel are the same in terms of performance but AMD is just cheaper. But this is the first time I've heard of these newer microarchitectures, so don't take my word for the newer processors...

In any case, some information can be found on Wikipedia.

 

It's about what latency the new processor can achieve with your choice of audiodriver.
At this point in time all Intel Quadcore i7 based platforms can do 64 samples. So monitoring through the puter is viable.
(128 samples and we start to notice a delay between our singing and playing and our hearback of the recorded signal)

Any incompatibility between the puter and our audiodevice and that relation is screwed. So it's all about the right chipset on the mobo, de choice of audiocard
and it's driver. At this point in time Roland/Edirol, M-audio/Avid, RME and a few others make decent ASIO drivers.

I assume any i7 system is a good choice. The current 6 cores from AMD seem to do great aswell.

Newer architectures should allways be judged by the quality of the chipsets on the motherboards aswell. Because there can be many things wrong with just that.

www.dawbench.com

 

From what I've read on the topic, Intel chipsets are always preferred due to the compatibility issues (Intel chipsets has less compatibility issues with audio interfaces). However, I personally would opt for AMD based system due to performance/price ratio. But in case of AMD system I would suggest to test the system beforehand, especially I would look for any unusual CPU spikes when using audio interfaces. Another thing to consider is the amount and quality of RAM. DAWs and plugins are quite sensitive to the quality of RAM, so better RAM would certainly help to avoid unexpected crashes. And of course if you're working with large wave files (which I assume you do, as you are doing mix-downs), you should think of getting pair of fast HDDs (one for the system and software and another for the audio files). Also what I always pay attention to is the loudness of cooling system. It's always irritating when fans are louder than the music ;)

 

I can tell you from experience with i7 cores that they are awesome! I use ableton live with the i7 930 cpu @3.2GHz and i have NEVER gone over 75% of cpu usage, ive had large projects with maybe 10+ vst's running plus samples playing without a problem. I think that u should get a minimum of 6gb of ram (i got Corsair ram), things run much more smoothly like large projects. I have the western digital black hard drives, in the 2 years ive owned them none of the 3 hard drives has given me any problems at all. I built my pc for $1,300 not including mouse, monitor, pc case & keyboard which i already had. just try to look for good deals online for your parts. If your lucky look for a microcenter near you, thats where i bought my cpu for $199 where everyone else had it for something like $289.

EDIT* just watched a couple of videos on the second gen Sandy brige cores, they look very promising, especially the intel quick sync feature if you convert videos often.

 

Errmm... Did you really mean to say 10+ vst's or it should be 100+ vst's? I can easily run 10+ vst's on my 3 year old HP tx2600 notebook Well, unless those 10+ VST's are WaveArts TubeSaturator

 

Yea now that i think of it 10 is a little low, vst's like massive, predator, plus each of those vst's have effects added like eq, tubes, sausage fattener lol, and im talking about complex sounds, 4 voices, unison, reverb + delay etc, u know things that are use up more cpu. I just did a quick test and i ran 40 instances of massive with a supersaw lead of 8 voices each, quality on ultra, with reverb and delay, plus 1 kick drum and some hi hats, cpu at 85%, didnt want to add more because the sound started to crackle up my sound card cant handle it lol (im getting a new one soon). i think its more than enough power to make a large project and have no issues with cpu slowness.

 

go for intel core i7

from what ive heard:
sandy bridge is a "consumer" chip with SOC (system on chip - everything from sound to video on the same chip)

core i7 is a "prosumer" chip that means it is meant for professionals

*yes*

 

Thats not that large of a project.. really. *no*

I use the same setup... Ive maxed out many a time...

My advice, get the bestest fastest, greatest awesomest neatest, non-/faily CPU u can afford

Then in 6 months... you can feel the tidal waves of regret come over u as u see, a more bestest one, for the same price....

... or less.

 

i know dude read my other post

 

dude what all comes down to... is where your fave daw is headed and how you work!!! the new 8 core chips are coming out and i for one cant wait!!! but once i see the price tag ill just get turned off and wait till they go down a bit and get more stable!! but if you can hold on a bit and wiat to see how the chips end up performing and the pricess start going down a bit, you can get your self a good puter for a good prices! also not sure if you were going too build it your self??? if you are, it is much cheaper!! i build a 2,500 computer for about 1,500 meaning that if i would have bought a computer from hp, dell, alienware or from a retailer with the same specs it wwould have cost me 2500. so do your research and wait a bit to see what your newcores are like and youll get a good deal!!

 

I just made a sandy bridge for one of my clients... I7-975 on the dp67bg a coolermaster 650 extreme PS,8GB of DDR 3 1666 memory (kingston) and a Nvidia gt580 Grafics board....(it will still run Games too but it´s an audio Comp)
It runs like a charm. Tons of plugins and depending on the HD a load of tracks runing Cubase 5.1.2 not a stutter.
Out of bad experiences with AMD and more so the chipsets surrounding those processors I turned to Intel - Intel configurations and am realy happy with it.
Ohhhh the price was a bit less than 1500$ inculding a coolermaster chassis a DVD-RW and 1.5 TB HD

 

An important thing is the missing PCI lane on all Sandy Bridge chipsets except B65, Q67 and the C200 series.
If you're using a PCI interface, go for another platform (or the business and server chipsets), since the additional controllers (e.g. PCIe-to-PCI bridges) are not designed for real time applications.

@Derwisch: i7-975 is not Sandy Bridge.

 

my 2 cents
1. The audio card and motherboard are very important, they must be in harmony. IE: an FM sound chipset on the motherboard and a wave chipset on the card=lag.
2. The best motherboards are the ones built for servers:
a. normally they have a sound chip on the board that you can shut off and run your own card.
b. they allocate your resources correctly IE: when one core is precieved to be reaching 50 to 100% it will send the work load to another core and so on..the same
with ecc ram and graphics. The management system is far superior to the regular home desktop motherboards.
c. They last longer, but can be confusing to configure.
3. CPU's today are designed to run with your OS. A 32bit OS will never see more than 4 cores.(even if it acknowledges 8 cores it cannot do anything with it) A 64bit OS will generally see all that you have.
a. The speed in ghz is important, but more than 3.4 will require a good and possible loud cooling system.
b. The speed is important, but it is the cache that does all of the work-the more cache the more work your computer will do.
c. Today Intel is simply faster and does more work than AMD, but like the turtle, it is steady.
d. AMD Phenom II X6 1090t = Intel Core i5 2500k sandy bridge
e. With unlimited funds Intel is the choice, and AMD's Bulldozer will not be cheap (max cores 16 running at 3.9 to 4.5ghz - sounds hot, no really hot)

 

Ur right the mb is and it was a 2600k I f-d up and a dp67 extreme sorry for my angry confusion...priced the same in mx city.....about 1000 bucks

 

Here you go for serious benchmarks

http://www.hardwareheaven.com/reviews/1285/pg1/amd-fx-8150-black-edition-8-core-processor-vs-core-i7-2600k-review-introduction.html

 

Don't fret it. They're all good. Choose a budget, and go for it - do some research, but don't fret.

There's a diminishing return on number of cores which can be quite substantial. Depending on the app, better results can be obtained from fewer cores running at a higher speed, with Cache playing a role too.

Generally Intel are better chips, but they cost more. There's also a significant premium for newer stuff, and a discount on older stuff. And audio gear is important too. Not a lot of point having an all-round kick-ass PC for music if you don't have good speakers etc, innit?

Personally I'd go for a high clock speed phenom x6, a good SSD drive(s), and put the rest towards good audio gear.