Processor for Music Production!! Please Help !

shivammangla,

I've not used Ableton, but it does have a control to enable multi-core and multi-processor support and, in general, the professional recording editing software such as Sonar do support multithreading. In an audio system, high clock speed is not as important as memory bandwidth and in effects processing, multi-tracking and etc. - more cores.

I have a dedicated sound recording system and for my small projects- two and four track live and MIDI recording using Cakewalk E1, the Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4GHz has been faultless. Overclocking is not advisable in workstation application as it increases possible errors as the threads are distributed and reintegrated.

The i5-6600K is not hyperthreading and the I7-6700K is oriented towards uses that benefit from it's excellent single-threaded performance that accelerates 3D- games for example.

For your use, depending on the scale of projects, consider a Xeon LGA2011 E5 6 or 8 core. This will give the wider memory bandwidth, and more importantly, the ability to use up to 12-core / 24 threads, and 40 PCEe lanes. The i5-6600K is 4 cores .4 threads and 16PCIe lanes. The extra PCIe lanes are used to run peripherals for example an audio interface card. I use PCI and PCIe duplex, MIDI cards. My friends that are involved professionally use for example MOTU interfaces and that run off of interface cards to an external modules. Of course a lot of interfaces are USB and Firewire.

If you wanted to make your system project quite a bit simpler, consider buying a used workstation, such as Dell Precision T3600 or T5600, or HP z420 or z620 with an E5-2670 (8-core @ 2.6 / 3.3Ghz) or E5-2680 (8-core @ 2.7 /3.5GHz). These processors were $1,500-1,600 new but are now depreciated and very reasonable.., For example:

HP Z420 Workstation 2.60GHz 8 Core Xeon E5-2670 16GB RAM LGA2011 Windows 10 Pro > sold for $479

You can also find these workstations with a low-end CPU and upgrade. A used E5-2670 can cost only $60-80 and E5-2680 is about $90-$120. (June 2016)

That system would be close to being usable as is, except for the drives as you would want an SSD for Windows and Programs and a larger storage drive. This method would save researching and ordering parts, assembling, wiring, configuration and so on.

The T5600 and z620 are mentioned as they can be upgraded to use a pair of CPU's.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

Start by dedicating a budget for a nice pair of headphones, and a good external audio interface first, then build your PC with what you have left.