Best CPU for Music Production with Ableton and a lot of instances of Serum.

Started by zagoor-splice

zagoor-splice

Hello. I'm thinking about building new custom PC for music production.
The biggest problem is which CPU is better? My choice is between AMD Ryzen 7 3700X and Intel i7 9700K.
I've heard that Intel is better for single-thread tasks, and AMD is better at multi-core tasks.
Is it true that the most software are strictly optimized for Intel, not AMD, or it's just a rumor?
And how about latency? Which is better in this case?
I'm also wondering if choosing a right motherboard chipset matters for the performance of the DAW.
Thank You in advance for all the answers and sorry for my grammar mistakes, i'm not a native english speaker.

steve_xfer

FLOPS is going to be the most relevant benchmark.

AMD/Intel would largely be a rumor, or overstated, both support common optimization such as SSE4, however there are some libraries provided by Intel which I would expect to outperform on Intel processors.

Latency ties directly to performance (the more performance, the lower you will be able to set latency).

I would suggest to ask on other forums, personally I have had good experiences with both AMD and Intel processors.

bobnreid-splice

I recently built one. What I learned is the number of cores in your processor makes a difference. I got an AMD processor with 16 cores, and it absolutely shreds. I have over 20 instances of Serum in my latest track, with the buffer size set at 128 samples, so really low latency, and my CPU is at about 30%. You also want SSD hard drives. There's two types. The newer ones, M-2 I believe, are better because they're actually a chip. So kind of like a mini-processor hard drive. This will allow your computer to pull samples and files from your hard drive much faster. So this will limit your motherboard choices. You'll want at least one M-2 slot. Mine has 2.