Thu Feb 18, 2021 5:08 pm
Ed - love the car analogy, and absolutely agree. Finding one's comfortable spot on the cost/perf curve (and hopefully avoiding the steep upper-end slope!) is important. I would not want to be building a PC today, with the market prices all skewed due to extreme over-demand relative to availability - both CPUs and GPUs. In my own use case, video editing and AI modeling were also key configuration drivers, in addition to HW. With C19 arriving shortly after I built my PC, I decided to donate my GPU/CPU time to F@H research, which does not play well with video editing and AI. However, HW lives on, and peacefully co-exists, mostly!
One key consideration is sample-set requirements- for small/mid-sized instruments, especially if one forgoes surround channels/ranks, I'll bet most modern mid-range CPUs would provide excellent service - for the last year or so, current gen Intel and AMD CPUs execute enough instructions/sec per core to reduce or even eliminate the audio-glitch sensitivities we historically had under Windows. In my case, my benchmark target was Laurenskerk Marcussen in surround. That class of instrument benefits well from lots of middling-fast cores. For the previous decade, I would have gone Intel without hesitation, but that changed substantially in 2019, when for most uses, Ryzen significantly surpassed Intel in price/perf and multi-thread total performance, while being barely under Intel in max performance-per-core (but more cores/$.) In the current generation, that trend seems to have further consolidated in AMD's favor. For the larger instruments we are now seeing, plus the increased CPU demands if one uses the Hi/Def & 96kHz enhancements of HW6, CPUs of the R3900/5900 (or their Intel performance equivalents) seem about right to me, with some headroom remaining for the next few years as demands continue to increase. 3950/5950-class CPUs (16 cores/32 threads) are probably presently overkill if HW is one's entire use-case, though I'm guessing we may not think so a few years from now. HEDT/Server class chips, such as Threadripper, XEON and their like seem entirely unnecessary for HW these days. I don't own Marcussen yet, but played around with the 24-stop demo version last week - it was the one organ I had to turn off Folding@Home to play reliably on the 3900x, under HW6, when maximally configured.
I don't recommend liquid cooling for these chips, unless one is intending to significantly overclock - more common with Intel than Ryzen. In my own case, I ran fine for about 6 months on the cooler that came in the box with the 3900x. (AMD mostly no longer provides a cooler in the box for this class CPU.) At that point, I upgraded to a commercial tower fan that is silent to me and far more effective (Scythe Fuma2), for about $60 (USD). Only because I was running F@H 24x7 at 100%CPU, and wanted a quieter cooler. Just looked, at 12 cores/24 threads @100% CPU under F@H, I'm drawing 145 watts at the CPU, CPU temp is 71C, fan is silent. If I pause FAH, CPU draw during normal use (browsing/editing...) is about 45-50 watts. GPU power draw is far higher, but that wouldn't normally be a factor for most HW users.
Summary - expressly understand ones use case(s) and budget target, avoid the steep cost penalty for the top-line products, consider near-term (1-3 year) growth desires. There are many creditable YouTube channels that provide good info regarding price, performance, price/performance, quality et al. They tend to cater somewhat to gamers, but generally cover low-mid to affordable high-end processors in great depth, including CPUs, Motherboards, cooling solutions, power supplies, storage solutions, and cases. And visit pcpartpicker.com if doing your own build - that website models almost all current product set, and continuously informs you about system component compatibility - power needs, does that fit with this inside that case...
Cheers, Bob