Is the I9 9900K overkill for music production?

[Straight2Vinyl]

If money is a problem, I think AMD offers better price/performance ratio. Also, 9900k and 9700k are quite hot chips and you'll also need a cooler cause there is no stock one, unlike AMD's 2700x. Also you could run 2700x with a B450 board and save a lot of money. You might think that B450 is a mainstream board and might not be that good, but things have evolved and even the entry level boards are pretty good. You go for x470 boards only if you are into sli, super overclocking and other stuff like that.

Another suggestion might be to wait till spring, AMD will announce Ryzen 2 (3000 series) which will be on 7nm node. Right now Intel chips are overpriced because of the whole manufacturing problems and low supply.

I'm running the first generation Ryzen 1700 and haven't had any problems with latency, I can go as low as 2-3ms with Steinberg UR22 MKII, though I usually run at 6-7ms cause I don't feel the difference and I don't like to worry about increasing latency later. PS. Haven't managed to max it out yet, I got it to like 50% and I use mostly synths (Omnisphere 2, Serum, Spire etc).

That's pretty good performance. Right now I'm leaning toward grabbing an 8700k system. I can get a z390 motherboard still for usb 3.1 and the option to upgrade in the future if it really isnt fast enough, but I think it should hold up. I hope so anyway. I've wanted to get a lot more out of Reaktor 6 and Iris 2 since I picked them up a year ago.

[nIGhT-SoN]

I wouldn't count on Intel to use the same socket/chipset for their next generation, to be honest. Coffee Lake is using the same socket as previous generation, but doesn't work with 200 series chipsets. Also the 300 series one won't work with previous cpus, only with Coffee Lake. Pretty strange decision and it should make you think twice, especially since they never said they are gonna support this platform with their next generation, there is nothing official.

[egbert]

Whoever is on top cares not for backward compatibility. When Athlon was in the ascendancy (2007) they made the next generation (ie the one after their first market leading dual core desktop chips - which they charged a lot for) incompatible with existing chipsets and sockets. They make more money that way.

Intel's 8 cores and up chips benefit from the extra memory bandwidth that comes with the server CPUs and sockets. Trying to get the same performance out of 2 channels is not happening. They need a revision of the architecture to get high memory bandwidth out of inexpensive boards.

[Mister Natural]

I love it as this means that in 2019; I'll be able to buy a 8700k chip for $100 less than it's being sold for now

[EnochLight]

Is the I9 9900K overkill for music production?

Absolutely not.

If you want to really chase lots of cores forget the i7/i9 line - you want a big xeon and a multi-cpu board

It's relatively asy to get a system with 56 cores with a 2-cpu board (28 cores per xeon platinum cpu) - needless to say not a cheap option though

Absolutely no, if running gobs of plugins at low latency sample buffers is needed. ScanPro Audio has done pretty great testing on this, and it all boils down to:

Multi CPU means NUMA - which has some adverse implications for low latency performance. ie the same sorts of issues as the threadripper CPUs but latencies would be greater between CPUs in different sockets (Dual Xeon setup) than between different dies in the same CPU (Threadripper).

^^ What he said. ^^

but the i9 9900k is priced at $500 US (669 CAD for me)

You think thats expensive for a newly released [INTEL] model CPU

Fixed that for you. But actually, I'm totally sold on the Core i9-9900K. Very well might be my next build.

It's literally twice as fast as my current i7-3770K in multi-thread, and single is a noticeable improvement as well:

[Straight2Vinyl]

I went with the 8700k. My projects really aren't that big and it will almost certainly cover anything I want to do with regards vst instruments. Besides, I need to get back to saving for my seaboard rise again and maybe a high end audio interface depending on how my system turns out. 9900k looks impressive though. And of course we have the next gen ryzen chips. Hopefully they'll do better at instrument latency than the threadripper.

[EnochLight]

I went with the 8700k.

I'm sure you'll be satisfied - congrats!

[Ichad.c]

I went with the 8700k.

I'm sure you'll be satisfied - congrats!

Ditto, I ugraded from a i5 2500k to the 8700k, worth every penny! Well, except the extortionist RAM prices.

[bmrzycki]

Kaine reviewed the latest crop of intel processors for digitial audio. It's a good read.

http://www.scanproaudio.info/2018/10/19 ... e-refresh/

The short summary is the i9 9900K is the only one he recommends. And even then, he's (rightly in my opinion) curious to see what the Zen refresh looks like in a few months.

[EnochLight]

Kaine reviewed the latest crop of intel processors for digitial audio. It's a good read.

http://www.scanproaudio.info/2018/10/19 ... e-refresh/

The short summary is the i9 9900K is the only one he recommends. And even then, he's (rightly in my opinion) curious to see what the Zen refresh looks like in a few months.

I saw his review a few days ago. I'm calling BS on clocking the 9900K to 5Ghz on all cores - every other review I've read indicates to get that high, you're baking the die to dangerously high temps. The TDW is just too much at 5Ghz overclock on all cores.

[adl]

I went with the 8700k.

I'm sure you'll be satisfied - congrats!

Ditto, I ugraded from a i5 2500k to the 8700k, worth every penny! Well, except the extortionist RAM prices.

Great to hear! I am running a i5 2500k as well and planning on getting a 8700k or maybe go with a Laptop 8750H.

[Straight2Vinyl]

I went with the 8700k.

I'm sure you'll be satisfied - congrats!

Thanks. Coming from my old AMD phenom ki x 4 2.6 and only mechanical drives, this new system with an NVME might feel like coming from an calculator to a PC. Lol.

[Kaine]

I saw his review a few days ago. I'm calling BS on clocking the 9900K to 5Ghz on all cores - every other review I've read indicates to get that high, you're baking the die to dangerously high temps. The TDW is just too much at 5Ghz overclock on all cores.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/in ... 47-11.html

The extreme torture test, which far exceeds any kind of workload an audio system created a maximum tdp pull of 249w, where the cooler I was using is rated to 250w TDP and I've seen it handle more.

We're seeing some variance in chips now they are released where some won't clock above 5GHz, some do 5.2GHz all day long, so currently we're binning here and this isn't uncommon in the first few batches, the silicon quality will stabilize over the coming months, it normally does.

Also, just to note, the 2990WX is also a chip that pulls 250W TDP, we're not seeing anything here that is shockingly extreme.

In this instance, Prime got just over a 3 hour test and AIDA stress test got a 12 hour one and nothing throttled within that time frame. Chips don't pull constant loads, AVX instructions send them through the roof and nothing audio hammers that instruction set remotely in the fashion the stress tests do. The chip will pull the current that it needs and I'm sure in both cases if you throw a 24-hour torture test onto them then yes, you probably will bake them to some degree. That's an argument against doing crazy assed testing with synthetics more than anything else though, as that isn't remotely close to being a real-world scenario.

The biggest problem I've seen commented on so far is the VRM's cooking, which everyone's noted is solved by a bit of airflow over them. This has always been one of the reasons I prefer tower air coolers over AIO's, as air is forced by them over those crucial VRM's when overclocking.

[Scotty]

Kaine, several months ago we chatted here and you were using a similar CPU to the 3930K that use . I have read all of the reports that you have published. For the 9900K do you think it would be reasonable to expect better single core performance say 20% at low latencies with RME PCIe hardware and up to say 70% more performance on all cores - compared to the 3930K (clocked now at 4.2ghz) ?

I have looked at all of my projects that I have done in the past couple of years and I have had to split 3 or 4 projects so i could add vocal overdubs. I understand all the workarounds ... bouncing, freezing etc but I prefer not to have to do this. If I could get 50 - 70% more asio head room on a heavy mix at 512 sample buffers than what I can achieve with the 3930K with the recently released 9900K I think it would be worth building another box this year. I use East West and Kontakt libraries but only 5 or 6 instances. Most of the CPU demand comes from effect chains as I do a lot of sound design as I create and mix.

Do you have any thoughts on this that you can share? Specifically do you think I'd be asking more than the 9900K can deliver based on this input?

[nIGhT-SoN]

I saw his review a few days ago. I'm calling BS on clocking the 9900K to 5Ghz on all cores - every other review I've read indicates to get that high, you're baking the die to dangerously high temps. The TDW is just too much at 5Ghz overclock on all cores.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/in ... 47-11.html

The extreme torture test, which far exceeds any kind of workload an audio system created a maximum tdp pull of 249w, where the cooler I was using is rated to 250w TDP and I've seen it handle more.

We're seeing some variance in chips now they are released where some won't clock above 5GHz, some do 5.2GHz all day long, so currently we're binning here and this isn't uncommon in the first few batches, the silicon quality will stabilize over the coming months, it normally does.

Also, just to note, the 2990WX is also a chip that pulls 250W TDP, we're not seeing anything here that is shockingly extreme.

Well 2990WX is also a 32c / 64t so I wouldn't think 250W TDP would be much for such a cpu. To be honest I would say it's quite impressive compared to 9900k which is a 8c / 16t cpu. In every review I've seen, 9900k is a really hot cpu, it's quite clear Intel can't go higher frequency than this with their current generation and for 10nm there is a long way for them.

Zen 2 will be interesting, it's different architecture but will run on the same platform/socket AM4 which is great.