Upgrade advice cpu or gpu

[Eoindude]

Hello forum members!
I am planning on saving up for an upgrade in the near future and was wondering if you guys could give me advice on which part to upgrade on my pc. My current spec is as follows:
Amd fx8350 cpu
Gigabyte a970 ud3p revision 1 board
Coolermaster hyper 212 evo
16gb mushkin ddr3 memory
Asus GTX 750ti
Cruicial mx300 ssd for os
Various mechanical drives for other stuff (games and audio)
Corsair cxm750 power supply.

Basically I'm looking at either upgrading the cpu which would of course involve new motherboard, ram and cooler, or upgrade the graphics card which would be a cheaper upgrade in the short term. My main uses of the pc are audio editing and mixing and playing games. If I was upgrading the gpu I've been looking at either the rx480 or GTX 1060. If I was to upgrade the cpu I've been tempted by the ryzen 5. My monitor is 1080p 60hz and I'm happy out staying at that for a good while at least. Which would you think would be better to upgrade now and which do you think could be done down the line? I have noticed the 750ti is starting to struggle with new games, (wolfenstein new colossus is unplayable at 1080p, mostly fine at 720p). If I was to upgrade the cpu I would need 16gb of ram for audio programs as they use a lot. Thanks in advance!

 

[Surfie]

In all honesty, i would want to upgrade both.
But given RAM prices at the moment: would do gpu first.

Besides, now is not a great time to buy a new cpu. Ryzen is scheduled to refresh in or around March next year, so if it will take a while for you to save up the cash for it anyway, that is when i would pull the trigger on the cpu side.. Either on a refreshed chip or on a price dropped current gen chip.

 

[Eoindude]

Hey surfie thanks for the reply. The price of ram at the moment was putting me off the cpu route alright. I'll keep an eye on the refresh next year so! Looks like it could be a new gpu for me in the new year! Thanks again

 

[Avet]

Hello fellow audio producer. If you are doing music i would recommend going for Intel. AMD is not good for music production at the moment. 7700K is still beating 1800X in music production programs even though AMD has twice the cores. Music programs still favor fast single core performance. General recommendation for home studios is go with fastest single thread performing chip that you could afford up to 500 euros.

My advice would be to go for GPU now. And in a few months see how will AMD do with Zen 2 CPUs. Hopefully RAM prices would go a bit down, and if you could squeeze in 8700K (wich i hope will become more available, and the prices should go down) your will never hear cracks, and pops in your mixes. Or look at the used market. 6800K is still the go to option for music production. Here are few combinations for you to consider:

7700K (310€)+ Maximus VIII Hero (143€)
6800K (used for 270€) + any X99 board around 200€

 

[Eoindude]

Hi Avet thanks for replying. That's good to know I wasn't sure which music programs preferred between core speed and count. I'll look into your reccomendations and see what I can stretch the budget to in a few months. In the meantime I can enjoy higher details from a new gpu!

 

[Avet]

I am glad i could help. If you have more questions down the line, or can't decide between few options, feel free to ask. There are many experienced people here, and this post might help someone else who is seeking for answers.

 

[Surfie]

Just bear in mind that Zen 2 processors are rumored to be coming in 2019, so that might not be worthwhile waiting for.

Zen+ (the refresh) might make things better for audio production, i honestly have no experience in that.

Either way, gpu first, then processor.

 

[Avet]

Just bear in mind that Zen 2 processors are rumored to be coming in 2019, so that might not be worthwhile waiting for.

Zen+ (the refresh) might make things better for audio production, i honestly have no experience in that.

Either way, gpu first, then processor.

Zen 2 maybe. Zen+ i doubt it. It is very hard for AMD to beat Intel in single thread performance with current generation. For music production currently Intel is literally 2x faster. 4 core Intel is slightly better than 8 core Ryzen in the mainstream market. And how much 7980XE demolishes 1950X is beyond belief.

In mainstream you can argue price/performance, and depending on the type of your workload you could go with Ryzen if it really must come to that. But in the HEDT segment there is no competition. And in core per core no competition at all.

https://techreport.com/review/32607/intel-core-i9-7980xe-and-core-i9-7960x-cpus-reviewed/12

Look at DAWBench VI 2017 48KHz/64 Samples results. That is the perfect spot for low latency, overall joy, and where you always tend to be. 2120 (Intel) vs 920 (AMD)... No competition.

If you don't compare flagship to flagship and take 7900X vs 1950X Intel is still 25% better with 6 less cores.

Edit: And if you are asking yourself well if music production needs that much single thread processing power and Xeons can't deliver, how did high-end studios cope with all that. Easy. They have Avid HDX wich is a 3000 euro sound card with heatsink, ventilator, and needs additional power cable. It has floating point cores, all kind of specialized features, and it does a lot of real time rendering on it's own taking the load from CPU. And you can run them in "SLI" as many as you like.