CPU upgrade advice

[jonorigin]

So I'm looking to replace my current audio PC that use to run Cakewalk/Ableton etc. At the moment I have an old Dell with an i5-6500 and 16gb RAM which is wheezing at the amount of synths I'm trying to run on it.

I have a budget around 450 and having looked around, I'm thinking either a new system with a Ryzen 5700G or something second hand with a Ryzen 3900x and the cheapest gfx card I can find.

Any idea how these two would stack up against each other for audio based workloads? I'm assuming either would be a decent step up from my current PC?

 

[Tetras]

(I don't know anything about those particular programs, or the needs of audio work, so I'm replying more generally)

The 3900X is generally faster in productivity apps (in e.g. Blender, by quite a lot), but in something that is more single core/thread heavy like Photoshop then the 5700G wins, though it doesn't win against the 5600 non-X or 5600X (in many scenarios that single core/thread matters) as much as you might expect, because of the loss of cache.

If you want to avoid buying a graphics card then the 5700G isn't a bad choice, you could also get a 12400 (not -F) for similar money and hopefully a 13400 (with the addition of 4 e-cores) sometime next year.

Against the 6500, both would be a big jump in raw CPU performance, since they (the 3900X and 5700G) have faster cores and at least twice as many (the 12400 has 6).

Intel Core i5-12400 2.50GHz (Alder Lake) Socket LGA1700 Processor - Retail - £229.99
Asus Prime H610M-A D4 - Intel H610 DDR4 Micro ATX Motherboard - £110.99
Team Group Vulcan Z T-Force 32GB (2x16GB) DDR4 PC4-25600C16 3200MHz Dual Channel Kit - Grey - £99.95

Grand Total: £451.43

(You can get a 12500, or maybe even a 12600 for the same money, by the way and there some big deals on the 12600K and KF not long ago, which might be back on black friday)

 

[jonorigin]

That's great advice, thanks very much! I will definitely take a look at the Intel options you mentioned.