Jim Roseberry
With the Intel 6850k or 6900k, Reaper will playback glitch-free right up to 100% CPU load.
With the 1800x (even with RAM running at 3200MHz), Reaper can not playback glitch-free with CPU load near 100%.
 
That said, when running the Reaper version of DAW Bench (using the 64Bit version of their Multi-Band Compressor for load), the 1800x outperformed the 6850k.  (I've posted the figures here on the forums.)
When running the 32Bit version of their Multi-Band Compressor, the 6850k outperforms the 1800x.
 
With Ryzen, getting RAM to run at 3200MHz (and the motherboard to behave rock-solid) is a quest.
We've got an 1800x with RAM running at 3200MHz... and it's mostly flake free.
But... a pair of USB ports just stopped working.
X370 motherboards were rushed out the door.  Worst launch I've seen in years.
 
I have no doubt the Ryzen platform will ultimately solidify... but for now, there's no way we'd build Ryzen for clients.
 
Threadripper certainly looks interesting (on paper).
We'll see how it goes in the real-world...
 
 

 Hi Jim.


 
Where are you in Ohio? Do you do repairs?

Just outside of Columbus.
Shoot me a PM for details.

Did you bench Sonar Platinum and did it give the same results as Reaper ?
It seems Reaper is very strong at not clicking and popping until 100 % cpu useage, whereas Ableton encounters glitches with much more modest cpu loads. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIoAlEV2IK0
Would be interesting to know where Sonar stands.
 

Slightly off topic.
Obviously, no benchmark is perfect but it would be interesting to know what kind of plugins are really used by people on real projects and in which quantity (I assume nr 1 would be EQ plugins, compressors would be popular and almost always there would be at least one delay or reverb).
I wonder if Cakewalk or Avid has access to such metrics.
 
Also, I could imagine that for obvious mathematical reasons, a sine wave signal is too simple to be representative of a real life sound/music, and that some plugins would be able to highly optimize around it. I wonder if there was any research about it, unfortunately the dawbench forum is closed.

CedricM
Did you bench Sonar Platinum and did it give the same results as Reaper ?
It seems Reaper is very strong at not clicking and popping until 100 % cpu useage, whereas Ableton encounters glitches with much more modest cpu loads. See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIoAlEV2IK0
Would be interesting to know where Sonar stands.

My point in benchmarking wasn't to rank Sonar's multi-core performance...
Rather... to compare the hardware itself (mostly focusing on how Ryzen 1800 compared)
So I kept the stress-test consistent across hardware platforms.
 
Reaper is certainly well optimized for multi-core CPUs.
If you're talking about socket 2011-3 CPUs, yes... you can push them up to 100% load (playing audio glitch-free) at a 48-sample ASIO buffer size.
With socket 1151, you can't push the CPU load quite as far (~95%).
With Ryzen 1800x (RAM running at 3200MHz), you can push CPU load to ~93%.
 
Sonar multi-core performance isn't quite as efficient as Reaper... but certainly more so than Ableton Live.
One thing to keep in mind; Live was designed to work in a much different way than typical "linear" style DAW applications.  ie: Audio warping is enabled by default.  This is going to affect CPU use.
Even with a 6850k, you top out at ~80% load (at a 48-sample ASIO buffer size).
I don't see Live as a replacement for more traditional type composing/recording applications... so (at least for me) it's not much of a real-world limitation.
 
The complexity of the audio signal has no affect on CPU load.
Doesn't matter if you're feeding the plugin a sine wave, white/pink noise, vocals, guitar, drums, etc.
CPU load is consistent.
 
I agree that DAW Bench isn't 100% analogous to a typical real-world project... in that you're not looking to run 500 instances of the same exact plugin.  
It's just a relatively simple way to mark/compare audio specific low-latency performance.
An easy point of comparison...

The reason for the Sine Waves as load tracks:
Because it's super obvious when there's a glitch.  
A complex signal could potentially mask a small tick/pop... or at the very least make it harder to hear.
With a sign wave, any pop/tick is glaringly obvious.

Jim Roseberry
The reason for the Sine Waves as load tracks:
Because it's super obvious when there's a glitch.  
A complex signal could potentially mask a small tick/pop... or at the very least make it harder to hear.
With a sign wave, any pop/tick is glaringly obvious.

Didn't think of that !
 
I hope we're not there yet, but I feared some plugin editors or daw producers would be tempted to exploit the sine, the same way graphics drivers came to be specifically optimized for benchmark loads, until it was publicized and they agreed to cheat less ;-)

The pre-orderable Core X processors could be pretty interesting for music production, most notably the Core i7-7820X (599 $) with its high turbo/max frequency.
First tests by Anandtech show good performance with loads that are probably the most comparable to DAW loads (encoding, decoding, rendering).
To fully benefit from it though one would want to wait for all the new x299 chipset/motherboards to fix their problems and odditiies, and for software developers such as Cakewalk and VTS/i makers to take advantage of AVX-512 (F, VL, BW, DQ & CD).

Hi, 
I'm about to build a music production pc. But I'm really confused in what I should get. 
I will mostly be working with with a lot of vst' and processing. I would like to have latency-free or at least, I don't want to feel it that much. Should I get the i7 7700k? or 6800k ? ,

Your audio interface will determine the lowest latency you can achieve.
IOW, If your audio interface yields 12ms total round-trip latency at a 64-sample ASIO buffer size, the machine itself can't improve on that.  In this example, to achieve round-trip latency of 4.9ms, you'd need a different audio interface.
The machine obviously has to be able to keep up with the load...