AMD FX 8350 For Music Production

Soorya Sahu

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Oct 19, 2013
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Hello Everyone..
I am thinking to built a powerful PC for my home studio..
My budget is not very Gud thts why m thinking to go for AMD nd not for Intel i5 nd i7..
thinking techincally Intel i5 is a 4 core processor with maximum 3.5 ghz speed..
whr else AMD FX 8350 Has a 8 core processor with 4.0 ghz stock speed..

I Use FL studio Software nd many other Additional VSTI for music production
Genrally I use 3-4 Layers of Waves lots of samples and lots of layers VST for Pad lead nd bass..
this things consumes lots of CPU..
So please guide me to go with AMD 8350 or to go with Intel i5
 

OOh thanks for the information brother..
I was unaware abt thhe irrelevant clock speed of Intel nd AMD..
Just now i googled abt the benchmarks of AMD 8350 and found it lower then in comparition with intel i5 but then also i wanna go with AMD FX 8350..
I have asked frm some AMD FX 8350 users about the performance..
some of them said that some times AMD FX 8350 even beats Intel Corei7 😀
 
8350 is excellent for editing work, but if you want gaming then I'd say both are good. Intel is just very popular for gaming. Benchmarks always look good for Intel.

Since you want to do music production and things other than gaming. I'd get the fx-8350 and a good cooler.
 

Gaming is not at all my priority even i am not going to buy any Graphic card..
for me the dedicated on board 1 gb Graphic card is enough..
Brother please tell me "Is thr a need to replace the stock heatsink/cooler fan ???"
well i dont feel like thr is a need to do overclocking of the processor..
 


I'll be honest here, and maybe it's because I accidentally bought an Nvidia card, but it's not doing the best. I have yet to try with an AMD card, and I'll eventually get there, but idk :/
 
I hope I'm not too late to reply to your question. I use an AMD Phenom II x6 1090T and I consider this to be one of the finest processors from the x6 stable. They've discontinued this after the FX line entered the scene.

I used to spent many hours gaming before I had a full-time job.
I've used this system to make music using Ableton Live + use many VSTis.
I've used this system to edit videos using Premiere Pro and Vegas.

I've never used Intel in my entire life and I'd say that I've been more than just happy with AMD. With informed purchase decisions, you can actually build an AMD-based workhorse that will let you do just anything possible!

As a producer, you'll need to get good sound equipment to minimize your latency as much as possible - you'll see the processor doing wonders in that department.
I'd suggest getting 16GB of RAM running at 1866 MHz with good timings. (Focus some part of your budget here since this will determine the amount of VSTis your computer can concurrently handle while being efficient).

I would also suggest getting a decent Graphics Card since some processing can be offloaded to the GPU in certain use cases.
 
Looks like you have made your decision but speaking for myself I would never build a machine strictly for audio production using an AMD. The main reason being hardware compatibility, some Interfaces have issues with the AMDs and I have seen some software have problems as well. If your interface does have a conflict there is no fix and it is a real pain when you are knee deep in a session and you start getting clicks and pops like crazy and there is nothing you can do. I have never had problems with the Intels (I have been at this for over ten years) Every professionally purpose built audio production computer uses intel. Just my point of view.
 
Whoever said there is a hardware issue with a microprocessor and an audio interface doesn't know what he's talking about. Your processor is abstracted away from hardware. Its the motherboard chipsets that cause problems with audio interfaces, and it is only with cheap Firewire and wi-fi chipsets. You can always just get an aftermarket Firewire card, or use a USB wi-fi adapter. USB works the same on every computer, regardless what type of processor you have, as does Firewire.

There aren't a lot of formal studies on this that I have run across due to a lack of comparable benchmarking tools people in the industry understand. I'm a computer engineer and an audio engineer and I am studying this right now so I'll share what I know right now. With audio, the thing that matters the most for running VSTs is multi-threaded performance, and audio latency.

When the latency is lower, its better for playing keyboards, drums, and using VSTs for tracking effects for vocalists and instrumentalists. But for playing back sequenced audio, latency is not an issue. Lots of DJs perform exceptionally well with horrendous amounts of latency without even realizing its there. Playing drums through a VST on the other hand is another story and the latency is most painful when tracking vocals with a wet monitor mix.

I make professional audio interfaces for a living and the chipset manufacturer that I use, XMOS, use 16-thread 50MHz cores instead of 2 400MHz cores. Multiply 16x50MHz and you get 800MHz, which is the same number of clock cycles as the dual core. By doing this, the audio latency gets cut in half. They have the lowest latency audio interfaces chipsets in the world because of this.

Intel processors are renowned for having excellent single threaded performance. Most video games only take advantage of two threads, which is why Intel crushes AMD for high-end gaming on older games not optimized for parallel computing. For mid-range gaming though, it doesn't matter if you use Intel or AMD, because your GPU is going to be the bottleneck, which is why Microsoft and Sony use AMD processors now. The bottleneck factor is important because it doesn't matter how fast your CPU is if its waiting for the RAM to send it data.

The thing that is good for accelerating multi-threaded computing is L2 and L3 cache. Running lots of VST plugins can cause thousands of threads to be running and they will use up all of your cache, unlike video games. Each time the processor switching from working on one thread to another, and the next thread is not in memory, the CPU stalls because it has to get data from RAM, which takes a long time.

AMD defiantly has a leg up on Intel dollar per dollar because those FX-8xxx series processors have two more megabytes of cache than the Intel i5-4570 Haswell. You'll have to pay an extra $110 for that much at Intel. The Piledriver cores also have more than 3MB more L2 cache than Intel, which translates into higher performance for AMD. AMD's approach with the larger shared L2 cache is a smart way to do it, and contrary to what many Intel fanboys think, is a true dual-core. Intel's hyper-threading isn't really that big of a performance boost, and two cores with shared resources can tag-team threads faster than two threads with a larger shared L3 cache. But the size of the cache only helps you out so much. Smart scheduling of threads around RAM latency can reduce this significantly and there are a bazillion different ways you can teak apples to oranges you have to benchmark it.
 



There is a reason that computers designed to handle audio production use Intel processors.
AMD has many great attributes cost over performance being one of the most notable.
I have used both Intel and AMD in audio specialized machines and Intel is the best period.