This might be interesting: I just bought a refurbished Mac Pro 6x3,33ghz mid 2010, 32gb ram, AND a Mac Pro 12x3,33ghz, mid 2010, 32gb ram, ati radeon 5770 on both machines, to use in parallel at two different studios I’m running. I was hoping and expecting the 12-core would slay the 6-core, so I created a test project in Cubase 9,5 to measure the power of each machine.
The test project consists of a set of folders. Each folder contains 8 individual stereo audio tracks, each audio track has the insert slot filled with 8x Fab filter Pro MB and 8x Oeksound Soothe (in 9,5 you have 16 slots. Soothe is btw one of the most CPU hungry plugins I own). Each group of 8 tracks is routed to a separate group channel.
I bought the refurbished 6-core from MacBank Pro in UK, and I don’t know what they feed their machines but the performance was mental to say the least. I managed to run 31(!) folders before the memory maxed out (the cpu still had some headroom left). That means 1984 instaces of Pro-MB + 1984 instaces of Soothe spread out over 248 audio tracks with the project running smooth, passing audio through all plugins.
Now the 12-core. Same system and audio SSD’s were switched over. Same test project. Result = 3 folders (192xPro-MB+192xSoothe over 24 channels). Then it was over.
There’s obviously a lot of different ways to test and compare, but at least with my setup the 6-core performed 10x better than the 12 core, in terms of running big sessions in Cubase.