Best upgrade from i7 4790k?

[esselfortium]

Since there's another similar thread right now, I might as well ask too:

I'm currently on an i7 4790k and have been hitting CPU limits a lot lately in Reason, so I'm wondering what processor would be my best bet for an eventual upgrade. The price of upgrading to something better looks high enough that I don't want to just make a guess and hope for the best. With pretty much any option I'll also have to upgrade the motherboard, which further adds to the cost.

Would overclocking my current processor be worthwhile for Reason? I've never overclocked before and am not sure whether the resulting difference in performance could be significant enough to actually be worth the effort and risk.

If my best choice is to get a new processor, the 4790k I have now has 4 cores and 8 threads. I'd assume that something with more than 4 cores would be ideal for improving Reason's performance, but that seems to get into extremely pricey territory.

I'm running Mac OS, so for compatibility's sake, I'm considering Intel processors only.

This is all very confusing to me, so any advice would be greatly appreciated!

edit: problem solved, I shouldn't need to upgrade for a while viewtopic.php?p=400572#p400572

[EnochLight]

Would overclocking my current processor be worthwhile for Reason? I've never overclocked before and am not sure whether the resulting difference in performance could be significant enough to actually be worth the effort and risk.

The i7 4790 that you have is the K series - it was meant to be overclocked. There's no risk by trying to do it on air, just start creeping your multiplier up and see what you can get it to run at and stay stable. Free performance is free performance! There are free tools out there that will allow you to monitor its thermal performance. As long as you can keep the i7 4790k under 74.04°C, it shouldn't throttle or shut down your computer when overclocking (assuming you do it in your motherboard settings and not the typical software overclock settings that may or may not come with your motherboard).

I overclock my 3770K from its stock 3.5 Ghz to about 4.5 Ghz on air, and it affords me noticeable performance gains. Whether you can get that sort of overclock on your i7 4790k will depend on the quality of your cooling solution, your chip's dye, your motherboard, etc. Experiment!

Specs on your current CPU:

https://ark.intel.com/products/80807/In ... o-4_40-GHz

Otherwise, yeah - might be time to upgrade.

[Voyager]

I don't know what kind of motherboard you use with that cpu but usually most recent motherboard have in their bios some overclocking presets. Check in your bios and see if you can overclock from there without taking too much risk.

Btw what do you do to put such cpu on it's knees ? You use lot of synth and effects ? You do not bounce tracks ?

[esselfortium]

Thank you both for the advice! It looks like I'll need new RAM as well if I get a new motherboard to support a new CPU, which would turn this into a $600+ USD project, so... definitely not something to be done anytime soon. Maybe at the end of the year if things go well. I'll look into overclocking first and see if that can get me anywhere

Btw what do you do to put such cpu on it's knees ? You use lot of synth and effects ? You do not bounce tracks ?

Kontakt instruments seem to be pretty heavy on it, but I've been bumping into limits sometimes just with synths and effects, too. Bounce-in-place is extremely clunky and unwieldy as a substitute for track freezing, or else I'd be using lots of that to mitigate the problem.

[Voyager]

What is your motherboard model ?

[esselfortium]

What is your motherboard model ?

Gigabyte GA-Z97MX-Gaming 5 Micro ATX LGA1150.

This is my current setup: https://pcpartpicker.com/user/esselfortium/saved/GnMjXL

[Voyager]

In your bios in the menu " Advanced Frequency Settings" you shoud be able to set an higher clock from some presets.

In there you should have "performance upgrade" ; "cpu base clock" and/or "cpu upgrade" see what the description says, it should be one of those were you could overclock safely.

There is also an app from gigabytes called easytune that allow you to overclock but i don't know if there is some presets to choose from.

Here is the link for the app :

https://www.gigabyte.com/FileUpload/Glo ... enter.html

But frist check in your bios, i'm pretty much sure you can do it from there.

[esselfortium]

Update on this:

I checked the temperatures I was getting and as it turned out, my CPU had been throttling itself due to overheating, and that was the actual cause of my performance problems. I cleaned the dust out of my case and installed a Hyper 212 EVO cooler to replace the stock Intel cooler, and that made a surprisingly massive improvement in CPU temperature. I'm now getting significantly better performance in Reason as a result, even without overclocking. Still getting occasional DSP crackles on my heaviest song projects, but "occasional" is the key word there, as those were previously completely unplayable. I'm very pleasantly surprised to be able to get more life out of this computer without needing to invest in a major upgrade yet.

[Przemyslaw]

Hi Sarah,

I've had the same problem some time before and reached the max performance from my 4790k. Because this cpu is the best on LGA1150 You can overlock it or change socket and buy better cpu along with motherboard and ram I suppose. I remember I overlocked my cpu to 13500pt in passmark (stock - 11187) without any overlock background, only read some articles about this cpu oc. It improved performance noticeably, but a couple months later Reason came with it vst support...
I bought i7 7820x (LGA2066) but later found on ReasonTalk that great performance in Reason and reasonable price has 8700k (LGA1151).

Ps. Lovely album.

[CR68]

I will wait for AMD threadripper 2 2990x
32 cores/64 threads and a Lot of Power....

[bronsoncox]

Scan Pro Audio is updating the answer to this question for me:

http://www.scanproaudio.info/tag/dawbench/