Patrick Derbidge

Sorry to hear about your misfortune. I wish there was a better way for us to band together against these types of thieves because theft is usually low on the priority list of local authorities. I remember using some of my gear to volunteer at a playhouse raising money for cancer. After a long night (the last night of the play) I took my gear home, too tired to put it all away and left it in my garage. I went on vacation the next day for a week away with my family and came back to find all the equipment in my garage was gone. It wasn't near the loss that people here have mentioned but still about $5k or more worth of equipment. Equipment that I could not, at the time, justify replacing so I just had to do with out. Such a shame that some people feel they are more entitled to your stuff than you are, who spent a lifetime purchasing and saving up for the gear. My deepest sympathies go out to you.

I just wanted to jump in and give some information that I think is missing here about the new Ryzen launch. Since this is my first post I'm sure it will come across as trolling or fanboish but some people here will recognize me as a long time member over at the VI Control Forums and can certainly vouch for me. While it is true that the 9900k can clock higher than the Ryzen 3700x, 3800x or 3900x- there is actually more to the story with clock speed than just the clock speed number. There is a thing called IPC. The difference between clock speed and IPC is this (stolen from a tech website) "While clock speed tells you how many cycles a CPU can complete in a second, IPC tells you how many tasks a CPU can conduct in each cycle." What AMD has been able to do is actually outperform Intel's IPC which means that with a clock speed of 4.6GHz it can match or beat an Intel at 5GHZ. I think I'm too new here to be able to post links but search over at scanproaudio for Dawbench results and you'll find that the 3700x comes very close to an overclocked 9900k and a 3900x clocked at all cores 4.3GHz will actually beat the 9900k all core clocked at 4.9GHz, and yes this is a DAW performance test. You can find the test under the July 2019 archive titled "AMD Ryzen 3600, 3700X & 3900X DaWBench tested – 3 is it the magic number?" There are two graphs of measurements. One that shows DSP performance at various buffer sizes. This is basically for those who use mostly VST's which will be more CPU intensive and the other test will show VSTi performance which is going to be more memory intensive. It is interesting to note that the 3900x has more latency communication between dies since they are basically separate sets of chips with multicore (think of two separate multithreaded CPU's on one silicon) vs the 3800x/3700x or even the Intel 9900k which are one chip with multicores. That's not very technical but I hope it makes sense. Point is, that because of the efficiency of the IPC it is able to make up for the poor latency of that particular chip (talking about the 3900x). Regarding Thunderbolt- AMD has added support on their X570 chipset for Thunderbolt but so far only Asrock has taken advantage of that so if you get an Asrock board you can have Thunderbolt support. I do, however, see a shift moving towards USB-C which I think is where most Audio interfaces will end up. Also the USB 4 spec adds support for Thunderbolt. It will be interesting to see if there will be TB to USB adapters that will allow older thunderbolt devices to work with USB4. After a lot of testing and research, I myself decided to go with a 3700x and it is doing a great job. Having said that, my bottlenecks were more memory and Hard Drive than CPU since I do a lot of Virtual Instruments. I invested into SSD's and extra memory. All you need to do is load one of your more intensive projects and fire up your DAW's performance monitor to see where your bottle neck is. I would also argue that due to the price of X570 boards that the cost of building a 3700x system is about the same as a 9900k system but since CPU clock speed was not a big bottleneck for me I opted to get the better multi-threaded performance but still the 9900k overclocked to 5GHZ on all cores technically beats the 3700x. On the other hand the 3900x beats the 9900k in all DAW tasks and you might want to go with a 3700x with the idea of upgrading to a 3900x in the future. IMHO I think that the Intel 8700k and 9900k are the only CPU's left by Intel worth investing in. Otherwise I would go AMD. And this is coming from a big Intel Fan. I do hope Intel comes out with a Ryzen killer but for now AMD is seriously giving them a run for their money and I'm surprised that they haven't really come out with an answer to Ryzen yet. What I do like about what Intel is doing right now is their focus on lower powered CPU's. I think they recognize that the larger market is in the mobile space and improving the mobile platform will eventually lead to us all abandoning our desktops. It may take 5 years for that to happen for me but I think it's coming. Edit: I know I've only discussed the non-threadripper cpu's but the same logic should apply to the Threadrippers as well and as far as I've read the new I9's have not addressed any improvement in IPC performance, in fact I think the IPC got worse. The saving grace for Intel is that they can overclock quite well because if they couldn't they would not compete with the new AMD's. Nevertheless it is impressive to see how lower clocked Ryzen's can meet or beat an overclocked Intel.