[SOLVED] Dual X5690 -OR- Ryzen 2700 (Digital Audio Workstation)

[jared_adams91]

Hi everyone, I have the opportunity to upgrade. But it's either a new machine for $700 + Potential hard drive upgrades (400ish) or upgrade processors from dual x5680 to x5690 + hard drive upgrades. Budget is like, I'll make it back in a couple of weeks kinda budget.

Currently running on

Dell t5500
Dual Xeon X5680
72gb of 7x8gb Samsung DDR3 1333
with a very full and about 6 years old 180gb SSD system drive and quite full 2TB HDD about 10 years old.
Can't Remember my current graphics card but I think the GTX 860.

I have the opportunity to move to a
TSI 470x board
Ryzen 2700 (not X)
16gb 3200 (2x8) Corsair
GTX 1060 3gb
1 256 SSD and 1 500gb HDD
850W power supply
built about 6 months ago for $700.

My other option of improvement is only upgrade the hard drives and the processors to x5690 (fastest processor the T5500 is compatible with).

I'm going to be adding and/or replacing current hard drives with:
(1) PCIe SSD 1tb &
(1) SATA SSD 1tb

Intention for this machine is for intensive Audio Processing (lots of midi, high voicing digital synthesizers, effects plugins). Not intended to be a graphics priority machine.

Anyhow, want to know thoughts whether or if there would be a noticeable difference in terms of performance and project load times and if it's worth dropping $700 + 450 on. Seems like the processor switchover, SSD system drive, and clocking would be of my interest. Clocking may or may not be implemented depending on how large some of the projects are.

Would the Single Ryzen 2700 machine be able to outperform two X5690 if I decided to just upgrade the processors and hard drives on my current machines?

 

[dudeman509]

If the software that you use scales to all cores of the Xeons well - and just doesn't leave some of them sitting there idle - you are probably going to see very similar performance from the dual Xeons and a Ryzen 2700. The Ryzen has a much higher single core speed, which will do everyday things like file management, web browsing, etc better, but the Intel setup you have now has the advantage of having 4 more physical cores.

However, the Ryzen 3000 series with more cores are just around the corner for similar prices. A 12-16 core Ryzen 7/9 may be what you're looking for in terms of a truly meaningful performance upgrade.