Originally Posted By: Matt Finley
These two companies go back and forth as to which has the most powerful CPU at any given time. Right now the pendulum may be toward AMD, but not enough to matter, and I would never spend the obscene money to buy the very top of the line anyway when something a bit down from that will do fine at less than half the cost. At one point, there were compatibility issues where a program might not run correctly on AMD, but those days are long past.

If it helps, I just bought an Intel i9 for my new production machine. This is my first PC since 1983 that I did not build myself, because I'm not familiar with the latest M.2 drives and cooling systems.

A few things follow from your choice of CPU, such as the socket on the motherboard or the cooling unit, so get some advice if you're not fully familiar with the ramifications of this choice.

I never overclock (avoids heat, better stability), and I choose a processor with more speed over one with more cores. BIAB does not require many cores. If you have other software, check the requirements of that software, but in general eight or more should be fine. I have ten, and most are never used much.

About the 'gaming' part, that's mostly about having an added Graphics card (GPU). BIAB of course does not need that at all. My new machine doesn't even have a graphics card; I got a CPU with integrated graphics. Intel chips have long been very good at this.

Does that help?

I can't respond to everyone separately on this thread but want to thank all who offered their inputs. I appreciate you sharing your experiences.

My philosophy is similar to Matt's in that I won't be first in line to pay a premium for cutting edge technology be it a computer processor, smart phone or other. For me that doesn't make financial sense plus I know something about the engineering process and I want the design and manufacturing flaws to be worked out before jumping onboard.

Since retiring, my "needs"/workflow mainly involve writing, recording, arranging and mixing music with BiaB and Studio One. Been doing this for a little over 3 years now. And as I continue to explore BiaB, S1 and my Korg keyboard I find that the number of tracks in my arrangements continue to grow. Not too long ago my bass and 3 or 4 BiaB tracks would be the norm. The latest song I shared contained 11 tracks each with volume and panning automation. I could see this trend continuing at least a little longer.

Of course, there are ancillary applications that are also up and running at any given time. Several web pages perhaps with a YouTube video or 2, my email web tool, MS Word to capture chord progressions, poems and lyrics, PowerPoint, Windows Media Player, my interface software, etc.

Yet my Win 11 i5 machine is currently meeting all my multi-tasking needs and even my palsey 12GB of memory is still serving me well. It's my C: drive size, too few USB ports and not having much overall headroom for future growth like synthetic vocals, OS upgrades and the like that is driving me to upgrade.

Back in the day, I led a small team to establish the connection between our local site and a Cray "Super Computer" located hundreds of miles away to execute large FE (Finite Element) models. Then UNIX-based Sparc workstations met that load. And when the engineering PC entered the picture, some of my Monte-Carlo simulations would run up to 48 hours wall-clock.

My current needs are nowhere that high these days so I'm thinking an i7 (or i9), 16 (or 32)GB RAM and two 1 (or 2)TB hard drives should keep me in the game for at least 5+ years. I need to look at availability and what makes sense as I get closer.

Based on some comments here and a little research, an AMD chip (like Ryzen 7 5800X) would probably work fine if assembled by a pro. But unless, something major is released in the press regarding Intel chips I think I'll be sticking with them. I've been an Intel guy for years with no issues.

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For me there’s no better place in the band than to have one leg in the harmony world and the other in the percussive. Thank you Paul Tutmarc and Leo Fender.