What did you end up with? I've kinda settled on a hot-shit i9 with the new chip and mobo but apparently Newegg had them for about three minutes last night at midnight.
AMD and Pro Tools do not work, have never worked, will never work. Lather, rinse, repeat for every single audio and video authoring application. AMD does something asynchronous with audio and video at a chip level that makes audio and video authoring applications either crash reliably or not run at all. There's an entire community out there of pikers who never have to do anything hard or anything for money and they'll go "I can get my Ryzen and Reaper to work just fine, I had it open for half an hour playing presets with my thumb therefore all the complaints about Ryzen are bullshit" and then you get deeper into the world of People Who Make Money With Media and the mantra is never ever AMD ever.
In the beginning, there was the Motorola 68x and the IBM x86. the 68x was a RISC chip; it was designed for synchronous processing by multiple different areas on the chip which meant it loaned itself well to stacking. The x86 was designed for memory segmentation to allow better use of limited resources. One is expensive. The other is cheap. One is refined for flexibility. The other is refined for speed. Apple used a 68x processor. This allowed it to handle digital audio natively and successfully. At a time when memory was $40/mb, Apple's x86 chips could successfully stream stereo CD-quality audio at 10.4MB/minute. PC clones used the x86 and no attempts were made at authoring shit. At some point in the late '80s, however, the PC universe decided that maybe games shouldn't sound like 8-bit shit so things like the Gravis Ultrasound and the Creative Soundblaster viable. These specialized sound cards siphoned the bistream off at an interrupt; there were sixteen available on the chip and a soundcard could use one. It allowed for synchronous audio control on an asynchronous chip. This is about the time Pro Tools was released as Sound Tools and about the time serious consumer video editing software was available. Pro Tools and Video Toaster were synchronous protocols that ran on 68x; video rendering was done on SGI and Sun systems that ran other RISC architecture. Eventually the PC universe recognized that there was a possibility to capture some of that money and assorted platforms rose up that sort of kind of allowed real-time recording and manipulation of audio and video but they only worked if they were slow and janky enough for the buffer to do the job. Eventually x86 architecture became fast enough that you could deal with the asynchronous nature of the x86 instruction set but also, eventually Intel realized that they could eat Sun and DEC's lunch if they came out with synchronous x86 chips for the server market. Now you could do audio and video on a PC. Meanwhile Apple limped RISC architecture along until it was an obvious dead end at which point they switched to Intel but the hot shit macs? They've always used server chips on the Intel side. So here we are now. If your asynchronous chips are fast enough, they will deal with synchronous data and the slop won't matter. This allows you to stream several channels of audio without things borking but I'm running 100 channels of I/O on a regular basis. Account for plugins and such and I've probably got a few thousand synchronous streams of data. And when things don't all arrive at the same time, software breaks. AMD never served the pro market and never will. Gamers are a much more valuable demographic anyway simply because there's hella more of them.
Every time I look at the pricing on higher end Apple kit I think someone really needs to try being SGI again. Gamers aren't going to be subsidizing wintel forever, between phones and games targeting every platform so there's not much of an advantage in a gaming PC over a console since the games are built around console limitations. Build a nice RISC architecture with good video and audio built in, port linux or FreeBSD to it and pay cad/audio/video vendors and Wolfram to port their applications, make sure it speaks Vulkan, and have a relatively cheap nerd toy offering to ensure the free software ecosystem will get ported to it. You'd own the big data space too because no one who still has to care about their CPU architecture likes x86.
I have two responses: 1) "From your lips to god's ears" 2) "I don't know how you can look at higher end Apple kit and conclude anything other than that they're trying to be SGI. You can buy twenty five thousand dollars worth of MEMORY for a Mac Pro." Mac Pros now cost more than SGI Octanes did.
They were the only game in town. You also have to keep in mind that the whole world came out with "USB audio interfaces" when USB itself is an asynchronous protocol. So it wouldn't reliably do 96k, it wouldn't lock up to word clock, and you'd get all sorts of nasty smear. Of course if you were listening on bullshit monitors or bullshit headphones and compressing the ever loving bejeesus out of things, you maybe didn't notice and if you were running pirated Radium warez that you got from a buddy at the club on a burned CD it really didn't matter. But as soon as things got real things got synchronous. The reason Apple held onto Firewire until the absolute bloody end is it's synchronous. As a part of the protocol it ships 8 pairs of digital audio. Period. You can spit audio down a firewire cable without even needing to translate. Just as important: if shit's broken, and I've got a Pro Tools sound card and Pro Tools software on a Mac, Pro Tools has to qualify that mac. If i call up Digidesign/Avid and say "shit's broke" they can say "okay what's the error" and they'll get something. They've got a handful of macs, they've got a handful of hardware devices, they're done. You call up on the Windows side and it becomes "what motherboard" "what CPU" "what GPU" "what memory" "what audio device" "what other audio device" "what other strange peripherals" "what else is on the USB bus" because windows gives no fucks it just sprays its data all over creation. This is why Avid officially supports eight Windows computers, all of them HP workstations. Pro Tools not working on Windows? Not running an HP workstation? Tough shit. Right now? Right now Pro Tools won't work if you have a Realtek chip on your motherboard. Why? Because Realtek rewrote their drivers to remove a bunch of functionality and Windows auto-propagates all your drivers and that functionality was necessary for Pro Tools to say "don't even think about considering this bullshit chip an audio device". That's an official bug report. It took me four hours to work around and I'm in the damn credits of the software. Traditionally this wasn't a problem on the Mac side but I'm also dealing with the fact that two of my Native Instruments synths are borked because Apple decided to update Logic without telling anyone ahead of time, which crashes about five programs that belong to Native Instruments, so their fix makes things work again on the Mac side while completely breaking the Windows side. SO long story short, yeah tradition because everyone sucks now.