Its time to upgrade again and I’m wondering whether I should continue down the Intel path with an I7/I9 or switch to Ryzen 9 series. My current understanding is that single thread speed is the most important spec, followed by other criteria.
I have tended to stay away from AMD (not sure why), but an article I read said that for music production Ryzen 9 was the current path to choose.
This will likely be my last hardware upgrade before retirement, so…
What do you think, and why?
I’ve almost always used Intel, but if there are no reported issues with AMD, l would not personally be too concerned to move to AMD. My latest machine is an i5, running Cantabile and a bunch of synth VSTi. I do not normally use sample-based VSTis, l don’t want the overhead of those, and the synth emulators do fine for my needs.
So the next question, is there a huge performance bump from i7 or i9 over i5?
With my own retirement (from work, not really ready from music) pending, one additional question would be, do l need the sports car, or will the sedan be all l need? Do you plan to keep using the machine after music? Say for gaming? Then look larger. If you don’t have a solid need for a music computer after music, take that into account as well.
My i5 motherboard could host a 12th gen i7, so if l’d found the i5 inadequate, l had the opportunity to move up, but it’s been rock solid. That may also be an option with the Ryzen. I also own several other PCs, one on Linux, so l could focus more on just a music box. I guess my root advice is save a buck if you can, music PCs ran on Celerons and Pentium IIs, Pro Tools goes all the way back to Macs in the 80’s, any modern machine should (if it meets specs) be able to adequately handle anything you throw at it.
Intel or AMD is probably much of a muchness from an audio perspective, but that is a subjective view that others may have more to comment about.
My latest gig PC is an ASUS NUC based on an Intel Core Ultra 7 155H, and that is working well, and I throw a hell of a lot at it including sample heavy VSTs
I would always advise you go for as much memory and hard disk space as you can afford as demands on those never go down.
I would also advise you use something like Bitsum Process Lasso to allow you to prioritise Cantabile in terms of system resources, noting that a lot of the old tweaks no longer seem to work on modern CPUs.
FWIW I’ve been running a 16 core Ryzen 5950x since 2021 with no issues attributable to the CPU choice. Yep, that boring. At the time of my build, Intel had been running high CPU speeds (=loud) to make up for other issues. Ryzen was the low power (=quiet) king. I always figured among the fast things in life, a fast computer was a lot cheaper than other fast things… For me, quiet and fast were priorities, so I splurged on the dampened case, giant cooler, and quiet fans, and went for the low TDP CPU.
“I have tended to stay away from AMD” that’s what many people of our age were inclined to think, myself included (retirement for me is not so far away neither!). I switched about 6 years ago to AMD and never had a regret. When I switched, AMD was cheaper for the same or better performance than Intel. I can’t tell if this still apply.