from my own experience, traditional air cooling, if capable enough, is always less noisy than liquid cooling in the long run, and it's always easier to replace a fan on a heatsink instead of replacing pump on a closed loop,
audio workloads alone aren't extreme enough to justify good liquid cooling system purchase

 

What actual difference does i7 make? I've been told this several times but no one has given a clear answer. I understand that the i7's tend to come with better specs than i5's but is there something about the intrinsic nature of the chip being an i7 that makes it better?

Anyway, I was considering the 13700K but unfortunately that thing draws so much power that I'd have to replace the 650w PSU for a 750w or 850w one...

 

I run totally air cooled and Im doing video, images and audio as well. NO overclocking. System is solid as a rock and quiet. With the fan/cooling management on most system boards these days one can dial in all those parameters that were once only available after spending big buck$ for a fancy fan controller. The only time I ever hear even a slight hum of fan sound is when I'm rendering a large video project with a lot of effects. And even then it's subdued to the point of hardly being audible. Personally I don't like the close proximity of liquid and electricity and since there's no overclocking going on causing exorbitant amounts of extra stress on the system (which translates to heat) I have no need for liquid cooling. A good well designed case helps a lot as well.

 

i7-13700K has 8 performance cores while i5-13600K has 6 performance cores, power draw difference is adequate indeed,
how much performance you need depends on how big audio projects you have,
in single-core performance both those cpus are basically same since they're from same generation/architecture,
and yea you're right for that i7 750W would be reasonable safe minimum

 

By the way, a while ago I've heard that Gigabyte Motherboards suck when it comes to audio, especially there seemed to be some kind of issue with USB.
Is that still a thing? Should I avoid Gigabyte?

 

A good gaming board (asus, among others) will get you where you want to go. Just make certain the board is capable of doing what you want now AND in the future. Like RAM count - getting a board that can only do say 16- 32 gb of ram (or possibly less) will have you buying yet another board in the nearest future. Also if you want legacy OS support you will need to look for that (it does exist). It's unfortunate, but I will tell you there are boards that can truly suck for audio (google is your friend here), and there IS NO ONE BOARD THAT FITS THE GOLDEN RULE FOR EVERYTHING AUDIO (or video too for that matter). They ALL have strengths and weaknesses. I will also tell you that a good well designed CASE with plenty of easy expansion and good airflow design will be worth its weight in gold now and a few years down the road.

You must access your needs
- how many slots do you need and what kind?
- how much ram do you think you'll need now (and in the future)?
- how much storage will you need and what kind?
- will you need RAID?
- Do you want legacy OS support?
- How much USB and what kind do require onboard?
- What kind of bios does it have?
- Is there proper fan/cooling management onboard?

These are all factors you should have in hand already - all you need to do is find a board that fits the criteria for your build. Once you have narrowed down to a few boards you like, start looking around the net for people talking shit about them (forums, amazon reviews, blogs, etc...) - these days this easier than ever. You could also approach it the other way and do a search for integrator's who do audio production builds - see what they are using and look up the parts used. Do they fit your criteria?

Otherwise with threads like these everyone is gonna put 2 cents worth in which will confuse the matter even more.

 

Forget the 5800X3D, it's crippled outside of gaming. If you can stretch your budget to around 1500$ you could probably get away with a 7800X3D and a mid-end AM5 board but going into AM5 just to be stuck with a mid-end build wouldn't make sense. If I were you I'd look into the used market, a 5950X and 1080 Ti would still have some wiggle room on 650W and if you use the 5950X in ECO (""65""W) mode you'll have plenty of extra wattage.

 

I'm pretty sure 7800X3D is equally crippled, or no?

 

Nope, only the 5800X3D is crippled. 11% lower base clock and 4% lower boost clock. AMD fixed this with the AM5 ones. With that said, if you're getting an X3D you're probably doing way more gaming than anything and in that case the 7900 and 7950 X3D are such bad value that they're nearly scams with how many hoops you have to jump through to get them working right.

 

Yea, I've gone through several iterations of other builds now, one of them being 5900X.
This is where I'm at right now: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Fk8gVw

CPU: Intel Core i5-13600KF 3.5 GHz 14-Core Processor
CPU Cooler: be quiet! Dark Rock Pro 4 50.5 CFM CPU Cooler
Motherboard: MSI PRO Z690-A WIFI DDR4 ATX LGA1700 Motherboard
Memory: Crucial Ballistix 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 Memory
Storage: Kingston KC3000 2.048 TB M.2-2280 PCIe 4.0 X4 NVME Solid State Drive
Video Card: Asus STRIX GAMING GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 11 GB Video Card
Power Supply: be quiet! Straight Power 11 650W 80+ Gold Certified Fully Modular ATX Power Supply

Bold = Already have this

Also still some open questions:

 

Forget Intel, it's a furnace and power limiting it sucks. On a full multithreaded load that thing sucks up 255W if memory server right. Used 5900X or preferably a 5950X would give you way better results and you can power limit them just fine and only lose ~5% in performance while gaining massive temp headroom. 5950X would definitely last you until AM6 and high end AM4 boards are 50 to 100 bucks cheaper than high end LGA1700 boards and on par with mid end boards price-wise.

As for a cooler there's zero reason to air-cool something mid range+, get an arctic liquid freezer 2 280+ from the money you'll save by buying used.

 

AMD did not fix 3D cache being used only by half of the chip, and causing thermal bottlenecks to the cpu, which results in uneven inferior performance in certain workloads, it's relevant problem with 7000 series, not sure which models if all or not

 

I'd rather suggest K version if the price difference is small, because KF version lacks igpu which you might else utilize in case of your nVidia gpu failues, or keep it enabled and use it for video codecs acceleration if you ever need those (Intel's igpu codecs seem to do better job than nVidia's ones)

 

Wrong. There's no "issue" here, 7900 and 7950X 3D only have the 3D cache on one CCD, it's by design. Those CPUs are effectively two CPUs in one, hence the weird IHS design. There are no thermal bottlenecks or anything of the sort, the only issues that were present were due to the Windows scheduler assigning workloads to the wrong (v-cache-less) cores. That got fixed. The issue with these high-end 7000 series X3D chips is that when gaming due to how the 3D cache works only one CCD benefits from it, effectively making one half of the CPU do nothing. This is why the 7950X3D is nearly a scam for gaming, the effective performance is that of a 7800X3D.

 

Intel's video acceleration has been useless for quite a while considering just how powerful CPUs have become, paying extra for an igpu isn't worth it.

 

Well, turns out someone wants to buy my Crucial Ballistix 32GB DDR4 Kit for the same price I paid for it new (100€), which means I could go for DDR5 instead. (Maybe 7700X?) Seems like DDR5 Memory with similar CAS Latency is only about 30€ more expensive than DDR4.

And unless I'm missing something, it would seem that even if I stayed DDR4, I could get something like G.Skill RipJaws 32GB Kit for 60€ new, which from what I can tell offers literally the same performance as the Crucial Ballistix Kit. Both are 3200MHz and CL16; am I missing something important here, or is the person who wants to buy from me just "dumb"? Very curious. Especially since the Crucial RAM released in 2020 and the RipJaws in 2015.

 

Not really, G.Skill's business strategy is to undercut everyone even if it means low profit margins. I can vouch for their high end Trident line, no idea about the Ripjaw line but it should be fine. Also remember that on AM5 DDR5 is *practically* capped at 2x32

 

Seems like this thread is only reliable place to get info about how all this actually work for audio.

 

from... a 13 years old thread referencing 14 years old hardware?

 

It got 40 pages, should I linked only the last one so you look at it past the first page?