However with Cubase which I use for my electronic music it isn't great. It runs great with Pro Tools for mixing, I have never run out of processing power yet even on pretty big projects.

im starting another year long project and wont have time to change DAW 'during the race'. Still would love to move to a 8700k or 9900k within next 6mo. what does help is, except Kontakt, and occasional Zebra instance, i use exclusively hardware for synthesis and all reverbs. so currently i am still satisfied with my DAW speed (again). Hoooraay this made all the difference in the world. trick was simple -> turn of the tempo sync within each Kontakt instance. doing film/tv music i use tempo maps every day.

However, finally i realized that new 64-bit Cubase and Kontakt create a bug - humongous cpu spikes when you use tempo maps.

then i got 980X, and overclocked it with no problems and this almost doubled my benchmark results. Last year i finally moved from Cub5/32 to Cub85/64 and faced insane performance drop and spikes etc.

Arturia analog lab causing mac problems