Ableton Forum

I finally get to upgrade my home studio DAW, and I'm not sure what works best with Live. I rewire to Reason alot, but Live Suite is my main DAW.

I decided on a 970 Hexcore with 6gb, with a water cooler for the CPU and six gb memory. I'd like to get three years out of it...
But then I started reading about SandyBridge 2600K, and overclocking. Even moderately overclocked, the reviewers say these chips don't generate dangerous heat, so they say you can overclock with a stock heatsink with relative safety. Also, the 4 core SandyBridge (when overclocked) can outperform a six core and generate less heat. Not to mention its almost $300 cheaper.
So, what is the deal- is SIX REAL CORES better than 4 (read 8 Hypethreaded) SandyBridge cores for Ableton Live?

I'm on a dual core laptop now, so this is all going to be a big improvement. But if Sandy Bridge is roughly equivalent to the HexCore in LIVE, I'd rather do that, and put the money into a Solid State hard drive as prices come down on these.

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If it helps, I have an 1st gen i7 desktop PC with 6GB 1600MHz memory, the CPU is a 930 overclocked to 4GHz (ie significantly higher than stock 970, but only 4 cores). My new MBP has only a 2.3 Ghz (turbos upto to something over 3Ghz for two cores, but not really relevent with all cores busy). The resulting audio performance in Live on the two machines forthe projects that I have had loaded on both is more or less the same within a point or two.

The key point is there is a *huge* jump in floating point performance between the 1st and 2nd i7 CPUs, so much so that floating point benchmarks between the two CPUs at the speed Im using them show the 2nd gen 2.3Ghz CPU to be quite a bit faster than then 4Ghz 1st gen CPU. Floating point perf id what really matters for running live. Of course more cores will help too.

Personally I would go for the fastest 2nd gen CPU you can afford.

Khazul, lemme be sure I get this right. Second generation means Sandybridge, right? If that true, what you're saying seems to confirm what I've been reading- that the floating point performance on Sandy Bridge is very good, and that its safely overclockable.

Prices seem pretty good on SandyBridge quad cores. I can get a nice system with water cooling, 6gb and an the 2600K processor for under $1300 and they build and test it. I'm thinking its time to upgrade.

Thanks for the input!