Upgrading CPU: would it make any difference in my setup?

Audacity Help Forum Windows
1

How CPU intensive is “Sliding Time Scale/Pitch Shift” process in Audacity?

My current setup (i7-4770 @ 3.4GHz, 16GB RAM, SSD) takes about a minute to apply that filter to a 5-minute song.

Not that I think it is slow (I have read that it is a good quality algorithm) and I appreciate the quality of the result, but I wonder if an upgrade to i7-4970K @ 4.0GHz will make this process running faster.

One would think that a faster CPU will make any processes faster but, an inspection to the CPU performance using Intel Extreme Tunning Utility while applying the filter shows that the CPU usage is always lower than 40%, which makes me think that the extra speed of the i7-4790K may not make a big difference here.

2

CPU usage of the effect should be about 25% on a quad core processor because it runs as one thread and so can only utilize one processor core at a time. Upgrading from 3.4 GHz to 4.0 GHz would therefore be expected to save you up to about 9 seconds on a 5 minute track.

3

Thanks Steve, excellent reply.