AMD or Intel for music production

MookJong

MookJong

MookJong

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20 Mar 2006
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Anyone got any experience with AMD vs Intel for music production?

I'm running Ableton Live 9 as my DAW and my aging Q6600 DDR2 rig 2GB RAM is starting to struggle.

I want to upgrade the main board / CPU and RAM and add a SSD. Spending about £400 if possible.

What are the PSU requirements for an i3 or i5 / (AMD equivalent) system these days?
 
Are you asking in terms of performance or compatibility/latency etc?

The quality of the PSU is important, I recently upgraded from a Q6600 to an i5 6600k without changing my Corsair 520HX and it's been working perfectly (pouring water on it aside).

edit - intel would be my choice just because intel chips are generally cooler and so should be quieter.
 
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Also keen to hear thoughts on appropriate chip/mobo upgrades for music production. Currently on a Q6600 as per the op.

To the OP: I have found that modern plugins are getting really hungry for memory as well as processing. 64bit plugins especially reverbs and mastering chain compression/limiter etc seems to kill my machine. I found 2nd hand ram up to 8 gig helped a fair bit.
 
RAM, RAM, and more RAM. Then an ASIO compatible sound-card.
It will make little difference in my experience. Music tools and VSTis seem to be more hungry for RAM and an ultra low-latency sound driver rather than anything else.
 
As Rilot says I do find this.

But for the 2-3 gen old chip owners like the Op and me (q6600) do we have any reasonable upgrade option?

8 gig ram is just managing but if I was to upgrade for say £400....chip, board, ram, ssd what would be the options and would it be an improvement?
 
I invested in the Arturia V collection when it was half price a couple of months back. I also have OPX-II pro and fancy getting Diva to complete the trifecta of virtual analogue synths. However Diva is an absolute killer and would not run on my current system.

I use an ASIO software driver and do not have a dedicated sound card just use the on board of the IP35-Pro motherboard. Latency has never really been an issue.
 
I found a big difference in my system was doubling my RAM to 8GB and getting a SSD to load my VSTs from, before this upgrade loading libraries in to Kontakt took a couple of minutes to fully load.

More processing power will allow for a lower ASIO buffer size and in turn giving lower latency if you're working with live recording.
 
Depends on what sort of VSTs you're loading, VSTs that use samples/libraries will benefit from and SSD whereas a generative VST such as Sylenth1 or Massive wouldn't. More RAM would allow you to run more VST simultaneously without having to freeze/bip tracks.
 
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