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I4790k upgrade to what?

pixel

Senior Member
Hi.
I feel that time has come to upgrade my old boy i4790k as I'm reaching 100% more often than before. What CPU (Intel) would give me significant improvement? Is it even possible to get 50% more power with newer CPU's or it's more like 10-20% max?
I really wonder how much of more processing power I can expect from newer CPU's than mine.

I need to mention that I'm not high profile or work for such company so I can't afford absolutely newest CPU's (these are overpriced anyway). But I do like to hear opinions how they compare to.

I'm using cpu hungry plugins for mixing and synths like Repro5. I can't squeeze any more juice from software side. CPU is overclocked to reasonable risk-free level.
 
I guess the best value option these days is the i7-8700k cpu, but I'm not sure if it's that much of an upgrade. So to really feel an improvement you are probably looking at i9-7900x which is a lot more expensive.

Coming from a i5-3470 Dell machine to my custom i7-6700k, overclocked to 4.5 ghz, I find the upgrade has been underwhelming unfortunately.
 
One of my computers has an i7 2600k and it's overclocked to 4.5ghz. I built it at least 7 - 8 years ago. Needless to say it's still keeping up (all be it a quad core) and is why I have bothered replacing it yet.

For my next PC build I think I'm going for a 9900k. 8 core and 5ghz clock?!? Sounds perfect for a DAW Master Computer. Then slaves I then build to accompany it can have slower clock and massive thread count. Dual 14 core Xeon server machines each etc. That's my plan anyway.
 
Quick research told me that it's not worth to upgrade to any new CPU in matter of price:improvement ratio.
That's unfortunate. I'm not willing to pay $1k for CPU, not in this life. 4790k for £300-400 gave me years of great performance so $1k doesn't calculate for me.
 
Quick research told me that it's not worth to upgrade to any new CPU in matter of price:improvement ratio.
That's unfortunate. I'm not willing to pay $1k for CPU, not in this life. 4790k for £300-400 gave me years of great performance so $1k doesn't calculate for me.

the i9 9900k (8core 16thread with a most likely easy overclock to 5ghz) is speculated to be around $520.
 
Buy AMD if you want a powerful sample playback machine with large RAM.
I’m going to get one early ‘19.
Guys I know love Intel for synths AMD or big ass Xeons for DAW/Sample work.
 
@jamwerks Any Skylake-X can support 128gb (i9 7900x, 7920x, etc), same with the Threadripper platform by AMD. However even for sample playback it appears as though AMD is behind the curve, according to ScanProAudio's benchmarks.
 
Intel Core i9-9900K 8 Core Cinebench R15 Benchmark Leaks Out
Overclocked To 5 GHz Across All Cores, Massive Multi-Thread Performance
Check goo.gl/XTNnDD
 
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Not to be a pest, but what buffer are you using? Could you live with a little softer buffer and extend the life of what you have?
 
In any case, probably not a good idea to get Skylake-X either at this very moment

...this idea of waiting a bit seems to be prevalent, at least here. I'm not in the market for a new CPU so I'm not on top of it, but that's why I asked about the buffer setting. If you could eke out a little more time on what you have you might give yourself better options, or at least less expensive ones.
 
Not to be a pest, but what buffer are you using? Could you live with a little softer buffer and extend the life of what you have?
For mixing I'm using 1024 - the highest setting available. I was extending life of my machine for a bit of time already in many different ways. This is why I came to the point that I can't do anything more than just upgrade machine.
But VEPro seems to be the best (cheapest) solution :)
 
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