Buying used pc

[rossi68]

Hi,
I can pick up a used gaming pc with these parts
for around 400$

i7 6700k
MSI z170A
16 Gb ram (only 1200 MHz)
Nvidia Geforce gtx 970

Will it be a significant step up from my i7 980x pc?

[junkgear]

I'm assuming you mean Pro Tools performance.
If you are already using SSD drives in your current system, then no, I don't think you will see a drastic improvement.
Overall, the new system will be more responsive, and programs will load faster, but those old processors were pretty powerful and once PT is open and running, I don't think you will see much difference.

If you are running into issues running your sessions, let us know a bit more about your full set up and how you are using PT and we can try to guide you to a better system.

[The Weed]

i7 4770K, 4th generation quad core, on an ASUS Z87-Pro motherboard. Just did the last upgrade I can unless I upgrade the video card: Samsung 970 Plus NVMe drives and from 16 to 32 GB of RAM. Computer is 7 years old and should last another number of years.

I don't stress the system very much as normally I'm just recording my voice for projects, but I also do described video, so have video, sound track, plug-ins and a producer's track so they can remote direct, at 64 buffer. I've also mixed a small movie - all with some Waves plug-ins and at 64 buffer when I had spinner hard drives and 16 GB of RAM.

As Will mentioned, let us know what you have now - a Sandra report would be good - and let us know what issues you're having and your typical session and its requirements.

[rossi68]

I was just wondering if the sixt gen cpu would be better than the first gen really.
I ended up returning a new pc this summer. A i9 10900x. Expensive... almost 3000$... of course better than my old one, but I felt it could not justify the price...
But if I get better performance for 400$ that would be something to think about.

[albee1952]

You should be able to bag a used HP z820 off of eBay. I had one that was dual 6 core XEON's at 3.5GHz, 64GB of RAM, nVidia graphics and a 500GB SSD loaded with Windows 10 Pro for $1100, shipped to my door. Tossed in my audio and samples drives and my HDN card and it ran like a train I did need to add a USB3 card(for more ports) and a Behringer USB>SPDIF box for Windows sounds and I swapped the graphics for a card I had that would drive 3 screens.

[ejinbc]

Originally Posted by rossi68

Hi,


i7 6700k
...
Will it be a significant step up from my i7 980x pc?

OP

I don't think you'll see a significant difference - the exception being if you routinely run long chains of CPU-intensive plugins that saturate one of the cores - the single core performance improvement between the 2 CPUs you mention is significant (see below).

I use PassMark for doing CPU comparisons - PassMark corelates reasonably well with DAWBench (a good Audio-specific Benchmark). In the images attached you can see that the overall PassMark is not that different between the 2 CPUs (980x vs. 6700K). I personally waited to upgrade from a 3700K until I could get an 8700K because there was no compelling reason. The 10900K has pretty good performance improvements, BUT you would have to be silly to buy a new Intel CPU right now - the M1 and AMD 5950 make Intel's top end look sad - one for core count and single core performance, and the other for power efficiency. Intel must have an interesting response soon. Competition is good.

Hope that helps. YMMV

ejinbc

[EGS]

According to this, you'd theoretically pick up about 10%: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compar...0K/m3336vs3502 Wait to upgrade if you can. The CPU battles are hot right now, thanks to Apple and AMD. I'm currently running ProTools on an i7-980x with a slight OC to 3.9Ghz. It's working well, but it's not exactly a modern monster! This CPU (or similar) would give you about 34% more juice: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compar...m3336vsm929964

[mikahawkins1]

The specs look good. The price is all that matters now.

[albee1952]

From my own experience:
Moving from a X58/980X system to an X99/6800K system was a pretty serious jump in power. The problem for me was poor stability. I fought with the X99 rig for several months before I bought the HP z820, which was solid as a rock. If you're still bent on the 6700 rig, the motherboard/chipset can make or break things. To me; that motherboard is a giant unknown

[rossi68]

Interesting.. The HP Z820 is from 2009?
There is a computerstore here in Norway trying to sell one for 3500$....
I offered 500, so we sill see :)