# Need opinions on new MONSTER VEPro slave PC build



## AlexRuger (May 13, 2014)

Hey friends,

I'm helping a prominent composer here in LA simplify and consolidate his rig. As of now we have a new ("trash can") Mac Pro running Cubase, _three_ PC slaves, and _two_ (older, "cheese grater") Mac Pro slaves. Some are using VEPro and connected via ethernet, some are using MOTU MIDI Time Pieces and sound cards. Some are on Gigastudio, some are using various versions of Kontak. Even one of the Mac Pros is using Mainstage. Quite a mess!

Thing is, most of his slaves exist simply due to legacy concerns (such as the Giga rigs), and due to being spread out so much they're hardly working. My primary goal is to consolidate his slave rig down to one, extremely powerful PC (updating all the older Kontakt 3 and 4 stuff to Kontakt 5, converting Giga libraries to Kontakt or using G-Player, etc). That way, finding problems when they arise will be easier, upgrading will be easier, fewer things will be able to go on, etc. Roughly estimating, a Windows 7 PC with 64GB of RAM could pull this off. I have two main concerns, here:

1) I'm no stranger to VEPro or slave PC's (I have a great i7 32GB RAM PC I built myself a few years ago). I personally have never run into any bandwidth concerns with the ethernet connection, and my Google searches have yet to uncover one, but then again his sessions are quite a bit bigger than mine and are using a wider variety of libraries and synths. I just want to make sure, though: have any of you ever dealt with that before? If that's a concern, I may switch directions and consolidate his rig down to two slaves (which would still be a very welcome improvement).

2) I've got a pretty good shopping list put together in my head, but as far as motherboards go, I'm pretty lost. My rig has an ASUS that I've never had any problems with, but my research has uncovered some pretty nasty opinions regarding their customer service and build quality as of late. ASRock is looking like a good new contendor, but I have zero experience with their products. Could you guys refer me to some great, reliable motherboards capable of running 64GB of RAM (or even more…we might want to go up to 128GB)? We plan on going Intel…probably i7, maybe Xeon (either way, we're shooting for a butt load of cores--probably twelve).

Thanks all!


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## chimuelo (May 13, 2014)

I bought the ASRock Extreme 11/a w/ the LSI COntroller chip and it's the most powerful streamer you can purchase.
Amazingly the Z87 chipset is drained of every little unused function from conumer boards, and this is an enterprise board with TBolt II @ 20GBps, NGFF M2 PCI-e SATA and SAS devices which are pricey, but if you're amking money, time always seems to be relevant.
I use this for streaming massive instruments live now, and while it won't add much to VSTi patches on synths where load times are needed, it can load 32GBs of your most valued instruments and treat them as if yuou are in real time mode.

There is a new Extreme Z97 in the works with SATA Express, and Ultra M.2 NGFF PCI-e SATA, which makes this a cheaper but definatley faster way to stream.
Don't even need to use RAID, but the tests I regard as reliable from the reviewer are pretty impressive.

http://www.thessdreview.com/daily-news/ ... ssd-32gbs/


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## rgames (May 13, 2014)

You need to check his voice requirements for each library - that's what dictates how many machines you need.

Based on my experience, both i5 and i7 max out around 1500 voices per machine with reasonable latency (3 - 5 ms) using VE Pro with one buffer over Ethernet. I got worse (higher) latency when using audio hardware, but that was several years ago - I switched to all Ethernet about that time and haven't compared in recent years. Those voice counts are for VSL and LASS. For Cinebrass, it's a bit less and with PLAY it's about 160 voices. So figure out how many voices you need from each library and that will tell you how many machines you need.

I've never seen any indication that CPU matters for a sample-streaming slave. Some swear it does, but I've never seen it demonstrated and can't make it happen in my own setup - my i5 2500k and i7 4930k both give the number of voices I mentioned above, so that tells me CPU doesn't matter for those libraries. SATA III SSD's make a big difference, though, so put your money there first.

I've used ASUS for ages but I think they've gone overboard in recent years in catering to the insane overclockers. I have the newest X79 Deluxe and it has issues. It's OK and workable but it doesn't impress me like ASUS did 5 - 10 years ago. However, it's more than sufficient for DAW use. Any major brand is fine - I think they're all basically indistinguishable.

rgames


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