I haven’t tried those particular processors, but my experience is similar to OP’s (I’ve tried everything to reduce glitches and can’t get below 512 samples safely on my high-end laptop). On paper, the AMD 7950X3D option seems superior in every respect (faster clock, more cores, larger caches), so I would expect it to do best.
A few tips that I haven’t found in any guide, but that have worked wonders for me:
- Launching multiple copies of a VST and spreading notes between them using SpreadVST has changed my life. It often halves my Time Load in Cantabile’s Performance Profiler with no discernible sacrifice in sound quality.
- Thunderbolt 3 & 4 audio interfaces are faster than USB because the Windows 10/11 Thunderbolt software stack is more performant than its USB stack.
- If playing many sampled instruments, having huge amounts of ram is important. I need at least 64GB to keep all samples in memory for 15 songs.