Dean wrote: ↑17 Oct 2018
Hey guys,
I am upgrading my pc and i am wondering what kind of cpu i should get?
I’ve heard mixed opinions about it should have more cores or it should have fast single core speed. Which is best i7 8700k i9 7900x i980 xe or something like 2950x, 2970x ryzen?
Also higher RAM helps alot right?
I read mixed opinions about that too
If money is no object, then definitely go with Intel, and definitely go with the fastest
single-core performance CPU that has
as many cores as possible. You've got quite a few options out there now, but Intel's new Core i9-9900K is benchmarking as a performance king when it comes to gaming (which applies to DAW like Reason as well). Its stock 3.6 Ghz cores are easily hitting 5.0 Ghz in Turbo, and can be overclocked without much difficulty if the early buzz is to be believed. It also runs at only 95 TDW, which isn't terrible when all things are considered.
As for bang-for-buck, the new Ryzen 2's aren't bad, but they're not the fastest. They also still suffer from the quirks that come with owning an AMD system (low latency audio with low sample buffers proved difficult for AMD's first gen Ryzen/Threadrippers; not sure if they sussed that out yet).
As for RAM, I wouldn't go with anything less than 16GB these days, but I tend to work with a lot of samples that need to buffer into RAM (so YMMV). And the faster the RAM, the better your system will perform.
As for storage, SSD is an absolute must in this day and age. Whether you go with an M.2/NVMe interface, SATA, or PCIe, is more a matter of preference, but some M.2/NVMe storage solutions can hit transfer rates of 3,400/2,500MB/s read/write, which is
simply magical. Your Reason projects will load (especially those with lots of audio or samples) practically instantaneously.
It's a great time to build a machine, IMHO, especially if you're upgrading from older hardware.
Finally, spend some time on cpubenchmark.net and compare Passmark single thread performance of the CPU's you are considering. It's incredibly eye opening.
Win 10 | Ableton Live 11 Suite | Reason 12 | i7 3770k @ 3.5 Ghz | 16 GB RAM | RME Babyface Pro | Akai MPC Live 2 & Akai Force | Roland System 8, MX1, TB3 | Dreadbox Typhon | Korg Minilogue XD