lockiano53 :
SORRY TO PUT A DAMPER ON THE "RYZEN" / "I7,5,3" LOVE, HATE CONVERSATION.
I'M DISABLED WHICH PUTS ME MOSTLY IN A LOWER PRICE BRACKET. TO AVOID THIS PROBLEM ABOUT 3 YRS. AGO
I WOULD SAVE MY LEFTOVER COIN OVER MONTHS TO BE ABLE TO WATCH AND SNAG BETTER PIECES FOR MY FIRST
DESKTOP BUILD. UNFORTUNATELY TIME HAS BECOME EVEN SHORTER FOR SUPERIOR MODELS TO APPEAR.IS MY AMD
FX 8370 8-CORE 4.3 GHz A YEAR AGO REALLY THAT DATED NOW, OR WILL I STILL COMPONENTS NEW ENOUGH TO
BUILD THE POWERFUL MUSIC PRODUCTION BUILD I HAD PLANED TO?
I'M STARTING ON IT IN ABOUT A MONTH.
For serious DAW work, an FX chip, even the mighty 8370 is gonna be a MAJOR bottleneck from the very start, to stay nothing of years down the road. Anyone telling you otherwise hasn't spent much time testing heavy audio work on a variety of different machines/CPU's/core counts/etc... This is because most all modern DAW's are the near ideal representation of what's known as a "mixed workload". Being incredibly complex software, with a massive amount of moving parts in a complex project, different facets of it are going to put strain on both your per-core performance (general snappiness/responsiveness, esp. when dealing with heavy effects for ex, each of which adds CPU strain to real-time playback for example, with an FX chip becoming simply unable to output in real-time at all with VASTLY smaller loads than a modern CPU from either side) to multi-core performance as well, because while most major DAW's are decently threaded by themselves, get really MT demanding REALLY fast as you add on/in more and more 3rd party plugins, and more importantly other pieces of audio software/ other DAWs.
For example I often have both Ableton & Reason going at once, each of which is decently threaded up to around 4c/8t utilization, but still HEAVILY dependent on single-thread speed for overall performance as this multi-threading is far from evenly balanced at this point. Having 6 or 8 FAST cores (the later in my case with a R7 2700X) allows both programs to perform as if they were running in isolation, with no compromises rather than 8 gimped cores not even half as fast as the former's, where both will run like trash, and even 1 by itself chugs with anything but the simplest projects. Most all DAW's are still primarily single-threaded workloads in isolation & without 3rd party additions, so it's better to be able to run 1 program at a time fast, than 1 slow, but 2+ not as slow as the former chip. Going with Ryzen 2 in particular gives you both w/o compromises at a better price than Intel, which as far as Coffee Lake is also a fantastic music workstation option, though much more pricey. An FX series otoh, are just about the worst chips you could pick for those particular workloads, and I say that as a MASSIVE AMD fanboy (bought both 1700 & 2700X at launch).
Literally the only place an FX series holds it's own when it comes to music workloads is straight up encoding, where it can get close to modern & cheap 4c/4t quads. Everywhere else though, even an older Intel quad like a i7-3770 would be the FAR superior choice, because then at least you'll get decent single-tasking DAW performance. But my outright recommendation would prolly be the Ryzen 5 2600. It's going to be outright superior to BOTH the prior options.