Need advice on new gaming/audio editing rig

[JonnyOldham]

Hey guys, I'm looking to replace my old gaming PC from 2010. Can anyone give me advice on the below build? My usage will be mainly gaming, but also some audio recording/editing in Cubase (which can be very processing heavy). I already have a very good external audio card. Budget is around 3k. Cheers!

Case: CORSAIR OBSIDIAN SERIES™ 750D FULL TOWER CASE
Custom Liquid Cooling Kit: Liquid Series High Kit - EK
Graphics Card Cooling: EK FC Nickel & Backplate - For One Graphics Card!
Coolant Colour: Mayhems Pastel Red
LED Lighting: 50cm Red LED Strip
Processor (CPU): AMD Ryzen 7 1800X Eight Core CPU (3.6GHz-4.0GHz/20MB CACHE/AM4)
Motherboard: ASUS® CROSSHAIR VI HERO (DDR4, 6Gb/s, CrossFireX/SLI) - RGB Ready!
Memory (RAM): 32GB Corsair VENGEANCE DDR4 2133MHz (2 x 16GB)
Graphics Card: 11GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 1080 Ti - HDMI, 3x DP GeForce - GTX VR Ready!
1st Hard Disk: 2TB SEAGATE FIRECUDA 3.5" SSHD - UP TO 5X FASTER THAN HDD!
M.2 SSD Drive: 256GB SAMSUNG SM961 M.2, PCIe NVMe (up to 3100MB/R, 1400MB/W)
Power Supply: CORSAIR 650W RMx SERIES™ MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD, ULTRA QUIET

 

[keynes]

For your budget I would go with an i7-7700k and unless you wish to add a 2nd gpu a medium kit liquid series kit. Keep in mind that the system will require maintenance every 2 years and it will be a bit tricky to upgrade items like the cpu and gpu on your own.

 

[Oussebon]

The i7 7700k would outperform the R7 1800x in gaming.

For Cubase:

I wouldn't bother, the results are quite depressing. I was working on a project using my i5 3750k and 8GB 1600MHz ram, and it was to the point of overloading the CPU. So I'd been waiting for a Ryzen for a while and read only good things and got myself a R5 1600 with 16GB 2400MHz ram. I opened the project again only to find that the Ryzen was worse than the i5. More stuttering and locks and now I have to run the latency buffer at 256 instead of 128. Hopefully it'll improve as it is brand new after all but it's not the start I wanted.
https://www.steinberg.net/forums/viewtopic.php?f=209&t=114000#p632822

The Scan Pro Audio blog referenced in that post also did some Cubase benches and seems to measure performance by lowest % CPU usage:
http://www.scanproaudio.info/2017/03/02/amd-ryzen-first-look-for-audio/
The 7700k is described as performing poorly relative to the 8 core intel and Ryzen CPUs but the graph only shows 33% usage, which suggests that it still had a lot of spare capacity. The article only refers to the playback load, not actual performance. There were also instances in other audio production benches they ran where Ryzen was running into issues some way before even the 7700k.

Moreover, since you're buying from PCS, it's worth bearing in mind that you can get a lot faster RAM for the Intel platforms than you can for the AMD ones.

Also, going for an Intel platform would open up the Noctua air cooler as an option, so if you're going for a liquid cooled system for the noise control you could consider instead an air-cooled one with a Noctua. Unless you're planning to load the GPU at the same time as the CPU for audio work.

 

[JonnyOldham]

Hi, thanks very much for your feedback! I'm looking into the team blue options just now. Why do you think the 7700k performs like this? I presume it just doesn't allocate enough to non-gaming tasks?

 

[Oussebon]

Why do you think the 7700k performs like this? I presume it just doesn't allocate enough to non-gaming tasks?

Sorry, I'm not sure I'm with you? If you mean why does the 1800x not perform as well in gaming, many games don't make a great deal of use of multiple cores, while some that do such as Fallout 4 (which gobbles about as much as you can feed it) still seems to have a main thread. So the 7700k's higher frequencies and IPC win out. And in the purely PC Specialist context, the faster RAM will give the 7700k a further edge in gaming performance.

The 7700k also often outdoes the 6900k for similar reasons.

If you're asking why the 7700k doesn't do as well in multithreaded tasks, it has 4 cores and 8 threads vs the 8 cores and 16 threads of the 1800x. So in something that will max the CPU out like rendering or video encoding it doesn't perform as well, despite each core being stronger. Likewise in the article with the Cubase benchmark, it has fewer cores and threads to go around so sees proportionately higher load. However, running at 33% load rather than 17% load as the 8-core CPUs do still means that it has 66% of its capability being unused. Which sounds like quite a lot of headroom to me, such that its performance should be anything other than inadequate.

While future games may make more use of cores, I'm not sure anyone seriously thinks this is going to happen overnight. It's not like there haven't been multicore CPUs before now - both at the Intel Extreme range of things and AMD's FX series.

 

[Stephen M]

I think Cubase is Windows and Mac only, which is a shame but if you are happy to dual boot with a Linux studio distro (Ubuntu Studio and KX Studio are very good plus their are others) you will have a low latency OS which is a big help, you can run Ardour on those and it is one of the best DAWs around, also all of stuff mentioned is free so nothing lost, other than your time, if you don't like it.

 

[JonnyOldham]

Hi again, thanks so much for your advice, much appreciated! I think I now have to weigh up the cores issue, since i'll probably go with Intel to enable a better quality of RAM.