# Testing my new build with i9 7940X and 128 Gb of RAM!



## marcodistefano (Sep 23, 2018)

Hi There,

I have been away for a while, being busy with the build of my new machine.

My previous one was not capable to handle anymore my workflow and need of resources, being limited to 32Gb with an old i7 2700K core.

After a long study I decided to go with a one single machine build, and I choose to go with the following components:


i7 7940X
AsRock Fatal1ty X299 XE
G.Skill 128Gb Trident 3200 Mhz
BeQuiet! Dark Pro 900 Rev 2
BeQuiet! Silent Loop 360 mm
BeQuiet! Dark Power Pro 11 1000W
3 Tb of SSD Samsung EVO 850, 860
https://www.geforce.com/hardware/desktop-gpus/geforce-gtx-950 (Geforce GTX 950)
The results are amazing, watch this video I have been able to play 100 instruments from Spitfire Audio in parallel, each with a changing expression/modulation/vibrato and articulations with a buffer size of 256. Just imagine that each of this instrument can launch up to 400 voices!!

And consider that in my previous machine (i7 2700K with 32 Gb) I could not play more than 14 instruments at the same time with a buffer size of 2048!!



http://marcodistefano.art/vo-15-building-and-testing-my-new-pc-i7-7940x-and-128-gb-ram/


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## Jdiggity1 (Sep 23, 2018)

That's a spicy meat-a-ball!

But seriously thanks for sharing. These sorts of test are few and far between, yet incredibly beneficial.
(Or maybe im just a nerd?)


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## marcodistefano (Sep 23, 2018)

Jdiggity1 said:


> That's a spicy meat-a-ball!
> 
> But seriously thanks for sharing. These sorts of test are few and far between, yet incredibly beneficial.
> (Or maybe im just a nerd?)



Thanks for watching and appreciating!
you get what you pay for 
I needed a one time pc for the next ten years now, and this is clearly the case!

I prefer this test than the DAW bench, just saying how many voices it can handle does not help.
This way instead you got a clear idea of the practical capabilities of the machine.

By the way, I am a nerd too


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## Pictus (Sep 23, 2018)

Congratulations!

The next step is to delid



And use Direct-Die-Frame


And set all 14 cores to 4.3GHz 

Interesting reading from https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i9-7900x-overclock-ln2,5618.html


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## marcodistefano (Sep 23, 2018)

Pictus said:


> Congratulations!
> 
> The next step is to delid
> 
> ...



Oh My God,
You did not have to show me this :D
it seems amazing I will watch the videos

thanks for sharing


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## Pictus (Sep 23, 2018)

You are welcome!
Did not have, but you know...


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## Shad0wLandsUK (Sep 23, 2018)

Still for multiple clients from an IT way of looking at this. Single point of failure does not tend to prove rewarding in the end :/

Still a powerful machine though


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## marcodistefano (Sep 23, 2018)

Pictus said:


> You are welcome!
> Did not have, but you know...


By the way I will never have the courage to do it

And also, who knows what the impact of this is in the lifespan of a cpu? There are probably not much who can share this information


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## marcodistefano (Sep 23, 2018)

Shad0wLandsUK said:


> Still for multiple clients from an IT way of looking at this. Single point of failure does not tend to prove rewarding in the end :/
> 
> Still a powerful machine though


Valid point but for me multiple machine is not an option because I have no space for them

Also because thinking about it you just multiply the maintenance costs, the upgrades, the electricity, the antivirus licences, the SSD...
In the end a single machine today is capable to do more that what we really need so is a no brainier for me


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## Pictus (Sep 24, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> By the way I will never have the courage to do it



Yes, have to be a kind of "mad scientist" to do... 




For anyone interested(I never used), there are delid services in Europe
https://www.delid.dk/what-we-do/ and USA https://siliconlottery.com/products/delid
And https://www.caseking.de/en sells delided CPUs.
Anyone who will use direct-die, must tell to not reseat the IHS. 



> And also, who knows what the impact of this is in the lifespan of a cpu? There are probably not much who can share this information



A cooler CPU will last longer, obviously respecting the voltage limits...
Do not need to overclock and a delided CPU can be more silent...


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## tabulius (Sep 24, 2018)

Thanks for sharing! I've been planning to build a PC with similar specs. I'm still waiting for the next generation CPUs, those might be released by end of the year. I've heard that Cubase has some problems with high core CPUs, did you notice any issues?

And it's great to hear there are delidding services in Europe too.


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## jononotbono (Sep 24, 2018)

Ok, so the i9-7940X can be overclocked? If so that’s amazing. Also, can I run two of these bay boys on a dual CPU motherboard?


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## marcodistefano (Sep 24, 2018)

jononotbono said:


> Ok, so the i9-7940X can be overclocked? If so that’s amazing. Also, can I run two of these bay boys on a dual CPU motherboard?


You can easily overclock to a stable 4,1 without many efforts
Someone got to 4,6.

Dual motherboard for Skylake-X? never see one


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## marcodistefano (Sep 24, 2018)

tabulius said:


> Thanks for sharing! I've been planning to build a PC with similar specs. I'm still waiting for the next generation CPUs, those might be released by end of the year. I've heard that Cubase has some problems with high core CPUs, did you notice any issues?
> 
> And it's great to hear there are delidding services in Europe too.


Hi,
no issues with Cubase, the opposite it works great and the load is equally shared across all CPUs.
There is a SkyLake x that may come end of year, but Cannon Lake is not before end of 2019
All the rest is not good since are limited to 64Gb of RAM, (and I don't think you want to go for a server cpu)

Thanks for watching!


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## Andrew Aversa (Sep 24, 2018)

jononotbono said:


> Ok, so the i9-7940X can be overclocked? If so that’s amazing. Also, can I run two of these bay boys on a dual CPU motherboard?



You can't run two on one motherboard. That being said if you must have _even more_ cores you could get the i9-7980XE (18 cores) or Threadripper 2990X (32 cores). Just keep in mind single thread performance suffers with both, as does power consumption, thermals etc.


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## marcodistefano (Sep 24, 2018)

zircon_st said:


> You can't run two on one motherboard. That being said if you must have _even more_ cores you could get the i9-7980XE (18 cores) or Threadripper 2990X (32 cores). Just keep in mind single thread performance suffers with both, as does power consumption, thermals etc.



Important to say that there are daw bench around and other tests showing that we are not yet ready for a CPU like 7980XE and that in the end the 7960X performs equally or even slighlty better
https://techreport.com/review/32607/intel-core-i9-7980xe-and-core-i9-7960x-cpus-reviewed/12

Today there are few applications that could really use 36 threads and in the end the lower base frequency plays a negative role, of course we do not know how quick it will happent the evolution towards a real multithread software architecture.


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## Shad0wLandsUK (Sep 24, 2018)

jononotbono said:


> Ok, so the i9-7940X can be overclocked? If so that’s amazing. Also, can I run two of these bay boys on a dual CPU motherboard?


Only Xeons can be run on boards with more than one socket as they are server processers
The i9 is a powerful beast that seems to be between a Xeon and an i7, but Server chips have other instruction sets that consumer CPUs (i3, i5, i7 i9 etc) do not


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## marcodistefano (Sep 24, 2018)

Shad0wLandsUK said:


> Only Xeons can be run on boards with more than one socket as they are server processers
> The i9 is a powerful beast that seems to be between a Xeon and an i7, but Server chips have other instruction sets that consumer CPUs (i3, i5, i7 i9 etc) do not


Correct, like supporting ideally as much RAM you want


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## Pictus (Sep 24, 2018)

zircon_st said:


> You can't run two on one motherboard. That being said if you must have _even more_ cores you could get the i9-7980XE (18 cores) or Threadripper 2990X (32 cores). Just keep in mind single thread performance suffers with both, as does power consumption, thermals etc.



The Threadripper 2990WX did not behave well in DAWbench.
http://www.scanproaudio.info/2018/0...bench-just-a-little-bit-of-history-repeating/

Seems like the windows scheduler do not understand the 2990WX architecture well.

Can Process Lasso "save it"?

The only motherboard with really good VRM(in my opinion) for the 32 core CPU, the
MSI MEG X399 Creation seems to have a too high DPC latency for DAW workloads, this
can be a result from bad BIOS, driver or configuration...
From https://www.hardocp.com/article/2018/09/18/msi_meg_x399_creation_threadripper_motherboard_review/4
"(...)In this test the highest reported interrupt to process latency was 537. This result was nearly double that of our control system. However, the results still within an acceptable range. The highest reported DPC routine execution time was 700. This is the highest results I’ve seen in quite some time.(...)" 

As today no working Thunderbolt for Threadripper, but GIGABYTE X399 AORUS XTREME
and X399 DESIGNARE EX have a Thunderbolt header




But Level1Techs made the Gigabyte Thunderbolt 3 PCIe card to work with a hack...


Sadly the safe bet still Intel, lets see what 2019 bring to us...


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## Flexi83 (Sep 30, 2018)

He Marco,
any information about asio load and real time peak performance?
Do you have Orchestral Tool libraries to test as well?
Regards
Feliks


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## URL (Sep 30, 2018)

Intel I9 7940X is not to bad mine is overclocked to all cores to 4.0, and temp is 52c, TB is 4.30.
Socket is 2066, works on WSboard for ex. Asus.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 1, 2018)

Flexi83 said:


> He Marco,
> any information about asio load and real time peak performance?
> Do you have Orchestral Tool libraries to test as well?
> Regards
> Feliks


Hello Feliks,
I do not own any Orchestral Tool library.
For the performance, It is not in the video but the peak happened at a latency of 128
The min latency where I had no peak and no pops or clicks was 194

Kind Regards
Marco


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## marcodistefano (Oct 1, 2018)

URL said:


> Intel I9 7940X is a bad boy, mine is overclocked to all cores to 4.0, and temp is 52c, TB is 4.30.
> Socket is 2066, works on WSboard for ex. Asus.


Super, I am going to do overclocking soon, not tried yet


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## URL (Oct 1, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> Super, I am going to do overclocking soon, not tried yet



Yes works great and the only thing about it is the cooler, I have Oct.D15 and its possible to go 4-4.30 and and the temp goes up to 60-70c, I choosed to step down a little, I dont think I need to go higher for now.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 1, 2018)

URL said:


> Yes works great and the only thing about it is the cooler, I have Oct.D15 and its possible to go 4-4.30 and and the temp goes up to 60-70c, I choosed to step down a little, I dont think I need to go higher for now.



I have a water cooling BeQuiet Silent Loop 360 mm, and bought this thermal past 


hope it will be sufficient


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## chimuelo (Oct 1, 2018)

Jdiggity1 said:


> That's a spicy meat-a-ball!
> 
> But seriously thanks for sharing. These sorts of test are few and far between, yet incredibly beneficial.
> (Or maybe im just a nerd?)




Great share as I’m one of those guys on the fence still about what my Master PC would use for system integration.

And the Spicy Meat-a-ball had to be the ancient Alka Selzer commercial.
My grandfather use to hysterically laugh every time that aired.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 1, 2018)

chimuelo said:


> Great share as I’m one of those guys on the fence still about what my Master PC would use for system integration.
> 
> And the Spicy Meat-a-ball had to be the ancient Alka Selzer commercial.
> My grandfather use to hysterically laugh every time that aired.



Thanks for watching, happy that it helps 

If you can wait other two weeks I am going to do more, I have actually replaced the 1940X with a 1960X since I have seen that in many DAW bench the 16 cores is much better (and just 200 euro more), so end of the week I will add it to my build and run the same test.
Hopefully I will be able to play the same test but at a lower latency and will keep add instruments to see what is the maximum 
Will then prepare a comparison video between the 1940x and 1960x

This is becoming a nerdy thing I know...


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## Damarus (Oct 1, 2018)

Pictus said:


> The Threadripper 2990WX did not behave well in DAWbench.
> 
> 
> As today no working Thunderbolt for Threadripper, but GIGABYTE X399 AORUS XTREME
> ...




Well, Thunderbolt is designed by Intel so might be waiting a while


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## chimuelo (Oct 1, 2018)

Looking forward to the 1600X tests.
I’m in no hurry to build.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 2, 2018)

chimuelo said:


> Looking forward to the 1600X tests.
> I’m in no hurry to build.


make sure you subscribed to my YouTube channel then to get notified


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## Olfirf (Oct 2, 2018)

Thanks for sharing your insight on the i9! I assume, you have VEpro plugin set at 2 Buffers? Sorry, if that was mentioned already! If that is the case, though, your actual Buffers size would actually be 512 Samples, setting the interface buffer at 256 samples. Still a great result, just to be fair with this test!


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## marcodistefano (Oct 5, 2018)

Olfirf said:


> Thanks for sharing your insight on the i9! I assume, you have VEpro plugin set at 2 Buffers? Sorry, if that was mentioned already! If that is the case, though, your actual Buffers size would actually be 512 Samples, setting the interface buffer at 256 samples. Still a great result, just to be fair with this test!


You are right!
I had not thought about it 
I have now upgraded the CPU to 7960X and will make another video with the same test soon, this time I will not forget to mention it


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## Chris Wagner (Oct 5, 2018)

Thanks for sharing this test. 

What I also like is that you are using BeQuiet! components. The company's name says it all. I'm super happy with their products.

I have the Dark Rock Pro 3 cooler (on a Core i7 9820x), Dark Power Pro 11 750W and the Pure Base 600 case. The PC is under my desk and it's not audible.


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## arvfur (Oct 6, 2018)

URL said:


> Intel I9 7940X is not to bad mine is overclocked to all cores to 4.0, and temp is 52c, TB is 4.30.
> Socket is 2066, works on WSboard for ex. Asus.


Sounds a bit modest. I could easily get 4.6 OC on all cores on my Gigabyte x299 Designare MB:


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## URL (Oct 6, 2018)

Yes, I choose to have a cooler setup and I use Oct.D15 cpu cooler and go to 4.6 makes everything warmer and need of watercolling, I already have 2 Pc slaves, so, I dont think higher cpu makes it for me for now. I will change for liquid cooler later, I need more room for Pci-e slot...so


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## URL (Oct 7, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> You are right!
> I had not thought about it
> I have now upgraded the CPU to 7960X and will make another video with the same test soon, this time I will not forget to mention it



Why did you uppgrade to 16-core...?


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## marcodistefano (Oct 7, 2018)

URL said:


> Why did you uppgrade to 16-core...?


Because Cubase can use efficiently up to 32 threads (which will probably grow in future releases) and the update came with a very small difference in price, so better do it now or nevermore


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## URL (Oct 7, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> Because Cubase can use efficiently up to 32 threads (which will probably grow in future releases) and the update came with a very small difference in price, so better do it now or nevermore



Yes, Cpu prices is going up for some reason, the usally get reduce price after a while, a little strange.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 7, 2018)

URL said:


> Yes, Cpu prices is going up for some reason, the usally get reduce price after a while, a little strange.


I found that at Scan.co.uk they have killer prices on CPU, I took it there honestly the 7960x was much less then other stores


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## Flexi83 (Oct 10, 2018)

Hi Marco,
besides the testing you will do with your i9 7960X it will be very interesting how your system will perform with and without overclocking the CPU. A store owner of XI-machines (a german company selling audio workstations to professional media composers) told me that they do not overclocking their xeons (2155-W) because of stability problems. So it would be very interesting if you can perform a stress test to test your systems stability. In the end overclocking and running x-tracks means nothing if the system is not stable. Do you agree?
Regards
Feliks


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## chimuelo (Oct 10, 2018)

Xeons don’t overclock unless the chipsets now allow this.
I’d love to OC my Xeon.

I also like delidding and let the pros do this, but only HEDT CPUs.
Xeons are quality CPUs with better thermal designs so delidding isn’t necessary.
While Intel desktop and HEDT CPUs are bad ass they’re still considered consumer CPUs so corners are cut wherever possible.

I bought a delidded 8086k. It was always fast enough for me but I wanted lower temps, and 43C to 39C was worth the extra dough. I use it in a 1U I’m still testing.
There’s a 1U Water Cooler for CPUs, it’s not as good as a Noctua but slightly better than the best 1U HSF Combos.
I’m going to try that out before this rig replaces my 4790k.

Nice rig though boss and thanks for sharing tests.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 11, 2018)

Flexi83 said:


> Hi Marco,
> besides the testing you will do with your i9 7960X it will be very interesting how your system will perform with and without overclocking the CPU. A store owner of XI-machines (a german company selling audio workstations to professional media composers) told me that they do not overclocking their xeons (2155-W) because of stability problems. So it would be very interesting if you can perform a stress test to test your systems stability. In the end overclocking and running x-tracks means nothing if the system is not stable. Do you agree?
> Regards
> Feliks


I agree and will do it,
testing it now it is great, I don't think there is ever the need to do overclocking.
I can play the test project at 128 of latency, what do we want more? 
Video coming in a few days


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## Flexi83 (Oct 11, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> I can play the test project at 128 of latency, what do we want more?


System Stability :D
Try to export it to an audio file. I'm not sure what kind of stress tests needed to be perform to validate a system as "stable"


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## Flexi83 (Oct 11, 2018)

128 buffersize WOW...without overclocking???
 I was wandering when dropouts will occur? Next step would be 96 samples making it really realtime playable for me


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## marcodistefano (Oct 11, 2018)

Flexi83 said:


> 128 buffersize WOW...without overclocking???
> I was wandering when dropouts will occur? Next step would be 96 samples making it really realtime playable for me


Ok now I remember a previous post here of someone asking to check the configuration of vienna, where there is a buffer set to 2

Meaning that in reality is the double, so 256. Still an incredible result


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## marcodistefano (Oct 11, 2018)

Flexi83 said:


> System Stability :D
> Try to export it to an audio file. I'm not sure what kind of stress tests needed to be perform to validate a system as "stable"


There are stress tests available on internet
The only problem is that I am not very knowledgeable to make OC, in my previous machine I was using a setup in the BIOS, but here there is no and need to do it myself
I tried to increase the multiplier but then I see that I have lost the turbo speed, will try to read something on the internet.
Do you know any guide for dummies?


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## Flexi83 (Oct 11, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> Do you know any guide for dummies?


No, sorry. But I want to upgrade from dual xeon x5680 to i9 as well.


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## Pictus (Oct 11, 2018)

marcodistefano said:


> Do you know any guide for dummies?


I would aim to a modest overclock with the i9-7960X/i9-7940X, like keeping all cores up to 4.2Ghz
and no more than 1.2V for the CPU, use lowest voltage as possible, each CPU is different.
Also the do not forget the AVX offset as AVX produces too much heat.
May help:
https://www.tweaktown.com/guides/8513/skylake-overclocking-guide/index.html
https://www.overclock.net/forum/6-i...299-taichi-taichi-xe-discussion-thread-2.html


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## Flexi83 (Oct 11, 2018)

Hi Marco,
dont know if you already know this video. But very informativ to check system for realtime performance


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## chimuelo (Oct 11, 2018)

First guy here to actually build master slave rigs with VEPro and test thoroughly.
A great resource.


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## Flexi83 (Oct 11, 2018)

He Marco,
Could you also make a DPC read out with "LatencyMon" of your system?
Would be very interesting and helpful to see if all the components didn't cause stability problems.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 12, 2018)

Flexi83 said:


> Hi Marco,
> dont know if you already know this video. But very informativ to check system for realtime performance



Thanks I will watch it!


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## tabulius (Oct 12, 2018)

If you haven't noticed Intel announced a refresh of 9th gen i9 and Core X platforms. Will be released in Nov: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/...chips-2018-desktop-processors-8-core-i9-9900k

EDIT: And to add a point to the CPU performance vs real-time performance discussion, it seems that the high core Skylake-X processors do well on VI polyphony tests. Source: Scanproaudio

EDIT 2: Found a better and more detailed graph.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 12, 2018)

tabulius said:


> If you haven't noticed Intel announced a refresh of 9th gen i9 and Core X platforms. Will be released in Nov: https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/8/...chips-2018-desktop-processors-8-core-i9-9900k


Too late for me 
My PC collapsed one month ago, and initially read that these were going to be released Q1 2019, so decided not to wait. the 7960x is already more than I need, but interested what these new CPU will look like


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## Damarus (Oct 12, 2018)

Flexi83 said:


> Hi Marco,
> dont know if you already know this video. But very informativ to check system for realtime performance




Really informative video!


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## Andrew Aversa (Oct 12, 2018)

The Skylake-X refresh looks to be pretty underwhelming... just a slight bump in frequencies and solder instead of thermal paste. Not much difference otherwise.


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## tabulius (Oct 14, 2018)

zircon_st said:


> The Skylake-X refresh looks to be pretty underwhelming... just a slight bump in frequencies and solder instead of thermal paste. Not much difference otherwise.



I agree. But to be honest, I didn't expect much. I think a big plus is soldered CPUs. So better temperatures out of the box, without the need of delidding (=quieter fans or better overclock). Other potential benefit is upcoming Black Friday sales and retailers might give good discounts last year's Skylake-X CPUs to get rid of their stocks.


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## marcodistefano (Oct 17, 2018)

Hi All,

finally I made the test and created a post in my blog with a video

I created another thread to discuss it 

https://vi-control.net/community/th...960x-and-128-gb-or-ram-versus-i9-7940x.75879/


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