AMD or Intel for Audio Recording?

[Yannycakes]

Hi guys,

 

 I did a little bit of digging around but didn't find much.

 

 I'm just budgeting out some stuff to save up for and I'm wondering what midrange  processor will be fast enough to give me near 0 latency while recording.

 

I'd like to get to the point where i can do  14-16 recording inputs at the same time and I wonder if anyone has had any experience with building an Audio related computer.

My old i53570k was good back in its prime. As of late though it's struggling with keeping low latency. I'm thinking AMD 3600X but i'm not sure which way to lean for smooth clean audio recording.

 

 Maybe i'm just over thinking ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ if anyone has input feel free to share it!

[TempestCatto]

Depends on the software. Ableton Live (what we use) prefers higher frequency over more cores. So Intel was the choice for that machine. You'll have to look into what software you're using and what it will prefer. Ableton blatantly states this about their software, so it may take some digging to find out from other users.

 

Also keep in mind your sound card. We use this: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00EO6X7PG/ref=ox_sc_saved_title_7?smid=A286IZ33TR5AUQ&psc=1

You probably already know, depending on what you do, but drivers make or break your latency when recording. Sometimes even disabling USB3.0 and Ethernet and Wifi is necessary to attain no latency.

[.Apex.]

43 minutes ago, TempestCatto said:

Depends on the software. Ableton Live (what we use) prefers higher frequency over more cores. So Intel was the choice for that machine. You'll have to look into what software you're using and what it will prefer. Ableton blatantly states this about their software, so it may take some digging to find out from other users.

Most if not all DAWs these days are able to utilize multiple cores, there might be differences in performance depending on the Audio Engine of the DAW but testing the same DAW will yield similar performance advantages with CPUs in comparison with other DAWs, might not be the exact same performance but it's proportional.

Higher frequency always matters as cores are assigned to each track, so it allows you to have more effects/VSTs in each, but unfortunately Intel is still ahead of AMD in terms of latency and overall performance in DAW due to Ryzen having high memory latency which holds it back significantly even though Ryzen 3rd Gen has faster Single Core and Multi Core.

As far as the Input to Speaker latency goes I'm unsure if the platform affects this, the memory latency differences are measured in nanoseconds so it wouldn't matter to your ears it only matters for the performance of real-time audio, as in how much you can stress your cores with VSTs until it starts stuttering, which takes a lot, so it depends on your usage, I think if you're only looking to record audio without VSTs in real-time then it shouldn't matter which platform, though I haven't tested this.

[.Apex.]

1 hour ago, Yannycakes said:

processor will be fast enough to give me near 0 latency while recording.

You'll never get to 0 latency with software, and the i5 3570k should handle real-time audio just fine, if you can't get decent enough latency with 1 track then there's something else that's causing that high latency rather than the processor itself.