One Core Carries the Chain

FL Studio spreads work across cores by mixer track, and Image-Line is explicit about the limit: everything from the instrument through its mixer track and that track's effects has to be processed in sequence on the same core. Route two heavy plugins into one track and no amount of extra cores will split them. That single sentence explains most FL Studio buying decisions, and it is why a machine that looks idle in Task Manager can still crackle.

So the build is chosen around three things: how fast one core is, how quiet the machine has to be if a microphone shares the room, and how sample libraries are stored and streamed. Core count still matters once a project runs many instruments and independent mixer tracks in parallel, and memory decides how many sampled instruments can stay loaded at once. Graphics barely enters into it.