Variations of this question seem to be asked frequently, but I've yet to find a response that satisfies my specific question.
I'm a mac user, and have been buying up inexpensive mac minis to use as slaves in conjunction with VEP and Logic. I'm at the point now where loading instruments as I need them is seriously slowing me down and my templates are maxing out the abilities of my current setup. I'm looking at building a slave PC so I can create a massive orchestral template with all (or at least most) of my instruments/articulations preloaded in a metaframe, and am trying to figure out what specs are necessary.
A lot of people advocate the use of i7's since the clockspeed is faster. They cite benchmark tests that show i7's tearing up performance stats, and state that DAWS don't use multiple cores very efficiently. That said, I'm lead to believe that most of those people don't use VEP or a master/slave setup and are basing their opinion off of an all-in-one setup. I've heard that VEP makes super efficient use of multiple cores/threads, so it's better to sacrifice clockspeed for cores. I'm currently considering putting together a dual 10 core xeon computer (20 cores total or 40 virtual cores), but the clockspeed for each would only be 2.2 ghz. It's much more expensive than a faster i7, but given that most companies that build dedicated slaves favor this setup, I'm inclined to believe it's more efficient. Any thoughts on this? If price is comparable, is it preferable to run 2 i7 slaves, or one dual xeon?
Additionally, is ecc ram necessary? I'd rather save up the cash for quality and not have to deal with panic attacks if my computer bugs out before a big deadline, but some have suggested it's overkill for audio work.
Also, has anyone tried out the Ryzen Threadripper yet? Most people suggest Intel, but a few have suggested it's a waste of money when I could get better or at least similar performance from AMD.
Thank you in advance!