# I7-6800k Slave build



## Jaredf920 (Jun 28, 2016)

Hey everyone, I'm going to start buying parts to build a new slave machine.
Here is what I've got for the build:
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/jaredf920/saved/#view=yhtXsY

This slave is going to be running: VSL Winds, CineWinds, CineBrass, _Hollywood Brass Gold (maybe)_, CinePerc (prec & mallets), _Berlin Perc (maybe) (perc+mallets)_, Spitfire Harp, and some synth patches (kontakt synths). Over VEP Ethernet.

Since everyone's testing seems to show no performance improvement from m.2/NVMe, I'm going to go with the Samsung 850 EVOs for sample streaming. I may get a M.2 chip for the boot drive though. I'm most likely going to use a Windows 7-Pro license I already own unless W8/W10 is more recommended.

Any recommendations and/or feedback is greatly appreciated!
Thanks in advance


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## trumpoz (Jun 28, 2016)

Im researching the same. The reviews are that the new CPUs dont overclock that well and that 4.2 is a max for stability. Ill probably go to 4.0.


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## Vin (Jun 29, 2016)

I'd rather get a 5820K-based PC. Broadwell-E CPUs don't seem to overclock well at all and run very hot even with high-end cooling.

I'd probably go for something like this: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/7MhgLD

or even 6700K version: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/Xx3tJV

My 5820K stays extremely stable at 4.4 GHz and not hot at all with my Noctua NH-D14 (under 65-70° at 100% load), while 6800K goes over 80°, almost 90°, even with decent water cooling.

Here's a good 6800K overview:



Bottom line, it's only negligibly faster than Haswell-E equivalent (5820K) and to achieve same speed it'll draw much more power and produce much more heat because you have to increase the voltage insanely high to get to the 4.2-4.4 Ghz.


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## Jaredf920 (Jun 29, 2016)

Vin said:


> I'd rather get a 5820K-based PC. Broadwell-E CPUs don't seem to overclock well at all and run very hot even with high-end cooling.
> 
> I'd probably go for something like this: http://pcpartpicker.com/list/7MhgLD
> 
> ...



This is great info! I was originally looking at the 5820k, I did recently build a small form factor 6700k machine (for gaming/VR testing) I wonder how they stack up against each other....
I'm a little concerned that with the amount of instruments this machine will host & amount of simultaneous voices, a quad core won't be enough. Although, I am planning on only running 1-instance of VEP, into Cubase.

If the 6800k runs that hot & overclocking doesn't yield as big of a performance boost compared to the 5820k, maybe the 5820k will be better.

Vln what all is your 5820k slave hosting?
Do you recommend a Noctua cooler over an AIO liquid cooler?


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## Jaredf920 (Jul 1, 2016)

Changed the build... after more research, it looks like Haswell>Broadwell CPU,
Here is the updated list:
http://pcpartpicker.com/user/jaredf920/saved/#view=yhtXsY


Is anybody using Windows 10 on their slave machine?
I was just going to put Win7-Pro on this, but perhaps win8/10 is good?

Also, re: the samples drives.... I figured I would split all of the libraries up across 2x 1TB SSD, each drive would be 50-60% full at most (includes headroom if I want to add a little more later).
However, I am trying to see if it would be better to split up the samples across 3x 500GB SSD.

For instance:
SSD1 = WW + Piano/Harp
SSD2 = Brass
SSD3 = Perc + Synths

Thoughts?


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## Spearhead (Jul 1, 2016)

Instead of installing your libraries in the way you have listed, have you thought about creating a single RAID drive from the three? The RAID drive would have a theoretical 3x speed increase over the individual drives. You could configure it as RAID 0 with no error protection, or RAID 5, which would allow you to keep working even if one of the drives died.


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## EvilDragon (Jul 1, 2016)

There's no real need for RAID with SSDs IMHO, as far as speed benefits are concerned, really...


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## Spearhead (Jul 1, 2016)

Definitely not the boost in speed you'd see from an HDD. If the drives aren't maxing out the SATA bus then there could be some gains.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 1, 2016)

Question: why are PCs never 12-core (that I can see)? Is it because the motherboards don't support it, because Windows doesn't, or just because people don't bother?


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## trumpoz (Jul 1, 2016)

Nick Batzdorf said:


> Question: why are PCs never 12-core (that I can see)? Is it because the motherboards don't support it, because Windows doesn't, or just because people don't bother?


There are - check out AAVIM technology. Vin Curligliano knows his stuff and is offering 18-core Xeons in DAWs


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## rgames (Jul 1, 2016)

http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2699-v4-55M-Cache-2_20-GHz

22 cores of goodness. And probably a really poor performer for DAW use.

High core counts for DAWs or sample streaming don't seem to help much - in fact, I've seen more examples of worse performance than better once you get over 6 cores. Speed is king and all those cores really drop the speed. Even for mainstream video rendering there's good evidence that more than 4-8 cores don't do much (https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Adobe-Premiere-Pro-CC-Multi-Core-Performance-698/).

You really need some pretty specific software to take advantage of all those cores.

rgames


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## Gerhard Westphalen (Jul 1, 2016)

rgames said:


> http://ark.intel.com/products/91317/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E5-2699-v4-55M-Cache-2_20-GHz
> 
> 22 cores of goodness. And probably a really poor performer for DAW use.
> 
> ...



Even if at the same speed (e.g. 4.0GHz 6 core vs 4.0GHz 8 core)? Wouldn't the DAW be able to run more plugins since each plugin is single threaded? I can't imagine it would simply not use the other cores. For VEP you could just assign the cores you want for each instance so I don't see how more wouldn't make a difference.


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## muk (Jul 2, 2016)

For DAW use, would you be better off with a 5820k (6 cores at 3.30 GHz) or with a 4970k (4 cores at 4 GHz)?


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## Vin (Jul 2, 2016)

Jaredf920 said:


> This is great info! I was originally looking at the 5820k, I did recently build a small form factor 6700k machine (for gaming/VR testing) I wonder how they stack up against each other....
> I'm a little concerned that with the amount of instruments this machine will host & amount of simultaneous voices, a quad core won't be enough. Although, I am planning on only running 1-instance of VEP, into Cubase.
> 
> If the 6800k runs that hot & overclocking doesn't yield as big of a performance boost compared to the 5820k, maybe the 5820k will be better.
> ...



Hey Jared,

I'm a minimalist - I just use one machine and haven't had a single problem with my decently overclocked 5820K yet. Using a lot of plugins with oversampling, Kontakt etc.



Jaredf920 said:


> Changed the build... after more research, it looks like Haswell>Broadwell CPU,
> Here is the updated list:
> http://pcpartpicker.com/user/jaredf920/saved/#view=yhtXsY




That looks great now, the only thing I'd change is cooling; I'd still prefer Noctua NH-D15, it's completely silent and performs amazingly well, 2-3° better than my NH-D14.


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## rgames (Jul 2, 2016)

Gerhard Westphalen said:


> Wouldn't the DAW be able to run more plugins since each plugin is single threaded? I can't imagine it would simply not use the other cores.


It will use all the other cores and it still might perform worse than a machine with fewer cores. Take a look at the link I posted - there are lots of examples where the system performs worse with more cores in use. That's a CPU-intensive process, of course, and even then the extra cores aren't necessarily a help. It takes time to coordinate all those cores; that's time lost to other activities.

In a DAW the benefit is even more suspect because DAW performance (these days) depends more on real-time performance than on CPU performance. And from what I've seen in terms of real-life examples (i.e. not how many hundreds of compressors you can run - how often do you have 250 compressors on a project?), high-core-count CPUs tend to have worse real-time performance. So if you're CPU limited then *maybe* a bunch of cores will help but I've never seen anyone show an example where it does. In my experience, they definitely hurt real-time performance so I'm doubtful that the overall performance is going to show any gain. As I said, it's more likely to show a loss in my experience (as the link also showed).

High core counts are, however, very helpful for things like computational physics. For DAWs though, from my experience the clock speed matters more and there's no real difference between 4 and 6 cores and things get worse beyond that.

rgames


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 2, 2016)

> You really need some pretty specific software to take advantage of all those cores



Richard, I suspect VE Pro is in that category. But I'm curious now - will post on the VSL site.


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## Nick Batzdorf (Jul 2, 2016)

...or I will when their site is back up after maintenance. 

Thanks for all the replies, by the way.


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## muk (Jul 2, 2016)

rgames said:


> For DAWs though, from my experience the clock speed matters more and there's no real difference between 4 and 6 cores and things get worse beyond that.



In that case a 4970k would be the better choice than a 5820k for DAW use?


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## Jaredf920 (Jul 3, 2016)

These are some great questions. I was planning on building an 8-core slave, but all of these concerns & $$, etc.... 6-core seemed like the way to go(at least for my uses at this time). Kevin Kiner has a 12-core mac Pro (2.66GHz) Running a little more than I want to on this slave (he is also using a couple instances of Altiverb 7 on there), and his mac pro runs very stable...especially for some of the more intense, John Williams-esque orchestral scores for Star Wars Rebels.

This machine I am building is going to be strictly a slave for sample streaming, my main sequencer computer is a 12-core Mac pro [2012] (may swap that to a PC later on since I'm switching over to Cubase). I have a Mac Mini slave just for LASS, and another Mac Mini for some Spitfire libs (Mural, Perc, albion/leogria, etc...). One of my hopes is that this new slave will be good enough that I could sell one of my mac minis, but we shall see! 

If you have a 6-core CPU clocked @ 4.0GHz and an 8-core clocked @ 4.0GHz, the 8-core would outperform the 6-core.... especially for VEP. Because VEP has the multicore functions, such as dedicating "only 2 cores" per instance. Or telling this instance to use 8-core (all), etc. (Kontakt also has a mutlicore feature like this, but I hear it can interfere with VEP, so only use the VEP multicore stuff if running K5 in your instance.) Core-for-core, they both the 6 & 8 core CPUs should be equal, at least in theory...


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## EvilDragon (Jul 3, 2016)

muk said:


> In that case a 4970k would be the better choice than a 5820k for DAW use?



Yep. Because higher clock speed.


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## peksi (Jul 8, 2016)

I see no one mentioned CPU cache. I have thought it has some effect on real time performance as well.


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