# My Ryzen 3700X build for music production



## Pier

I've mentioned in other threads that I've been building a Ryzen machine for music production. I'd like to share my specs, comments, and results.

*TL;DR:* For my use case which is mostly using virtual synths, this thing is a beast.

*Specs*
CPU: Ryzen 7 3700X
Motherboard: Gigabyte Aorus Wifi Pro B450
RAM: 16GB 2133Mhz (I used 2 8GB sticks from a previous build)
GPU: ASUS Strix 1070
PSU: Corsair RM850x
SSD: Kingston Digital HyperX Predator (also used this from a previous build)
Cooler: Noctua NH D15 (still waiting for this, using stock cooler for now)
Audio interface: Audient iD4 via USB (latest drivers and firmware)

*Installation notes*
I bought the B450 board because it was relatively cheap and I'm not interested in overclocking. Unfortunately I didn't read the fine print which is: *the B450 boards need a BIOS and firmware update to be able to run Ryzen 3000 CPUs*, and you need a supported CPU to do this. So after running the machine the first time and panicking I figured it out and had to buy a cheap 2200G Ryzen CPU to be able to update the BIOS. Apparently AMD offers free boot kits for this but since I don't live in the US I really didn't want to wait.

I also needed to install the Windows Firmware drivers from the AMD website since the ones from Gigabyte are not the latest.

Windows 10 installed some old Nvidia drivers. I manually installed the latest ones but did not install Nvidia Bloatware Experience.

*About noise and temps*
The 3700X is rated at 65W of TDP, but I've found this to be very misleading. I'm sure this technically correct but it's not the whole story.

I have a gaming machine with a quad core i5 6500 which is also rated at 65W and I can run it at ambient temperature on idle with a medium sized cooler (Scythe Kotetsu). I expected the same from the Ryzen. Boy I was wrong.

The first time I ran Windows the CPU was running at 60ºC on idle and the stock fan was screaming. After some googling I found a post on Reddit and they recommended the firmware drivers from AMD which did lower the idle temps to about 35-40ºC. Still too high. After reading some more I learned that Ryzen CPUs usually have higher temps on idle than Intel, much like an engine running at higher RPMs to be able to turbo boost at any moment or something like that. It was frustrating at first, but knowing all this it was just a matter of adjusting the fan speeds on the BIOS to run very low until the CPU was higher than 50ºC similar to what Apple does. After doing that the CPU is almost inaudible when the room is in complete silence.

With the stock cooler the max temps have never gone beyond 77ºC when checking with Ryzen Master.

I'd like to add that the Strix GPU and the Corsair PSU do not turn the fans on until there is a significant work load so the only noise I hear is the CPU fan. I also have 2 Nanoxia Deep Silence fans on the case which are inaudible from the sitting position running at low RPMs.

*Special configs*
I haven't messed around much with any custom configs:

Custom fans config in the BIOS
Ultimate Power Plan (added with a terminal command)
Disabled the onboard audio chip in the BIOS
Uninstalled a bunch of games and Microsoft crap included in Windows 10
*Benchmarks*
Latencymon is all green and reports a max DPC latency of 248us which is fine for me. I've been using the Wifi chip from the motherboard during the monitoring.

CPU-Z benchmarks report results a bit better than the average for the 3700X I guess I got a bit lucky with the silicon lottery.

At 256 samples of buffer Ableton Live reports 10ms of latency which is totally fine for my use case.

So here comes the most interesting result for me. I run a small benchmark in Ableton Live with Hive 2 in the machines I have. I use the default preset (a bass with effects and a couple of unison voices). So I write 1 note 1 bar long and start duplicating tracks until I hear audio artifacts at 256 samples of buffer.

Old gaming machine (i5 6500) 34 tracks
5K iMac (i5 7600K) 40 tracks
New machine (Ryzen 3700X) 111 tracks
So almost triple the performance of the iMac which is what's expected by looking at Geekbench and other CPU benchmark sites.

After the initial bumpy road with this build I'm now starting to salivate at being able to throw pretty much anything I can probably need at it. :D

I will run more tests with Diva and other synths but this is all for now!


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## JC_

Congrats on the new build! I didn't see it mentioned, what case are you using? and Any plans on upgrading ram in the future?


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## chimuelo

Great specs except there‘s a DDR Sweet Spot Ive read about a few times that really kicks up performance by a measurable difference.
Has something to do with Sync and Speed which is in between 3600-3700MHz.

Its a YouTube video and very well done too since the guy does talk but every word is useful. Unlike some demos of other audio related topics where the person is more interested in hearing themselves speak. Way too many of these imbeciles @ YT.


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## Pier

JC_ said:


> Congrats on the new build! I didn't see it mentioned, what case are you using? and Any plans on upgrading ram in the future?



The case is a Fractal Design Define C mid tower.

Yeah I will upgrade the RAM at some point but it's not a priority. I don't think I will see a dramatic performance difference tbh.


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## Pier

chimuelo said:


> Great specs except there‘s a DDR Sweet Spot Ive read about a few times that really kicks up performance by a measurable difference.
> Has something to do with Sync and Speed which is in between 3600-3700MHz.
> 
> Its a YouTube video and very well done too since the guy does talk but every word is useful. Unlike some demos of other audio related topics where the person is more interested in hearing themselves speak. Way too many ofnthese imbeciles @ YT.



Thanks for the tip, I'll see if I find more info on that sweet spot. If it's a big performance increase I don't think I will be able to resist the temptation and see how much I can push this beast.

Edit: holy shit some games are getting a 50% increase in FPS with a 3600 RAM over 2133...

Amazon here I come again...


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## pderbidge

Pier Bover said:


> The first time I ran Windows the CPU was running at 60ºC on idle and the stock fan was screaming. After some googling I found a post on Reddit and they recommended the firmware drivers from AMD which did lower the idle temps to about 35-40ºC. Still too high.


I too was surprised, at first, with this when I did my 3700x build. Chipset driver updates and new Bios fixed most of it. I used to see 60C idle and now I see in the 40's but that's also with a Noctua heatsink with 2 Noctua fans and 6 120mm case fans. If it were my old Intel chip it would be running in the low 30's with that beast of Heatsink and fan setup. I also think the temps show higher than they really are because the way AMD's monitoring system constantly pings the bios for readings so you're getting more of a real time read out of the temps rather than a more averaged out measurement.

I'm using 64GB 2400mhz rated memory that easily runs at 2666Mhz (I think they're actually 2666hz sticks with baked in xmp profile of 2400Mhz) If I were to do it again I would have gone for at least 3200Mhz since the price was not that different but I was anxious and it was the only available memory locally at the time. When I upgrade to 32GB sticks for an total upgrade to 128GB of ram then the only speed available for those sticks currently are 2666MHZ by Samsung and Crucial so maybe it's good I'm not spoiled with higher speed memory

Glad to see you're enjoying your system.


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## Pier

pderbidge said:


> I too was surprised, at first, with this when I did my 3700x build. Chipset driver updates and new Bios fixed most of it. I used to see 60C idle and now I see in the 40's but that's also with a Noctua heatsink with 2 Noctua fans and 6 120mm case fans. If it were my old Intel chip it would be running in the low 30's with that beast of Heatsink and fan setup. I also think the temps show higher than they really are because the way AMD's monitoring system constantly pings the bios for readings so you're getting more of a real time read out of the temps rather than a more averaged out measurement.
> 
> I'm using 64GB 2400mhz rated memory that easily runs at 2666Mhz (I think they're actually 2666hz sticks with baked in xmp profile of 2400Mhz) If I were to do it again I would have gone for at least 3200Mhz since the price was not that different but I was anxious and it was the only available memory locally at the time. When I upgrade to 32GB sticks for an total upgrade to 128GB of ram then the only speed available for those sticks currently are 2666MHZ by Samsung and Crucial so maybe it's good I'm not spoiled with higher speed memory
> 
> Glad to see you're enjoying your system.



I just bought 16GB of 3200Mhz and will report back in a couple of days. I wanted 3600 but it was too expensive and from the videos I've seen the performance increase from 3200 to 3600 is not that big.

Honestly I'm totally fine with the current performance with the 2133 RAM but since I was going to buy new RAM in a couple of months anyway well what the heck 

I'm sure you will be alright with 2666.


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## Pier

I disabled CPB in the BIOS (core performance boost) to see if it made any difference in audio perf. Same idea on both synths. One long note for 1 bar, and then duplicate tracks until I get crackles.

I got these results (I didn't run both synths at the same time):

Diva: 29 tracks (patch: HS Amped Forces)
Hive 2: 97 tracks (default patch)
I chose that Diva patch because it has 4 stacked voices and uses 2 effects, so pretty beefy.

I then enabled multicore in Diva (same patch) and I only was able to get 14 tracks. I'm almost certain the problem here is the latency between the core groups which someone explained in another thread (not sure if here or on Gearslutz).

Another interesting thing is that with CPB off I got about 10% less audio tracks with Hive 2.


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## chimuelo

Pier Bover said:


> I disabled CPB in the BIOS (core performance boost) to see if it made any difference in audio perf. Same idea on both synths. One long note for 1 bar, and then duplicate tracks until I get crackles.
> 
> I got these results (I didn't run both synths at the same time):
> 
> Diva: 29 tracks (patch: HS Amped Forces)
> Hive 2: 97 tracks (default patch)
> I chose that Diva patch because it has 4 stacked voices and uses 2 effects, so pretty beefy.
> 
> I then enabled multicore in Diva (same patch) and I only was able to get 14 tracks. I'm almost certain the problem here is the latency between the core groups which someone explained in another thread (not sure if here or on Gearslutz).
> 
> Another interesting thing is that with CPB off I got about 10% less audio tracks with Hive 2.




I noticed the same with hyperthreading on my i7 4790k rigs.
I disabled it and have much better timings and latency is all but disappeared.

Im sure they’ve got better with HT since the 4000 series CPUs.
One of the reasons I try and stay with quad cores for live performance.


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## Mornats

chimuelo said:


> I noticed the same with hyperthreading on my i7 4790k rigs.
> I disabled it and have much better timings and latency is all but disappeared.



This piqued my interest as I'm running an i7 4790k. Are you disabling hyperthreading in Kontakt/your DAW or on the chip via the BIOS?


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## chimuelo

Mornats said:


> This piqued my interest as I'm running an i7 4790k. Are you disabling hyperthreading in Kontakt/your DAW or on the chip via the BIOS?



Kontakt and the ASRock BIOS. No Turbo, no Hyper, just a 4ghz 4 thread stream. 
I can get a pretty substantial boost in layering and polyphony by Overclocking to 4.4/4.6 and I dont need it for my live rig.

Not saying hyperthreading isn't useful for recording, editing or rendering, just seems to add additional latency for the real time work I do.
Its not noticeable except when I do my heavy sustain heavy layer heavy poly tests.

I‘ll take PianoTeq, Kontakt and Keyscape and just drive the layering as hard as I can. 
Unfortunately Keyscape drops out due to design, but PTeq and Kontakt just go on and on with zero clicks pops or dropouts.

In all honesty for my live rigs I havent really needed additional IPC or CPU Power since my first i7 Bloomdale CPU.
I only upgrade because after three years even though the rig still works Id rather not experience a crash.


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## woodslanding

Wow, I don't remember you mentioning that before. I may try turning HT off, and see if I get a boost. I'd love to go to 64 samples, which mysteriously worked for one day, and never since.

The 5775c is still going strong, can't complain. Pushing 1K of live gigs/sessions at this point. Looked at getting another one, they are still selling used for what I paid for mine 3 years ago.

To get back on topic: Can you give us some Ryzen comparisons at 128 and 64 samples? I can't go back to 256....


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## Pier

woodslanding said:


> To get back on topic: Can you give us some Ryzen comparisons at 128 and 64 samples? I can't go back to 256....



So I enabled CPB again and got these results:

*Buffer 256 @ 48Khz*

Hive 2: 100 tracks
Diva: 32 tracks
*Buffer 128 @ 48Khz*

Hive 2: 85 tracks
Diva: 32 tracks
*Buffer 64 @ 48Khz*

Hive 2: 64 tracks
Diva: 25 tracks

Again Hive on the default patch and Diva on HS Amped forces. The difference with previous tests is because I was on 44.1Khz. I was surprised that 256 and 128 made no difference with Diva.

I'm still waiting for the 3200 RAM...


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## woodslanding

So how does that compare with your old machines? Are you seeing similar gains at lower latencies? Those are encouraging results, especially at 64 samples!


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## Pier

The old gaming machine with the i5 6500 is not working at the moment... I used a couple of components in the new Ryzen machine. 

As for the 2017 iMac 5K i5 7600K:

*Buffer 256 @ 48Khz*

Hive 2: 36 tracks
Diva: 16 tracks

*Buffer 128 @ 48Khz*

Hive 2: 28 tracks
Diva: 12 tracks

*Buffer 64 @ 48Khz*

Hive 2: 15 tracks
Diva: 8 tracks

Overall the Ryzen machine is 3-4 times more powerful and it cost me about 1/3. The previous test with the iMac and Hive were done at 44.1Khz.


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## Pier

So I received my 3200Mhz CL16 RAM and redid the tests with Hive and Diva. It made barely any difference with my previous 2133Mhz RAM! In some cases I got 1-2 more tracks but it's pretty much negligible.

Oh well, at least I will get some more FPS when gaming


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## vitocorleone123

Pier Bover said:


> So I received my 3200Mhz CL16 RAM and redid the tests with Hive and Diva. It made barely any difference with my previous 2133Mhz RAM! In some cases I got 1-2 more tracks but it's pretty much negligible.
> 
> Oh well, at least I will get some more FPS when gaming



Just figure you’re now more likely eeking out every bit of performance. If you went to 4000 speed you’d possibly get another track. But loading samples should also be faster, opening a template, etc.

And, yes, FPS!


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## Solarsentinel

Latency RAM affect only benchmarks. In real performance you can't noticed the difference. But now you have it use it and enjoy enven if your gain are weak!


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## Pier

Solarsentinel said:


> Latency RAM affect only benchmarks. In real performance you can't noticed the difference. But now you have it use it and enjoy enven if your gain are weak!



It depends...

In Ryzen CPUs RAM speed has a great impact on some workloads, specially some games.

For audio it seems not, at least in my use case which is virtual synths and effects which is mostly CPU work. I imagine the results would be different with a heavy kontakt instrument. I can do some tests if anyone is interested. I own Albion One and a few other Spitfire libraries.


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## Solarsentinel

Yes please, i'm curious about the result. Thanks


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## Anevis

Hmmm, I'm looking into Ryzen CPUs as well and from what I've heard and read Ryzen is actually better in performance for music production. Yes, idle temperature is higher but load is actually significantly lower. 
What actually shocked is that you reached those numbers and you had to tweak it a little.
If you could do some Kontakt instrument test, I would appreciate it as well since I use a lot of those.


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## Pier

Anevis said:


> Hmmm, I'm looking into Ryzen CPUs as well and from what I've heard and read Ryzen is actually better in performance for music production. Yes, idle temperature is higher but load is actually significantly lower.
> What actually shocked is that you reached those numbers and you had to tweak it a little.
> If you could do some Kontakt instrument test, I would appreciate it as well since I use a lot of those.



I will!

I'm moving the components to a new case so it will take me 2-3 days.

I wasn't happy with the Fractal Design case. The tempered glass on the side exploded in my hands while I was removing it. A bit of a shock but I thought I could just buy an acrylic sheet and replace it. Although yesterday I was benchmarking the CPU with Cinebench and noticed in HWMonitor that the SSDs (which are placed behind the CPU) got super hot (up to 70ºC). Not sure how bad is that for SSDs but I don't want to live with the constant paranoia of SSDs being cooked. I have an old NZXT case lying around that I didn't want to use because it's big and heavy but I figured that's a better option than a) buying a new case or b) cooking SSDs.


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## Anevis

Pier Bover said:


> I will!
> 
> I'm moving the components to a new case so it will take me 2-3 days.
> 
> I wasn't happy with the Fractal Design case. The tempered glass on the side exploded in my hands while I was removing it. A bit of a shock but I thought I could just buy an acrylic sheet and replace it. Although yesterday I was benchmarking the CPU with Cinebench and noticed in HWMonitor that the SSDs (which are placed behind the CPU) got super hot (up to 70ºC). Not sure how bad is that for SSDs but I don't want to live with the constant paranoia of SSDs being cooked. I have an old NZXT case lying around that I didn't want to use because it's big and heavy but I figured that's a better option than a) buying a new case or b) cooking SSDs.



Fractal Design?
I thought those cases are good, hmmm. Probably just a bad piece from the factory.
Yeaaah, I don't think that temperature is good for SSDs. If I may give you an advice, I always try to go for a bigger case, because you probably won't be moving the desktop daily and you can fit more coolers etc in it and also, the components have more space to actually cool naturally.


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## vitocorleone123

I think the Fractal R6 with a solid case is the way to go. I never want to see in my computer, it isn't a display piece, and I want it as quiet as possible.


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## WorshipMaestro

vitocorleone123 said:


> I think the Fractal R6 with a solid case is the way to go. I never want to see in my computer, it isn't a display piece, and I want it as quiet as possible.


2nd the Fractal R series cases. I have built in nothing else for the past 7-8 years, and don't plan to build in anything else in the future.


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## Pier

I used the Define C. The case in itself is pretty good but it had something weird with the tempered glass. Maybe it was damaged during transport, who knows. I would have preferred the windowless model but it wasn't available in my country.

The idea to put the SSDs behind the CPU is... weird to say the least.


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## Pier

Anevis said:


> Fractal Design?
> I thought those cases are good, hmmm. Probably just a bad piece from the factory.
> Yeaaah, I don't think that temperature is good for SSDs. If I may give you an advice, I always try to go for a bigger case, because you probably won't be moving the desktop daily and you can fit more coolers etc in it and also, the components have more space to actually cool naturally.



I'm going back to my old NZXT H440 which also has acoustic material but it's huge in comparison. But yeah, it has more space for fans and drives.


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## Pier

@Anevis so I did a little test with Kontakt. I loaded all the Albion Orchestra instruments (woods, brass, strings, etc) and started adding notes on the default articulations (short and spicato) and settings. I was able to reach about 1500-1600 simultaneous Kontakt voices before I heard any crackles. The CPU was at about 25-30% when that happened.







These were short 1/8 notes repeated for 1 bar looped.






In total I had 41 pure MIDI tracks sending notes to a single Kontakt instance. All instruments in Kontakt were being used. Depending on the instruments I changed the octaves since there are high/low brass and woods.

If you do the math it's about 123 simultaneous notes (3 notes per track) but of course there is reverb and release which is what I imagine contributes to the voice count in Kontakt.

I only have 16GB of RAM so I'm not sure if that is a bottleneck. Kontakt only reports 0.82GB of RAM being used which is weird since I know some of those Albion instruments are much bigger than that.

Are these results good?

I'm more of a synth head, not sure how to make a proper benchmark for kontakt...

*Edit:*

I just noticed that each instrument had a max of 400 voices so I'm not sure if I was hitting the limit of my system or that limit... I'll do more tests and report back.

*Edit 2:*

I increased the limit of each instrument to 1000 notes but it didn't make any difference.
*
Edit 3:*

These are my default Kontakt settings:


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## Anevis

Pier Bover said:


> @Anevis so I did a little test with Kontakt. I loaded all the Albion Orchestra instruments (woods, brass, strings, etc) and started adding notes on the default articulations (short and spicato) and settings. I was able to reach about 1500-1600 simultaneous Kontakt voices before I heard any crackles. The CPU was at about 25-30% when that happened.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> These were short 1/8 notes repeated for 1 bar looped.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> In total I had 41 pure MIDI tracks sending notes to a single Kontakt instance. All instruments in Kontakt were being used. Depending on the instruments I changed the octaves since there are high/low brass and woods.
> 
> If you do the math it's about 123 simultaneous notes (3 notes per track) but of course there is reverb and release which is what I imagine contributes to the voice count in Kontakt.
> 
> I only have 16GB of RAM so I'm not sure if that is a bottleneck. Kontakt only reports 0.82GB of RAM being used which is weird since I know some of those Albion instruments are much bigger than that.
> 
> Are these results good?
> 
> I'm more of a synth head, not sure how to make a proper benchmark for kontakt...
> 
> *Edit:*
> 
> I just noticed that each instrument had a max of 400 voices so I'm not sure if I was hitting the limit of my system or that limit... I'll do more tests and report back.
> 
> *Edit 2:*
> 
> I increased the limit of each instrument to 1000 notes but it didn't make any difference.
> 
> *Edit 3:*
> 
> These are my default Kontakt settings:



I guess you ran out of RAM, not sure, because 25-30% CPU is not much. But yeah, thank you, for the tests.
41 pure MIDI tracks is quite a few, only using samples simultaneously. Probably if you had more RAM you could get higher which is very good to hear.

Thank you again!! Appreciated this a lot!


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## chimuelo

IIRC you wont see the best performance until the DRAM is synced, and that occurs @ 3633MHz or something odd.
As far as Syncing I wish I could remember what gets synced, it might be the Fabric, etc.
This is similar in another CPU w/ large Cache, the i7 5775C. Its Cache is not synced and when the CPU gets overclocked the cache does too, it went from 1800 to 2200MHz then due to its non synced nature crapped out.
Some Motherboard Manufacturers referred to the cache as the Ring Bus, same thing as cache.

But do check out a video, which evades me, but its a guy just talking and demonstrating his DRAM Overclocking.
If you see a video where the guy is having trouble getting close ups of the motherboards VRM (ASRock) and bitching about the lack of MOSFETS thats it.
He seems like a dip shit at first but then he goes into high speed mode and really covers the DRAM and every detail.

It even shows how figures above the sweet spot were worse.
So you might want to check that out.
It was posted by a member named Pictus who is always all over this stuff.
Its in another Ryzen here at VI-C.

Theres articles about this with gaming too, but they just claim faster DRAM Period gets thier attention.

Any ways thanks for posting.


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## Pier

@Anevis I've been looking around and it seems when benchmarking Kontakt people usually use multiple instances vs what I did which is a single instance getting all the notes. Maybe that would push the CPU harder and I would be able to get more voices. I will do a test later this afternoon to see if it makes any difference.

On another topic, yesterday I received my Noctua NH D15 cooler. It's much quieter than the stock cooler and it manages to get max temps at around 65ºC when benchmarking all cores with Cinebench which is fantastic.

The issue though are still idle temps which run between 40-45ºC even with PBO disabled on the motherboard and Ryzen Balanced power plan. Even when maxing the Noctua fans temps don't go much lower and the case is filled with heat so the case fans are working more than I'd like. This also makes the GPU hotter even when not playing anything which in turn speed up the GPU fans.

I'm super happy with the performance of the Ryzen but the 65W TDP is very misleading. Not being able to reduce idle temps to below 40ºC with the best air cooler in the market is a bit ridiculous.


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## Anevis

Pier Bover said:


> @Anevis I've been looking around and it seems when benchmarking Kontakt people usually use multiple instances vs what I did which is a single instance getting all the notes. Maybe that would push the CPU harder and I would be able to get more voices. I will do a test later this afternoon to see if it makes any difference.
> 
> On another topic, yesterday I received my Noctua NH D15 cooler. It's much quieter than the stock cooler and it manages to get max temps at around 65ºC when benchmarking all cores with Cinebench which is fantastic.
> 
> The issue though are still idle temps which run between 40-45ºC even with PBO disabled on the motherboard and Ryzen Balanced power plan. Even when maxing the Noctua fans temps don't go much lower and the case is filled with heat so the case fans are working more than I'd like. This also makes the GPU hotter even when not playing anything which in turn speed up the GPU fans.
> 
> I'm super happy with the performance of the Ryzen but the 65W TDP is very misleading. Not being able to reduce idle temps to below 40ºC with the best air cooler in the market is a bit ridiculous.



Hmmm, yeah, most probably you just reached the max of voices for one instance, but still 41 tracks is a lot.

I don't think you can go lower, if you don't want to use dozens of coolers. True, Ryzen's idle temperature is higher, but should be lower when loaded compared to Intel, judging only from some tests I've watched. If you can get the computer to be somehow quiet and yet not overheat, I wouldn't mind much about the temperature.

Honestly, it is a bit ridiculous, but I suppose you have to pay the price of being a bit hotter to higher performance?..


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## Pier

Anevis said:


> Hmmm, yeah, most probably you just reached the max of voices for one instance, but still 41 tracks is a lot.
> 
> I don't think you can go lower, if you don't want to use dozens of coolers. True, Ryzen's idle temperature is higher, but should be lower when loaded compared to Intel, judging only from some tests I've watched. If you can get the computer to be somehow quiet and yet not overheat, I wouldn't mind much about the temperature.
> 
> Honestly, it is a bit ridiculous, but I suppose you have to pay the price of being a bit hotter to higher performance?..



Yeah, 65ºC or so at peak performance is excellent, and I don't mind the noise when actually pushing the machine.

I certainly don't mind the CPU running at 45ºC on idle (my iMac 5K runs at 50ºC on idle) what bothers me is the noise on idle and the rest of the components being exposed to so much heat constantly. I've bought a couple of extra Noctua fans for my case and see if it gets better. I'm now running 2 x Nanoxia Deep Silence at the front of the case.

Winter is coming and ambient temps will go down. Hopefully AMD finds a way to make this situation better before next summer.


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## Pier

@Anevis I did this new test with Kontakt.

I created a track with a single instance and loaded the Albion Orchestra strings and changed articulation to long. Then I added 7 x 1 bar long notes and started duplicating that track. I got 37 tracks.






Each Kontakt instance was playing 50-80 voices. I imagine in part because this is an ensemble instrument and in part because of note release, reverb etc. So in total that would 1850-2960 voices.

I noticed that when creating the Kontakt instances it didn't reload all the samples to memory so I imagine it's smart enough to know when a sample is already in memory.

CPU in Ableton was around 30% with some random 40% peaks.

As for the cooling issue, I recived my 2 Noctua case fans and I've been able to reduce temps by about 10ºC which is great. Idle is about 35ºC and peak is about 50ºC when benchmarking all cores with Cinebench. I'm running with Ryzen Balanced plan and I've disabled CPB and PBO in the BIOS. This gives me about 10% less Cinebench scores but I'm fine with that.

So this build is done!


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## Anevis

Pier Bover said:


> @Anevis I did this new test with Kontakt.
> 
> I created a track with a single instance and loaded the Albion Orchestra strings and changed articulation to long. Then I added 7 x 1 bar long notes and started duplicating that track. I got 37 tracks.
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 
> Each Kontakt instance was playing 50-80 voices. I imagine in part because this is an ensemble instrument and in part because of note release, reverb etc. So in total that would 1850-2960 voices.
> 
> I noticed that when creating the Kontakt instances it didn't reload all the samples to memory so I imagine it's smart enough to know when a sample is already in memory.
> 
> CPU in Ableton was around 30% with some random 40% peaks.
> 
> As for the cooling issue, I recived my 2 Noctua case fans and I've been able to reduce temps by about 10ºC which is great. Idle is about 35ºC and peak is about 50ºC when benchmarking all cores with Cinebench. I'm running with Ryzen Balanced plan and I've disabled CPB and PBO in the BIOS. This gives me about 10% less Cinebench scores but I'm fine with that.
> 
> So this build is done!



Even more than before, excellent!
It does recognize wether or not it is loaded in memory.
That's still quiet low which is good.

So how many cooling fans do you use or else, how many are constantly turned on? I'm just curious because I'd like to get one of the Ryzen's CPUs as well and most tests show the same results to yours. And yes, 35°C compared to 45°C is very good, using extra coolers.


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## Solarsentinel

Pier Bover said:


> @Anevis I've been looking around and it seems when benchmarking Kontakt people usually use multiple instances vs what I did which is a single instance getting all the notes. Maybe that would push the CPU harder and I would be able to get more voices. I will do a test later this afternoon to see if it makes any difference.
> 
> On another topic, yesterday I received my Noctua NH D15 cooler. It's much quieter than the stock cooler and it manages to get max temps at around 65ºC when benchmarking all cores with Cinebench which is fantastic.
> 
> The issue though are still idle temps which run between 40-45ºC even with PBO disabled on the motherboard and Ryzen Balanced power plan. Even when maxing the Noctua fans temps don't go much lower and the case is filled with heat so the case fans are working more than I'd like. This also makes the GPU hotter even when not playing anything which in turn speed up the GPU fans.
> 
> I'm super happy with the performance of the Ryzen but the 65W TDP is very misleading. Not being able to reduce idle temps to below 40ºC with the best air cooler in the market is a bit ridiculous.



Yes 45 - 50 °C in idle temps are normal temps for ryzen 3000, it's a know "issue". Cool that you could down them with new coolers, 35°C are very good!

By the way many thanks to you for this test. I will seriously considering a Ryzen for my next build!


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## Pier

Anevis said:


> Even more than before, excellent!
> It does recognize wether or not it is loaded in memory.
> That's still quiet low which is good.
> 
> So how many cooling fans do you use or else, how many are constantly turned on? I'm just curious because I'd like to get one of the Ryzen's CPUs as well and most tests show the same results to yours. And yes, 35°C compared to 45°C is very good, using extra coolers.



So in the CPU I have the Noctua NH D15 (black edition for being able to produce darker sounding tracks ).

Then on the front of the case I have:

2 x 120mm Nanoxia Deep Silence PWM (not sure about the RPM but I can look it up)
1 x Noctua NF-S12B redux-1200 PWM
On the back of the case I have for exaust:

1 x Noctua NF-S12B redux-1200 PWM
Like I said before the GPU is an Asus Strix which does not turn on the fans unless yuo're gaming or the case is very hot.

The NZXT H440 case has many small holes for liquid cooling and such which I've covered with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PTMM81B/ (adhesive foam acoustic material) to get better air pressure/flow and less dust. The case also has good acoustic material but I added foam to the window panel to reduce noise a bit further. The plate between the PSU and the main section of the case also has some small screw holes so I've added some foam there as well to prevent heat from rising up.

Edit:

Forgot to write than all fans are on all the time but I've manually adjusted the fan curves in the BIOS so that they run at very low speeds unless temps rise.


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## vitocorleone123

Maintain positive case pressure (cfm in) in the case to keep dust out but not cool as much. Negative pressure (cfm out) for potentially more cooling but also more dust.


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## Anevis

Pier Bover said:


> So in the CPU I have the Noctua NH D15 (black edition for being able to produce darker sounding tracks ).
> 
> Then on the front of the case I have:
> 
> 2 x 120mm Nanoxia Deep Silence PWM (not sure about the RPM but I can look it up)
> 1 x Noctua NF-S12B redux-1200 PWM
> On the back of the case I have for exaust:
> 
> 1 x Noctua NF-S12B redux-1200 PWM
> Like I said before the GPU is an Asus Strix which does not turn on the fans unless yuo're gaming or the case is very hot.
> 
> The NZXT H440 case has many small holes for liquid cooling and such which I've covered with https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07PTMM81B/ (adhesive foam acoustic material) to get better air pressure/flow and less dust. The case also has good acoustic material but I added foam to the window panel to reduce noise a bit further. The plate between the PSU and the main section of the case also has some small screw holes so I've added some foam there as well to prevent heat from rising up.
> 
> Edit:
> 
> Forgot to write than all fans are on all the time but I've manually adjusted the fan curves in the BIOS so that they run at very low speeds unless temps rise.



Black edition? So that's what will help me produce darker sounding tracks, I was wondering! :D

Okay,so this means it's a lot about the little details to tweak it your way and you can get quite good and surprising result! This will come very handy, building my own machine soon.

Very much appreciate all the tests and details you've provided.


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## Pier

So it's been a couple months and my Ryzen DAW is still doing great.

The temps I posted earlier were in winter and they obviously increased during Mexico's summer so I started getting fan noise again!

So I did a couple of changes to reduce noise even further.

My idle temps were around 50ºC and coming from Intel I wanted to get those to 35ºC but I could only do that by increasing the CPU fan speeds. Then I remembered Apple doesn't increase fan speeds until the CPU reaches above 60ºC so I just lowered CPU fan speeds even more on the BIOS. So now, unless the CPU goes above 60ºC the CPU fans remain at 15%.

I also identified a couple of air flow issues so I've added 2 x Noctua 140mm at the exhaust. This helps a lot to keep the CPU and GPU cool so that they don't have to push their fans harder. Now I have CPU idle temps at 40ºC in summer which is quite nice for the Ryzen 3000 series. Even when using Cinebench benchmarks the CPU never goes above 70ºC. When making music the machine is practically inaudible, even in summer.

Obviously when gaming the story is quite different. When playing moderately demanding games the fans are audible but still not bothering me at all.


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## thevisi0nary

I think you mentioned already about enabling the ram xmp in the bios but if you didn't already make sure to do that. As far as I understand (and I could be wrong about this so be careful), you want the ram speed at 1:1 with the F clock, so you could try manually setting the F clock to 1600mhz and see if that makes a difference.

According to these articles, this most important only in terms of the headroom at the lowest latencies. - http://www.scanproaudio.info/

I don't know how well Ableton is at utilizing multiple cores as compared to something like reaper. My (barely scientific) opinion is that if you are testing voice count and hitting a wall with crackling, and your cpu usage is only 30-40% (the same on all cores), and you are monitoring that your ram usage is not maxed out, this would mean that your daw is not properly utilizing the remaining cpu power.


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## Pier

thevisi0nary said:


> I think you mentioned already about enabling the ram xmp in the bios but if you didn't already make sure to do that. As far as I understand (and I could be wrong about this so be careful), you want the ram speed at 1:1 with the F clock, so you could try manually setting the F clock to 1600mhz and see if that makes a difference.
> 
> According to these articles, this most important only in terms of the headroom at the lowest latencies. - http://www.scanproaudio.info/
> 
> I don't know how well Ableton is at utilizing multiple cores as compared to something like reaper. My (barely scientific) opinion is that if you are testing voice count and hitting a wall with crackling, and your cpu usage is only 30-40% (the same on all cores), and you are monitoring that your ram usage is not maxed out, this would mean that your daw is not properly utilizing the remaining cpu power.



Yeah I enabled XMP in the bios and getting the full speed of the RAM. While comparing benchmark results with my previous RAM and without XMP it didn't make much of a difference. Although I mostly tested virtual synths and not so much sample-based libraries.

When benchmarking Diva/Hive/etc the CPU was maxed so I don't think it's an Ableton Live issue. I only have 16GB of RAM so most likely I would need to get more if I wanted to use more Kontakt based stuff. Honestly, 123 simultaneous notes with releases and all is way more than I will ever need since I don't do serious orchestral work.


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## Solarsentinel

Pier said:


> So it's been a couple months and my Ryzen DAW is still doing great.
> 
> The temps I posted earlier were in winter and they obviously increased during Mexico's summer so I started getting fan noise again!
> 
> So I did a couple of changes to reduce noise even further.
> 
> My idle temps were around 50ºC and coming from Intel I wanted to get those to 35ºC but I could only do that by increasing the CPU fan speeds. Then I remembered Apple doesn't increase fan speeds until the CPU reaches above 60ºC so I just lowered CPU fan speeds even more on the BIOS. So now, unless the CPU goes above 60ºC the CPU fans remain at 15%.
> 
> I also identified a couple of air flow issues so I've added 2 x Noctua 140mm at the exhaust. This helps a lot to keep the CPU and GPU cool so that they don't have to push their fans harder. Now I have CPU idle temps at 40ºC in summer which is quite nice for the Ryzen 3000 series. Even when using Cinebench benchmarks the CPU never goes above 70ºC. When making music the machine is practically inaudible, even in summer.
> 
> Obviously when gaming the story is quite different. When playing moderately demanding games the fans are audible but still not bothering me at all.


Very good temps! You have a good point here, airflow is crucial for better cooling


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## Pictus

Pier said:


> Yeah I enabled XMP in the bios and getting the full speed of the RAM. While comparing benchmark results with my previous RAM and without XMP it didn't make much of a difference. Although I mostly tested virtual synths and not so much sample-based libraries.
> 
> When benchmarking Diva/Hive/etc the CPU was maxed so I don't think it's an Ableton Live issue. I only have 16GB of RAM so most likely I would need to get more if I wanted to use more Kontakt based stuff. Honestly, 123 simultaneous notes with releases and all is way more than I will ever need since I don't do serious orchestral work.



You may try to overclock the RAM








AMD Ryzen 3000 series - Page 54 - Gearspace.com


Quote: Originally Posted by speerchucker ➡️ Thanks! This is most helpful. From what I've seen online, this must be one of the rare success stories, bit hoping to see more good reports here. I'm happy with my overclock, but I've seen more aggressive memory overclocks from people with golden 3950x...



www.gearslutz.com





HWInfo64 is very good to verify voltages/temperatures/frequency
https://www.hwinfo.com/download/
Another trick to lower the temperature is to try to find the minimal voltage the
processor can run, here(Ryzen 3600) I locked all cores to 4.2GHz and was able
to limit the max voltage to only 1.175V!
And no crashes even with Prime95 tests with AVX enabled!!








AMD Ryzen 3000 series - Page 59 - Gearspace.com


Quote: Originally Posted by Ricardo G ➡️ I rest my case here.... My point here was just this... i achieved my dream balance. I got a used workstation machine that can do what i want or need very fast, all in real time, no more constrains... And i did for less than a cost of a 3950X CPU can you...



www.gearslutz.com


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## Pier

Thanks for the info @Pictus !


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## lahatte

@Pictus I am no electrical engineer, but it seems to me that lowering voltage would increase the current, which would increase temperatures. Just my thinking. I could easily be wrong.

Also, @Pier, thanks for all the good info. Have you tried turning off the multi cpu support in the Kontakt VSTi? As I understand it Kontakt may work better when running in a multi cpu DAW by letting the DAW handle those. Might be worth a try.


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## Pictus

lahatte said:


> @Pictus I am no electrical engineer, but it seems to me that lowering voltage would increase the current, which would increase temperatures. Just my thinking. I could easily be wrong.



Nor do I, but the CPU is not a transformer...
Does a light bulb get hotter when you use a dimmer and set it to low light?
With HWiNFO64 you can monitor all aspects like ampere/volts/watts/temperature.
Less volts for the CPU = less heat
The "auto" thing usually gives more voltages than it really needs, each CPU is different...


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## chimuelo

Just pre ordered my Zen 3 board from ProVantage.
My 3700X is a nice powerful solution for a DAW as 256/1.4msec./96k is fine.
Not my choice for live work as the latency seems to correlate with polyphony.

Zen 3 has an entirely different cache design that should overcome the chiplet shortcomings..

Dual M.2’s right below my triple barrel fans too. Sweet.











__





ASRock Rack > X570D4U-2L2T







www.asrockrack.com


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## Pier

lahatte said:


> Have you tried turning off the multi cpu support in the Kontakt VSTi?



Thanks for the tip, I will try that if I ever need more performance from Kontakt.


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## chimuelo

Use a little more RAM and more instances of Kontakt too if you want to get more performance.

An Evil Dragon once told me so, then I checked off MCore and use 4 instances instead of 1 instance.

The result is my awesome Physis K4 Controller is an insanely powerful high quality sounding 128 preset ROMpler, with articulations by the dozens.


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