In audio work if the session does not fit on the i5 it doesn't fit. There is no take longer - you either have enough cores and CPU BW or you "freeze" tracks to use less resources to make a session fit. People who do orchestration really need 12 core and more types of machines. Hyper Threading makes a real difference there.
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i7-7700K vs. i5-7600K for Logic Pro X
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In audio work if the session does not fit on the i5 it doesn't fit. There is no take longer - you either have enough cores and CPU BW or you "freeze" tracks to use less resources to make a session fit. People who do orchestration really need 12 core and more types of machines. Hyper Threading makes a real difference there.
Thanks for sharing. I have not any audio work before. Coming more from a development point of view where it simply takes longer to compile a big project if the processor is not as powerful.
Agreed. It then becomes how much $=Time.
this is true for video and other rendering stuff, more power is simply less time.
but Audio is another story.
for those interested here is a good explanation:
I do a lot of orchestration on a 2011 iMac, many Kontakt libraries and find it a struggle to work this way due to stutters and pops etc. I've just bought the new 2017 4.2ghz, 64gb RAM, 1tb SSD iMac, but would you suggest getting a 2013 12 core Mac Pro instead?
Many thanks
Don't get a 2013 Mac Pro. It's far too old. Wait for the Mac Pro 2018 or perhaps the iMac Pro if it's quiet.
Audio guy here myself, that can maybe chime in a little bit. I use mostly Pro Tools, but also can use Logic depending on the client/workload. Self-taught in Logic, but took courses in Pro Tools, yada yada yada. I also have a Universal Audio interface that offloads UA plug-ins from the system CPU to the interface's audio engine, fwiw.
First things first, I had the 2013 6c Mac Pro for a good 2.5 years, I just sold it this past weekend. I would highly advise against buying one today, unless it's second-hand and you can get a good deal for the system config you're interested in, and you're fully aware of the state of the 2013 Mac Pro right now, and what it means for you as an owner. The 2013 Mac Pro is all but deprecated. Thunderbolt 2 is eclipsed and for all intents and purposes, you can go ahead and consider it a legacy IO port. Expansion via TB2 exists for sure, but be prepared to A. Not find much of it and B. Whatever is out there will likely still remain forever expensive. There was absolutely a case for TB2 peripherals and expansion in 2012/2013, but now, not so much. Furthermore, the PCIe SSD in the Mac Pro runs at about 1000 MB/S read/write, which is pretty great, until you realize that the newer iMacs and MacBook Pros run about 2400 MB/S Read and 2000 MB/S write. The GPUs in the Mac Pro have already been completely outclasses by the consumer-grade GPUs in the newest iMac, as well.
The only reasons one should buy a Mac Pro right this second are that they absolutely need a new machine right now, absolutely need more than 4c/8t, and absolutely need to work in OS X. As in, this is how you make your living, and you can't go another 6-7 months without a means to make that living. In every other case, I would highly recommend not buying the 2013 Mac Pro.
All of that being said, to answer the OPs question more directly...it really depends on your session workload, and what kind of plug-ins you use, how you as the operator like to work, and how you feel your session work might expand in the near future. One person's 300 plug-ins test session to stress the CPU might only equal 20 plug-ins that you use on your sessions...to use an extreme example, an i5 quad-core could probably handle 500 7-band EQ plug-ins running in real time, but maybe once you've gotten to the 5th or 6th instance of Kontakt, you find you'll need more CPU headroom.
The i5 CPU will show as 4 logical cores, and the i7 CPU will show as 8 logical cores due to HyperThread. The i7 produces a bit more heat, and likely noise, yes, but it will have an awful lot more headroom to work with if you use demanding plug-ins, or work with numerous tracks in a professional-level session. It's also more taxing on the CPU if you regularly work with higher-quality raw audio, say 96/24 if you're running intense mastering sessions, or if the clients recorded the session in this way.
I can tell you from the last few years experience working on various machines and sessions, I have very rarely run into a session that choked on any recent hyper-threaded i7, and have never worked on a session that was able to max out the 6c/12t Xeon in the Mac Pro (other engineers will tell you differently depending on the material they work with). But I have on more than one occasion run into sessions that started to choke on i5 systems. Which really, depending on how you work, may not be as a big of a problem as it sounds. Once you get to that point, you need to start making and committing to decisions, printing audio tracks, organizing your session better to take better advantage of system resources, etc. Some engineers even *like* to work with system limitations in this way, as it helps them to commit to things faster and generally churn out finished sessions at a faster rate.
Another thing to quickly note, if you generally work with either Pro Tools HD, a Universal Audio system, Waves GRID, or any other system that has a hardware component that offloads plug-ins/DSP onto, you could perhaps get away with *not* having a powerhouse CPU, as well.
So all in all, it depends on you. Just know that if you have demanding sessions, or sessions with many tracks, or use demanding plug-ins, and you generally want to run them in real time on your system CPU, you'll most likely want/need the i7 due to the HyperThreading.
First things first, I had the 2013 6c Mac Pro for a good 2.5 years, I just sold it this past weekend. I would highly advise against buying one today, unless it's second-hand and you can get a good deal for the system config you're interested in, and you're fully aware of the state of the 2013 Mac Pro right now, and what it means for you as an owner. The 2013 Mac Pro is all but deprecated. Thunderbolt 2 is eclipsed and for all intents and purposes, you can go ahead and consider it a legacy IO port. Expansion via TB2 exists for sure, but be prepared to A. Not find much of it and B. Whatever is out there will likely still remain forever expensive. There was absolutely a case for TB2 peripherals and expansion in 2012/2013, but now, not so much. Furthermore, the PCIe SSD in the Mac Pro runs at about 1000 MB/S read/write, which is pretty great, until you realize that the newer iMacs and MacBook Pros run about 2400 MB/S Read and 2000 MB/S write. The GPUs in the Mac Pro have already been completely outclasses by the consumer-grade GPUs in the newest iMac, as well.
The only reasons one should buy a Mac Pro right this second are that they absolutely need a new machine right now, absolutely need more than 4c/8t, and absolutely need to work in OS X. As in, this is how you make your living, and you can't go another 6-7 months without a means to make that living. In every other case, I would highly recommend not buying the 2013 Mac Pro.
All of that being said, to answer the OPs question more directly...it really depends on your session workload, and what kind of plug-ins you use, how you as the operator like to work, and how you feel your session work might expand in the near future. One person's 300 plug-ins test session to stress the CPU might only equal 20 plug-ins that you use on your sessions...to use an extreme example, an i5 quad-core could probably handle 500 7-band EQ plug-ins running in real time, but maybe once you've gotten to the 5th or 6th instance of Kontakt, you find you'll need more CPU headroom.
The i5 CPU will show as 4 logical cores, and the i7 CPU will show as 8 logical cores due to HyperThread. The i7 produces a bit more heat, and likely noise, yes, but it will have an awful lot more headroom to work with if you use demanding plug-ins, or work with numerous tracks in a professional-level session. It's also more taxing on the CPU if you regularly work with higher-quality raw audio, say 96/24 if you're running intense mastering sessions, or if the clients recorded the session in this way.
I can tell you from the last few years experience working on various machines and sessions, I have very rarely run into a session that choked on any recent hyper-threaded i7, and have never worked on a session that was able to max out the 6c/12t Xeon in the Mac Pro (other engineers will tell you differently depending on the material they work with). But I have on more than one occasion run into sessions that started to choke on i5 systems. Which really, depending on how you work, may not be as a big of a problem as it sounds. Once you get to that point, you need to start making and committing to decisions, printing audio tracks, organizing your session better to take better advantage of system resources, etc. Some engineers even *like* to work with system limitations in this way, as it helps them to commit to things faster and generally churn out finished sessions at a faster rate.
Another thing to quickly note, if you generally work with either Pro Tools HD, a Universal Audio system, Waves GRID, or any other system that has a hardware component that offloads plug-ins/DSP onto, you could perhaps get away with *not* having a powerhouse CPU, as well.
So all in all, it depends on you. Just know that if you have demanding sessions, or sessions with many tracks, or use demanding plug-ins, and you generally want to run them in real time on your system CPU, you'll most likely want/need the i7 due to the HyperThreading.
workstation class is generally better for Orchestral stuff because of the huge demand in Hardware this brings to the table.
the i7 is newer and the mac pro is workstation grade.
the 12 core has only half the single core performance of the i7 but roughly 30% more total power.
then u have 24 threads instead of only 8, thats really a lot and good if you use huge track count.
+ it supports 128 GB ram, not officially but it works
this is really hard to tell, if you can, best thing would be to try it out
using tons of libraries in high quality low latency puts a lot of pressure on the SSD and memory
probably the bottleneck is there, not on the cpu.
your system is pretty decent, maybe just increase buffer
and again same thing with SSDs, its not about read speed, but random access time.
which should still be superior on the mac pro.
i think the new iMac pro is for you, this is a leap frog in compute power like never seen before.
and definitely the new mac pro that will come but who knows when
If you've managed to run files with any success whatsoever on a 2011 iMac, then the machine you've bought gives you miles of headroom to expand your project size before you start to encounter problems. So unless you plan to quadruple your file size, I wouldn't sweat it.
Upgrading to a Mac Pro workstation would not only be overkill, but it'd doom you to largely out of date hardware and a dead-end machine at a ridiculous mark up. Yes, the core / thread count will still exceed an iMac, but at this point it'd just be a waste to buy into that scene unless you're already pushing the boundaries of 2017 consumer hardware - which you're clearly not. The other thing with audio is that, unlike gaming or rendering, you get no material benefit from overshooting how much horsepower you need. It's not like it's going to sound even nicer if you've got 12 cores more than you require to run the project.
And at least with an iMac you can usually resell it for ~2/3 the price a year or so from now if you want to, and buy an iMac Pro or 2018 Mac Pro then. Conversely, a 2013 Mac Pro now will have zero resale value once the 2018 Mac Pro / iMac Pro come out.
That's my take, anyway.
I think the current requirement as we know lies in the GPU, Raedon 580 and not the CPU.
Yes, since the External Graphics development kit recommended by Apple for VR content creation uses that.
https://developer.apple.com/development-kit/external-graphics/
After running around and around and around regarding the choice of CPU, I finally decided to go with the 7600K, with the 580 graphics and 512 GB SSD. I'm sure my intended Logic usage doesn't require the 7700K, and IMO that chip just runs too hot for the confined case and one fan in the iMac. In the Tom's Hardware stress test, it even exceeded the Tjunction temp on a test bed with decent cooling. I've honestly never had such a difficult time deciding on a configuration for a computer.
Thanks a lot to everyone who gave some great info on this topic.
Thanks a lot to everyone who gave some great info on this topic.
OK, not to hijack the thread (which I read fully), but heres my dilemma. Wife is using an i7 2012 Mini with 16Gb and 512 SSD to run FCPx. Trying to decide between the i5 with 570 GPU or the i7 with 580GPU, both will be configured with 512SSD and 8Gb RAM. Since I have the education discount the wife wants to add the Logic Pro X and Motion 5 for her transitions and stuff in FCPx. Question is which CPU? Thanks for the help
Thanks for the helpOK, not to hijack the thread (which I read fully), but heres my dilemma. Wife is using an i7 2012 Mini with 16Gb and 512 SSD to run FCPx. Trying to decide between the i5 with 570 GPU or the i7 with 580GPU, both will be configured with 512SSD and 8Gb RAM. Since I have the education discount the wife wants to add the Logic Pro X and Motion 5 for her transitions and stuff in FCPx. Question is which CPU?
Either should work fine.
The i5 works fine for me in Bitwig Studio. i am not even getting close to using its full power. In my current project I have 29 tracks with a lot of automation. I have 97 plugins running and i would say probably half of them are Soundtoys and Fabfilter plugins.
This is with the i5 3.5ghz 7600.
From there you can get the 7600k which isn't a huge upgrade but it's more powerful and from what I've read it doesn't get as hot and kick the fan on as much as the 7700k.
That said if you want to future proof then you can upgrade to the 7700k and you shouldn't have problems for a long time.
One of the posts in this thread said he was getting like 300 plugins 100 tracks and only using 29% of the cpu on the 7700k. Apparently the fan kicks on around 30-50% of cpu usage.
So it really comes down to how much you want to spend and how long you plan on using the machine.
I'm thinking the 7600k is the best option as it's slightly more powerful than the 7600 and it might kick the fan on less. That said I don't see myself getting above 300 plugins and 100 tracks very often.
No I haven't heard the fan come on once.
Doing a quick look in Activity monitor it shows me using about 40-50% of the cpu. Though this is with safari open, and a couple other minor apps. I'm also running a full time machine backup at the same time.
No problem. Like I said I'm using Bitwig and I've read it's not the best optimized software. That seemed to be the case on my 2012 Mini comparing Bitwig to other DAWs.
On that 100 track 4 drummer 300+ plugin test the 7500 (Base i5) was at 50% load and the Logic CPU meter was more like 60% or so ~50degC CPU. The Base i5 is a totally capable machine as long as your sessions fit on it. Plugins, sample rate and number of tracks all have an effect. I was scared that this one would limit me too much but I am feeling better about it the more I use it (BTO with SSD instead of the Stock Fusion Drive will be in next week). The 3.4GHz never goes over 70degC (100% load) and never moves the Fan off of 1200RPM (though my Ambient is like 24degC and that may make a difference). I would be surprised if the 7600 was much different. I chose bigger SSD over slightly faster.
The Fan at 1200 RPM would never bother me but you can hear it in a very quiet room 2 feet in fromt of the machine. 1600 is where it would start to bug me - but still Nothing like the 2012 Mini or 2013 MBP
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Since your budget was big enough for the 7700K, you can always get both the bigger SSD and slightly faster.
I chose the 7600 with 1 TB SSD. I tried to convince myself to splurge to go to a 2 TB SSD, but it turns out I couldn't anyway. The only way to get a 2 TB SSD is to get the Radeon Pro 580.
Awesome thanks! I thought the test was done on the i7 too at a lower cpu usage, but I guess I read that wrong.
Well update of the update. Have been getting my i5 ready for some recording work tomorrow. Many of my pro tools stress numbers seem tired today. I decided to repeat some of the initial thermal testing I did. As it turns out that i5 is now running about 10°C hotter in general than it was when I first got it. Granted the weather is a little warmer but I am not sure what is caused this change. At 100% load now I am getting about 77°C (was 66 deg a week ago). I looked into whether any background processes were making this happen and I did not find any. My idle temperature right now with just chrome running is around 51°C. Room temp is about 27°C. It does make me wonder if there's some break in period for a new machine. I am still surprised to see it change so much and I will be interested to see how my new i5 machine works in comparison next week. I even tried booting from an SSD and turning the internal spinning drive off. No difference.
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The answer was actually TB3 to TB2 adapters - one feeding a long optical run. see details a few posts down....
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The answer was actually TB3 to TB2 adapters - one feeding a long optical run. see details a few posts down....
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