Intel i7-950 vs XEON 5650

[planet_b]

Going from i7-920 to Xeon 5650 gave me plenty more power in Ableton Live 9.. The Xeon overclocks very easily without heating up that much. On the stock 920 the "Live performance test" had 60 tracks at most until it started crackling with 512 byte audio buffers. With the 5650 overclocked to 3.4 GHz I can have 100 tracks in the same test. And in fact it uses less electricity than the 920 (I have a wattage meter). So, for me this was very really worthy upgrade for 80 euros.

[Steinberg]

It's true, but it depends of chipset on Your MB.

I use Cubase5, so I had to change back to my i7 950.
Now it's much better.

We will see Cubase Pro8

[Kaine]

As mentioned above, older versions of Cubase weren't fully optimized for multi-core CPUs.

This. Cubase 5 has lousy load balancing, much improved in 6 and 7 and even more so in 8.. I'm not surprised in the slightest for the test involving less+faster cores of the i7 to come out ahead of the more+slower core setup found in the Xeons.