Single x64 machine system performance report [with explanations]

[Vatroslav]

Well, as I promised, the single x64 machine system performance report is here, finally. I have been waiting for this to happen for months, and now that it's finally done and ready for putting out in the public, I can't tell you how excited I am.

I know a lot of you (especially those of you who are planning on a x64 upgrade in the near future) were waiting for this anxiously and I apologize again for not delivering sooner. It's just that I have been so busy with different things lately I couldn't work faster than I did and the whole project (everything from the re-writing of an existing piece of mine to the entry, the editing, the tests and the preparation for posting) took longer than I thought it will.

But I finally did it, and here it is, to whom it may concern.

This thread is basically a follow-up on some of my posts with my initial findings on the single x64 machine system on The 64bit/32bit debate thread and some basic x64 facts with descriptions of my experiences setting the whole thing up, so if you haven't read it already, it would be a good thing if you would before immersing in all this.

Enjoy.

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[Vatroslav]

Well, as we all know, the sample-based proaudio community is at the brink of a major switch from 32bit memory addressing systems to complete 64bit architectures.

Whether it is a network of 64bit computers or one x64 server-class machine, the advantages of 64bit address space will enable us to do what we have been dreaming of ever since the early days of the jump from hardware samplers, synthesizers and 700MB cages to 2.7GB software of virtual instruments and streaming sound file libraries in x32 enviroments.

As it has been told many times before, the x64 superset has been around for quite some time now, but what held most of the x64 aspirants back was the absence of the 64bit driver support from most of the internal peripheral device vendors.

The server may have been supporting x64 instruction sets since day one, but the slow progress in 64bit driver releases and the instability of the early versions made most potential users sit out the harsh times.

On the software side of things, even though many have been saying that the true x64 heaven will come only with the release of native 64bit applications, MS' increadible WOW64 subsystem programming and excellent compiling of most of the existing 32bit music creation applications by their manufacturers has enabled us to break the sabotaging limits of the x32 mathemathics much sooner than some the early predictions have been claiming we will.

Having planned on a single x64 machine system for over four years now, I have been one of those people warily waiting for the harsh times to pass by.

Around two years ago, I talked to a fellow composer who decided to take the role of the x64 pioneer.

When I first met with him after he finally managed to get the system up and running and after spending some time with it, I needed less than a minute of his rampaging oration to come to a decision to leave the x64 upgrade on hold.

For whichever reason, he barely got the system to work at all, and when he finally did, it was so buggy and unstable he regreted the day he decided to go to music school.

From what I remember, he went back to his two x32 computer network and used the new one as a third slave, whatever he could get from it, that is.

Long story short - that was $3000 he never saw again.

I was discouraged to say the least and thought it's more likely I will turn into a x64 machine myself than buy one anytime soon.

And then, about eight months ago, I met a guy who claimed to work on a single x64 system with 8GB on an ABIT board and a Quad and has a hard time remembering what it feels like to have a wait time between the moment his mind thinks of an articulation and the moment that articulation sounds off.

The word "bounce" hasn't gotten out of his mouth for months either. Nor did "freeze", "unloading", "clicks", "pops", "crackles", "dropouts", "memory warnings", "crashes".

Effects chains weren't a problem anymore. Dozens of audio tracks loaded either.

Loadtimes simply did not exist. The template is loaded upon the system boot and remains the only wait time he will have until the workday is over.

Driver latency was lower than ever before. Input latency as well. He could play along whatever was going on in the piece and with no discernable audio lag, even with key instruments.

Polyphony was never even discussed. His pieces hardly ever go over 300 simultaneous voices, but at the time even that number at 256 which is his working latency made my jaw drop.

And all this with only three player instances.

I was sceptic, as you may assume.

So I invited myself over to his studio to hear this with my own ears.

I was proven everything I was told, and then some. He was streaming 250 average voices moderato at 100 bpm with ~20 mid-phrase short articulation switches at even intervals from four 7200s with four signal interceptions, eight waveforms and an active input and was still left with loads of memory space and some processing headroom.

First of all, less than year and a half since the world record in the number of swearings in a single sentence has been broken, here's a guy who hasn't had a single issue with a x64 setup, and on top of that he has everything I've been dreaming of for three years running as smooth as any system I've ever seen or worked on, including the highly optimized ones in the composing and mastering facilities I've been to.

I asked him for some advice and got a half-hour tutorial which set me off preparing for what I finally ventured in a month ago.

In the meantime, I met dozens of other guys (either sound engineers or composers) doing the same thing with no issues at all and it was clear that time has done its thing and that the new audio era is no longer just wishful thinking but a reality today.

The key word here is, of course, Windows XP x64 SP2. However, as this is a subject discussed more times than Vista programmers could probably ever dreamed it would be, I will leave it at that as there is more than enough said regarding this issue on this forum and others.

One of the most useful set of advices was given to me by one of the composers on 16GB, 8 drives and Dual DualCore 285 Opterons who even with everything he could ever imagine having in a mix loaded and ready to go still has more memory room and transfer bandwidth than he could ever use (counting effects too).

So three months ago I decided to put an end to the lurking from the dark and join the x64 guinea pig movement, wherever it may lead me.

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[Vatroslav]

As we all know, the key to a stable single machine system are the right hardware choices and and all of the intercompatibilities of all of the software/hardware components and specifications that have to be kept in mind when planning on a build from scratch.

The good news is, we are lucky enough to live in the age when all of the internal hardware components support x64 operations, so when you go into a store to buy anything that that goes in the box, the question "Is it 64bit?" in not necessary anymore.

However, as has been said times before, this does not go for external non-plug&play hardware peripherals. Some will work perfectly in a x64 system, some might not. Checking with every hardware manufacturer whether there is x64 driver support for the product of your desire is a must-do before making any purchasing decisions.

Regarding externals, what I personally was most concerned about before startin with all this was what's going to happen to my Yamaha S90 synthesizer.

Yamaha luckily had x64 drivers for their hardware, but they were very new and in the early versions, if I remember right, so I could only hope the synth will be able to communicate MIDI at x64 instruction sets.

When the system was finally put together and up and running, I was surprised to learn that S90 doesn't need any drivers to work with Win XP x64 at all.

Just as any other external peripheral I have hooked up to the box.

So after months of surfing, asking around, talking to audio and IT experts, listening to other audio professionals' experiences, browsing through dealer sites, specs examinations, test report considerations, technical and financial calculations, development speculations and predictions and all of the other research and planning I needed to do before I start my stride down the computer shop alley, I came to the conclusion that, for me, the following specs would be turn out to be the best deal:

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[Vatroslav]

Motherboard

ABIT IN9 32 MAX

When it first came out a year and a half ago, the nForce 680i SLI chipset was awarded the title of a dream coming true for every gamer and PC enthusiast that ever grabbed a joystick. I remember reading reports on some MOBO manufacturers being so impressed with the design they threw the offers as-is.

Having planned on an Intel chipset for a long time, I was sceptic to video-oriented platforms for audio production, but as some of the early benches I read suggested 680i is not that behind some of itscompetition when it comes to digital audio processing, I became less hesitant towards maybe investing in something I thought I never will.

What I was particularly impressed with at the time was the increadible FSB and memory controller as well as the peak interconnect bandwidth that were the top of what you could find a year ago (and was just until recently 790i came out).

However, I was still very hesitant towards going with something aimed at linking three graphic cards more than anything else and having planned on an RME audio interface and knowing it works best with Intel chipsets, the idea was still very far-fetched, but reading and hearing some of those guys on single 8 or 16GB beting heavily on gaming chipsets for their x64 audio powermachines, I gave them the benefit of the doubt and went along with their suggestions.

One of the main reasons why, apart from the fast clocking and the increadible connectivity on the southbridge, was a completely new northbridge and a revised memory controller with asynchronous run ability, significantly improving the overall server-side box performance in comparison to older nForce sets.

Also, the solid state capacitors make the whole thing cooler, more resistant and more stable.

Now, the problem is ABIT is not an advised MOBO brand from the DAW builders. They say it often acted very unstable in the past.

I can say I've been using ABIT's MOBOs for ten years and never had a single glitch happen.

However, at the time of my search for an ideal board, there was only one supporting all of the standards I needed in the system and at the same time providing enough RAM room for future upgrades and lots of headroom in the performance, and that was ABIT IN9 32 MAX.

With 4 DIMM slots supporting up to theoretical 32GB of DDR2 at 800MHz, it was exactly what I was looking for (the headroom is more important here than the off chance of going higher than 8GBs one day), and with all of the connectivity (3 USB and 2 FW headers internal, 4 USB and 2 eSATA headers external, which would mean you could attach up to four additional SATA drives to external ins via port multipliers and still have SATA I performance level and hook up to 7 USB drives without an additional external hub for small streams - add to that 2 FW channels and you can theoretically have a second drive array at approximately the same total bandwidth as the internal one), not wasting precious board space with unnecessary channels and on discount at the time, this was the one that went to the checkout.

However, it was only late in the game that I found out that the original BIOS of the board was in desperate need for a flash, not just for o'clockers or gamers but others user profiles as well as it often knew to make instability problems.

To all of you that don't know what flashing is or have naver done it - keep it that way. BIOS flashing should only be done when there's an obvious need for one and with the system on a UPS. If the power goes out during the flashing process, the only way to get the board working again is to plug the BIOS back in live which involves rubber gloves and lots of balls.

Now, for those of you who have read those initial x64 postings of mine on the ohter thread, none of my problems described there had anything to do with bad BIOS. They were all down to a low-end RAM brand which was the sole cause of all of the hardware problems from day one.

Also, I have to mention that the IN9 32 MAX is likely one of the best board designs I've seen, which was another reason I went with this one. When setting up a system like this one, the design is about as important as it can get (not just for cooling reasons but simplicity and general space issues as well).

I can say I've never had an easier time assembling to a MOBO, even though it's not an EATX or WTX.

Also, it is very important to update to the latest chipset and other MOBO drivers and disable the built-in audio interface together with the OS sounds if not needed.

There are tons of other motherboard-related issues that can arise with audio systems, but that's a whole other topic.

[Vatroslav]

CPU

Intel Core2Quad 2.4GHz, 1066MHz, 8MB, or Q6600, as the folks call it.

I guess after everything that's been said about it, this little fella got to the top of the wishlists of the majority of the audio industry and even though the topic has been covered many times, some facts are still worth mentioning.

First of all, four point of processing or four cores do not equate even math. You will not get a 100% improvement upgrading from a Dual Core system at 2.4 to a Quad at 2.4. There are multiple reasons for this, but we'll go through the two most important ones.

1) Current Quads on the market are not true QuadCore CPUs. Meaning they only have two cache registers, just as DualCore processors.

In other words, the intake of the data will be larger than it is on a DualCore system, but the output will still be subdued to two cache areas to read from. You will get better overall performance, but not by even math.

This is why many audio pre-optimized off-the-shelf systems have such an accent put on the overclocking of the front side bus as the enlargement of the final transmission proves to be more useful than additional processing point under a smaller number of temp storages.

2) Multithreading.

Even though current multiprocessor computer architectures allow so called SMP (symmetric multiprocessing or "multithreading"), all of the current versions of the Windows platform were primarely written as single-threaded applications and even though they support multithreadng operations, the system is still not optimized enough and does not handle multiple thread processing from a single app that well.

ASMP apps (asymmetric) will obviously see no benefit from SMP architectures and will distribute the processes in a different way (again, not necessarily meaning twice as slow).

But on something like Linux, you would see an overall improvement of SMP app's performances over ASMPs, regardless of the type of the instruction sets of the application.

This is why you will have better performance on multicore or multiprocessor systems on Windows using standalone modes of players than you will with plug-in modes (even with a highly optimized SMP DAW like Sonar).

We can hope future versions of Wins improve on the thread splits.

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[Vatroslav]

RAM

As I already mentioned, and as you could have read from the other thread, I had major issues using KingMax RAM and had to switch to another brand altogether (TakeMS 2GB 800MHz) to make the system work at all.

From what I can tell, not all brands make their kits to work at high memory capacities and it might also be that KingMax can't even work at more than 4GB.

The problems that I had with 4 2GB kits plugged in at the same time included the Win XP x64 installation not being able to start (got around this by unplugging three of the kits and leaving only the one in DIMM 1 slot plugged in - this might also have to do with dual channel mode operations - haven't thought of that until after I changed the RAM completely), random BSOD crashes, regular cold boot crashes and the system not being able to boot at all after the installation of the audio interface drivers and also some POST errors requiring different BIOS tweaking tricks.

So, the conclusion is - do NOT space on RAM brands.

Dual Channel RAM will require to be paired right, meaning you will need to plug in according to the colors of the DIMM slots.

In other words - install the x64 OS using only one RAM kit in DIMM 1 slot (you want to do this, there are problems with installing x64 OS with more than one mem module filled).

Then plug in the second kit in the slot with the same color. Then reboot to update.

Turn off the machine and do the same with the remaining two kits. One by one with boots between the two.

Aslo, do not experiment with different brands and different capacities working with one another at the same time. Use the same brand and the same size and preferably stay with an even number of kits inside (2, 4, 8, etc.).

Memory busing clocks do matter, but not that much, not in streaming audio world, unless you start getting very close to the physical memory limit and lots of data incoming/outgoing being processed simultaneously.

In the case of non-server class architecture, 8GB will be more working memory space than any single CPU currently out there will be able to handle, but that's something we'll get to later.

Also, if the MOBO has jittery DIMM clocks, it might not be a bad idea to lower the bus clocks on the kits as it will probably make everything more stable. I haven't had that issue with my ABIT, but I wouldn't hesitate to do it if I did.

[vjs123]

what is the difference between dual core processor and quard2duo processor is there any performance variation

[bobbyem]

Your hard core! Dual hard core!

Printing....

[Vatroslav]

PSU

It's interesting how often people go off spending thousands of dollars on the most expensive system they can put together and then get a $50 power supply unit to power it up.

The PSU is the bloodstream of the entire system and having enough power going to every device connected from a stable unit needs to be the postulate of any x64 sytem built.

An underpowered system might not just cause various inexplicable issues like freezes or crashes but hurt the components' health just as well.

It is commonly known that the longevity of a chipset largely depends on the quality of the power it is fed with. This is another reason for having a good PSU and a UPS.

My choice was Everest Fortron 800W.

You always need to calculate the minimum power supply for your setup and go at least 20% beyond. You can use a power supply calculator like these two:

Snoop
eXtreme

(The latter is regularly updated. There are others, but most of them are outdated. There are computer shops ofering PSU calculations on their websites).

UPS is still on my buy list and you can find more info on uninterruptible power supply systems in this thread.

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[Vatroslav]

CASING

After careful considerations, I decided to go with Kandalf9003WBS.

Beside the size of the casing (to have as much free room as possible), my main concern was, of course, the cooling of the enclosure. I also need six internal 3.5" bays and the whole thing generally as adjustable as possible, so I went with the five-fan full tower solution to have the airflow as configurable as it can be and with Thermaltake being the most popular brand around here and having heard nothing but good word about the fans that come with Kandalf, I decided to go with that one.

Now, from this point of view, I may have been better off with something like Antec's sound isolation management as it turned out I went from a loud machine to louder (because the door of the compartment in the desk has to be open for the air to come in and now the fans spin faster than they would normally and the surrouding sides accumulate even more noise), but I have already thought of how to deal with that.

I haven't yet tested turning off the side intake fan and that's something I will have to get around doing soon because I'm wondering if it's messing with the front -> back horizontal flow and making those drives in the back heat up more than they should. On the other hand, it sure does help cool the CPU and the chipset, especially since the latter is on passive (for zero noise - what an irony).

I took off Kandalf's front side doors (the question as to what purpose those serve I still have trouble answering) for both simplicity of life and the casing to fit inside the compartment at all.

Finally, I made sure all of the cabling inside is grouped together to create minimum airflow interference (another must-do for every box clogged with cables).

Well, that's it for the hardware.

And now to what we're all here for ...

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