Huge DAW performance improvement post GFX card tweaks!

[bustedfist]

The worst thing to allow to affect a DAW build is the Brute Force Syndrome. Same systems killer for games can be shite for audio work. It's all about clock speeds across all harware. This is the most basic comparison, other's here that build Audio Systems and have their wallet and rep on the line know what plays nice together and what doesn't. One link in the chain marching to the beat of a different drummer can throw the whole band into chaos. It's more complicated, just making the point biggest, most popular, most power won't get it done in all but the luckiest instances.

[bustedfist]

Is a 8 year old system really going to 'destroy' most modern custom builds?

It very well could, see my last post.

[bustedfist]

If you want to build a system, look to what people like Pete Kaine and Chris or Scott at ADK post in the advice threads. If I've missed one or two, I apologize, no favoritism. They say over and over what has to play nice with what to have a DAW with no issues. At least some build both gaming systems and audio. They always say what's good for the goose isn't necessarily good for the gander.

[rifftrax]

So you'd use that as a slave with VEPro, or am I missing something?

His way of saying if you knew what he did, you wouldn't have to.

I thought that was maybe what he meant. It's an ugly big beast so if I was to have it i'd lock it away and use it as a VEPro slave.

Is a 8 year old system really going to 'destroy' most modern custom builds?

I'm running a i7-4790 as a home machine and after buying a DL380 G7 with dual X5660 I'll never go back to running anything but servers. So, in my case at half the cost... yes without a doubt. The creative director at my new job put a home build together for like $5000 which barely would best an equivalent second-hand bladeserver I could cobble together for maybe $800.

Here's a good article on it this kind of approach:
http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-aff ... al-xeon-pc

Whatever you are using to run Vienna Pro I guarantee you can just virtualize it if it needs to be isolated from a host and run in a separate OS for some reason. Hyper-V is your friend and if you have Win 10 Pro it's included for free.

[barryfell]

Is a 8 year old system really going to 'destroy' most modern custom builds?

It very well could, see my last post.

Interesting. Can you detail why? Genuinely interested as a builder of PCs for myself.

[barryfell]

So you'd use that as a slave with VEPro, or am I missing something?

His way of saying if you knew what he did, you wouldn't have to.

I thought that was maybe what he meant. It's an ugly big beast so if I was to have it i'd lock it away and use it as a VEPro slave.

Is a 8 year old system really going to 'destroy' most modern custom builds?

I'm running a i7-4790 as a home machine and after buying a DL380 G7 with dual X5660 I'll never go back to running anything but servers. So, in my case at half the cost... yes without a doubt. The creative director at my new job put a home build together for like $5000 which barely would best an equivalent second-hand bladeserver I could cobble together for maybe $800.

Whatever you are using to run Vienna Pro I guarantee you can just virtualize it if it needs to be isolated from a host and run in a separate OS for some reason. Hyper-V is your friend and if you have Win 10 Pro it's included for free.

Mmmmm, interesting. You're giving me ideas now....

[bustedfist]

Is a 8 year old system really going to 'destroy' most modern custom builds?

It very well could, see my last post.

Interesting. Can you detail why? Genuinely interested as a builder of PCs for myself.

Those guys can say it better than I ever could and there are quite a few recent examples in the computer section. I'll give it a meager shot, I'm not worthy.

Just something like the clock speed of memory clashing with that of the CPU can cause DSP issues. That's just one stupid example, as I said I'm not worthy. Think of an orchestra. Imagine every section playing the same piece at a different tempo. One section hears the next at the same time the next hears the first is off and both try to adjust to each other, meanwhile all other sections are oblivious and keep on as they were. That's the best analogy I can give. The threads I refer to are at the top on that sub-forum.

[rifftrax]

Mmmmm, interesting. You're giving me ideas now....

Here's what I would do if you want a fun project:

E5-2670 dual cpu
Purchase: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Intel-E5-2650-v ... 2095502941
Benchmark: https://cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=In ... cpuCount=2
Cost: $100 for 2 qty

Dell Precision T7610 dual socket LGA 2011 motherboard
Purchase: http://www.ebay.com/itm/New-Dell-Precis ... 2899562630
Cost: $171 for 1 qty

16GB 8x2 ECC DDR3 RAM
Purchase: http://www.ebay.com/itm/Kingston-16GB-8 ... 2613091721
Cost: $48 for 2 qty (total 32GB ram covering 16 slots)

NVME to PCI-e x4 Adapter
Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Angelbird-Wings- ... B018U79YQK
Cost: $75 (worth it for the heat dissipation IMO)

Samsung 960 500gb NVME drive
Purchase: https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-960-EVO- ... Z-V6E500BW
Cost: $250

You're at $650 total cost so far. Add whatever CPU heatsinks + case + power supply you want, build it and I dare to you tell me it doesn't shit all over anything you've ever run in the past.

[barryfell]

Thanks man, i'll have a look at that.

[rifftrax]

Thanks man, i'll have a look at that.

No problem.

It's funny... I actually was recently talking to the president of a well known managed services IT company in my city who had apparently never heard of NVME. They were still setting all their clients up with SATA3 SSD for boot. I described to him that I just finished benchmarking a fresh clone of an existing Win 7 Pro system (going from a 7200rpm mechanical drive that was maxing out at 130MB/s sequential reads to a Samsung 960 Pro NVME) which was afterwards getting 2.8GB/s sequential read with no fine-tuning at all. The look on his face was priceless.

I've known very well-trained and uber-certified IT contractors working for $250/hr that would still do shit like run random critical non-windows services under the built-in admin account on a server 2008 r2 install (major no-no). These were super smart guys, but they were more network admins than system admins. The problem is that there is simply so much tech and nuance in IT that it's generally ridiculously difficult to keep it all sorted and even then a smart dude with some powershell chops can make a sys admin veteran feel like they have no idea how operating systems work when delving into low-level stuff.

I'm lucky because my current company had really no IT infrastructure when I first came on as a project manager with them so I was able to get my hands dirty in massive amount of stuff I've always wanted a excuse to dick around with. A lot of IT people get stuck managing existing asinine infrastructure because the boss is too afraid to permit anything to change and the whole company remains frozen in a wildly inefficient and overpriced system administration paradigm.

CEO of my last job let his contracted IT group convince him he needed $1000 managed gigabit Brocade switches for their VOIP network. To me that's stupid AF but whatever, he was happy to pay it. Remember... there's almost ALWAYS a cheaper and less bullshit way of accomplishing something in the tech world for the same or less money. Just takes some research and knowing your desired spec really well.

I have this theory about hiring IT people. To me, there's only one question you need to ask which is "how bad-ass is your home lab?" If they don't jump at the chance to talk for hours about a setup they configured and managed from the ground up of their own volition then I'm moving on.

[barryfell]

Thanks man, i'll have a look at that.

No problem.

It's funny... I actually was recently talking to the president of a well known managed services IT company in my city who had apparently never heard of NVME. They were still setting all their clients up with SATA3 SSD for boot. I described to him that I just finished benchmarking a fresh clone of an existing Win 7 Pro system (going from a 7200rpm mechanical drive that was maxing out at 130MB/s sequential reads to a Samsung 960 Pro NVME) which was afterwards getting 2.8GB/s sequential read with no fine-tuning at all. The look on his face was priceless.

I've known very well-trained and uber-certified IT contractors working for $250/hr that would still do shit like run random critical non-windows services under the built-in admin account on a server 2008 r2 install (major no-no). These were super smart guys, but they were more network admins than system admins. The problem is that there is simply so much tech and nuance in IT that it's generally ridiculously difficult to keep it all sorted and even then a smart dude with some powershell chops can make a sys admin veteran feel like they have no idea how operating systems work when delving into low-level stuff.

I'm lucky because my current company had really no IT infrastructure when I first came on as a project manager with them so I was able to get my hands dirty in massive amount of stuff I've always wanted a excuse to dick around with. A lot of IT people get stuck managing existing asinine infrastructure because the boss is too afraid to permit anything to change and the whole company remains frozen in a wildly inefficient and overpriced system administration paradigm.

CEO of my last job let his contracted IT group convince him he needed $1000 managed gigabit Brocade switches for their VOIP network. To me that's stupid AF but whatever, he was happy to pay it. Remember... there's almost ALWAYS a cheaper and less bullshit way of accomplishing something in the tech world for the same or less money. Just takes some research and knowing your desired spec really well.

Yeah I can imagine. I don't work in IT myself but on the odd occasion I do need to call our ICT helpdesk contractor (CGI), typically due to me not having the admin rights for my own system to sort it myself I end up telling them what they need to do to fix it! It feels like many of them are just working from a script and won't divert from it, regardless of what I or previous other analysts I can have spoken to regarding and issue have tried and clearly written on the ticket. I was annoyed the other day when went through 10(!) service desk analysts and not one of them could work out what the issue was with a problematic shared mailbox. I appreciate these guys are just the bottom of the ladder first line though, and I have massive respect for some guys I know and speak to in the industry who really know their stuff. It must be nice to come in as a manager like you did and implement a fresh IT infrastructure from scratch.

As much as i'm a natural IT analyst/tech and do that job unofficially both in my day job and out with it quite often, I wouldn't want to actually be one professionally. I really don't enjoy troubleshooting and fixing problems all day tbh, and I find most of of the tech very mundane.

We're getting rather off topic here but since you are clearly a fan of performance and transfer speeds, what's your thoughts on Intel's new Optane memory/storage? I like that that some early modules coming soon that although small in capacity compared with modern SSDs, never mind HDDs, will be very affordable but can be used as a cache for the likes of high capacity HDDs but make them effectively read/write at fast SSD speeds. It's a nice stepping stone way of integrating this new 3D Xpoint memory into user and enterprise systems well before it becomes mature and cheap enough for our system to migrate entirely to it.

It's not often we get a big step jump in performance, especially these days but 3D Xpoint looks like it has serious potential.

[rifftrax]

It feels like many of them are just working from a script and won't divert from it, regardless of what I or previous other analysts I can have spoken to regarding and issue have tried and clearly written on the ticket. I was annoyed the other day when went through 10(!) service desk analysts and not one of them could work out what the issue was with a problematic shared mailbox.

It's unfortunately super common and the big issue is IT is not one of those areas where even characteristically geeky people tend to get very excited about. If you stumble across an IT person who is floored by talking about network infrastructure fine-tuning then you've found the leprechaun lol.

It must be nice to come in as a manager like you did and implement a fresh IT infrastructure from scratch.

The new company I'm with is a up and coming educational toy manufacturer. We just moved into a 22k sq ft building and I have my hands in so many cookie jars it's almost silly. I made out like a bandit finding this place as I had always dreamed of basically building some heavy-hitting network and system infrastructure from scratch for a fast-paced business.

We're getting rather off topic here but since you are clearly a fan of performance and transfer speeds, what's your thoughts on Intel's new Optane memory/storage?

I'd never heard of it. Glad you mentioned it

Seems pretty interesting but yeah I mean NVME speeds are neck and neck with what they are talking about (at a fraction of the cost) but I could see the elimination of NAND cell degradation being a really big deal (although using single-level cell makes that a bit of a moot point currently). That would mean the controllers would no longer need to be subject to the overhead of write leveling. I'm guessing that's where they are achieving the massive latency improvement - i.e. in the assembly level controller instructions required for a single write/read operation.

[flugel45]

Erm, back to original topic...

Thanks, barryfell, for this interesting discovery.

The next obvious question is if a non-Ryzen user could benefit from this tweak... Or a non-Cubase user.

I guess the first step is to check if you have the graphics card utility installed. If you're like many DAW users, you only installed the video driver. Now it might be worth installing the "control panel" as well.

[barryfell]

Erm, back to original topic...

Thanks, barryfell, for this interesting discovery.

The next obvious question is if a non-Ryzen user could benefit from this tweak... Or a non-Cubase user.

I guess the first step is to check if you have the graphics card utility installed. If you're like many DAW users, you only installed the video driver. Now it might be worth installing the "control panel" as well.

I am a non-Ryzen user.

[flugel45]

I am a non-Ryzen user.

Ah, okay. I saw where Ryzen was mentioned earlier and missed where you corrected this.

Even better!

I'm now going to check if my video card control panel lets me switch to another profile....