# New x99 based need your feedback.



## manivels (Dec 7, 2016)

Hi guys,

I need a new main PC to work with 4 other slaves via VePro. Most of my projects are huge orchestral template like trailer music.
This is what I end up with.(Noise is not a issue as PC are all in a machine room.

Budget around 1600$

case: ATX Cooler Master HAF 912 
mobo: ASROCK extreme4/3.1
Proc: x99 6800k [email protected],2Ghz
Cooler: H80i v2
SSD syst: samsumg pm961 256gb
SSD project: samsumg 950 pro 256gb
RAM: corsaire CMV8GX4M1A2133C15 32gb
PSU: corsaire 650w
Graphic card: nothing fancy didn't choose yet.
Sound card: RME( UC or UFX+ already have those cards so not included in the budget)

Thanks in advance for your help.


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## CACKLAND (Dec 7, 2016)

Considering the new Samsung 960 Pro / Evo Series has just been launched, I would highly advise of purchasing those M.2 NVMe SSD's over the ones you listed.


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## manivels (Dec 7, 2016)

Thanks for your quick reply Cackland and thanks for your advice.
The Evo looks like to be a good advice and also less expensive than the 950 pro, will check if I can find some bench.
Thanks again.


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## rgames (Dec 7, 2016)

Hve you considered the 6700k? I think it might make a better DAW than the X99-based 6800k. I don't think any of the X99 chips can beat the 6700k on single-core performance and that's where DAW performance tends to lie. Plus you can get the 6700k up to 4.6 GHz pretty easily - I just set up two of them for slaves and both are running at 4.6 on cheap air cooling.

So I'd look around to see if you can find some relevant benchmarks.

Also, for DAW use, I haven't seen any major advantage for NVMe drives. I have a 512 GB Samsung 950 Pro NVMe drive and it gives the same streaming performance as all of my SSDs. It does drop load times for a large template by about 15% but other than that I haven't seen any performance advantage. I'd just buy whatever SSDs are cheapest.

rgames


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## manivels (Dec 8, 2016)

rgames said:


> Hve you considered the 6700k? I think it might make a better DAW than the X99-based 6800k. I don't think any of the X99 chips can beat the 6700k on single-core performance and that's where DAW performance tends to lie. Plus you can get the 6700k up to 4.6 GHz pretty easily - I just set up two of them for slaves and both are running at 4.6 on cheap air cooling.
> 
> So I'd look around to see if you can find some relevant benchmarks.
> 
> ...


Thanks for your reply,
I'd like to say that it's a interesting point of view and I appreciate the real-life testing.
I'm surprised to hear that less core is better than more as Cubase and VePro are using multi-core syst, that said my main daw is a 3930k @4,2 and I never reached the 100% cpu usage, lets say that the ASIO will hit the 100% before.
So for you, there is no advantage to have more core even when working with Vepro?
You say that you set up two of them for slaves so can I ask you what do you have for your main PC.
Thanks again for you precious feedback.


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## garyhiebner (Dec 8, 2016)

rgames said:


> Hve you considered the 6700k? I think it might make a better DAW than the X99-based 6800k. I don't think any of the X99 chips can beat the 6700k on single-core performance and that's where DAW performance tends to lie. Plus you can get the 6700k up to 4.6 GHz pretty easily - I just set up two of them for slaves and both are running at 4.6 on cheap air cooling.
> 
> So I'd look around to see if you can find some relevant benchmarks.
> 
> ...


What air cooling you using for the 6700k's?


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## khollister (Dec 8, 2016)

manivels said:


> Thanks for your reply,
> I'd like to say that it's a interesting point of view and I appreciate the real-life testing.
> I'm surprised to hear that less core is better than more as Cubase and VePro are using multi-core syst, that said my main daw is a 3930k @4,2 and I never reached the 100% cpu usage, lets say that the ASIO will hit the 100% before.
> So for you, there is no advantage to have more core even when working with Vepro?
> ...



I'm obviously not Richard, but while VEP is extremely well threaded for multi-core use, that is a concern only on the slaves running the VEP server, unless you are also planning on running a VEP server locally on the DAW. And ASIO spikes are CPU related. 

The DAW software makes a big difference in how well cores are used. Reaper is very good in that regard, and the DAWbench benchmarks folks run using Reaper show huge track count increases for the 6/8/10 core Broadwell-E CPU's. However I'm not sure Cubase is going to leverage those cores nearly as well unless you are also going to run VEP locally rather than on your slaves. 

I'm in the process of moving to Cubase/PC from Logic/Mac and I'm struggling with the same decision - X99 & 6800/6900 or X170 & 6700. I'm tempted to keep the costs down with a 6700 build and then perhaps transition to a Skylake-X platform late next year if the 4 core can't keep up. I do have a 4930 VEP slave already. If I had the funds, I would update the slave to a 6900 in a heartbeat but that will have to wait.


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## rgames (Dec 8, 2016)

manivels said:


> Thanks for your reply,
> I'd like to say that it's a interesting point of view and I appreciate the real-life testing.
> I'm surprised to hear that less core is better than more as Cubase and VePro are using multi-core syst, that said my main daw is a 3930k @4,2 and I never reached the 100% cpu usage, lets say that the ASIO will hit the 100% before.
> So for you, there is no advantage to have more core even when working with Vepro?
> ...


I wouldn't say fewer cores are better, rather faster cores are better. If you can run more cores at the same clock speed then you'll get more mileage out of them (up to a point). However that's almost never the case - in general, higher core counts go with slower clock speeds, therefore lower per-core power.

As an example, my current main DAW is a 4930k (6 cores) and it performs basically the same as the i7 920 it replaced (4 cores). (In truth, it performs slightly worse but not enough to matter). So, 50% more cores but no change in performance - with the 4-core machine my min latency with big projects was about 6 ms. With the 6-core machine, my min latency was ... <drumroll> ... about 6 ms. No difference.

So I'm really skeptical that cores matter much these days. Given that the 6700k can overclock so much better I wouldn't be surprised if it were the better DAW because there is a lot of evidence that practical DAW performance scales with clock speed.

But, like I said, I don't have any data for the 6700k. Just some anecdotes based on other processors. Let us know if you find any real data.

rgames


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## JohnG (Dec 8, 2016)

why only 32 GB of RAM? I think with it so inexpensive these days I'd use 64.


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## rgames (Dec 8, 2016)

Here's an example of what I'm takling about: the 6700k kills on single-threaded performance, even when not overclocked. Throw overclocked performance into this mix and it performs even better.







In general, the DAW is going to assign each complete audio chain to one core (e.g. one track), so if any one core becomes a bottleneck then it doesn't matter how many cores you have, you have a bottleneck. That's part of the essence of the difference between real-time performance and CPU performance.

If that's how your DAW works (and I think all do) then it stands to reason that the 6700k is more likely to give better performance.

Where that might not be the case is if you truly are CPU-limited. But I've not come across CPU limitations in the past 5-7 years - my largest projects run at maybe 50% CPU usage. But I could think of situations where there are CPU limitations - e.g. many dozens of very CPU-intensive synth tracks all playing at the same time. But I have a hard time imaging anyone writing music like that.

rgames


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## manivels (Dec 8, 2016)

Wow, get it, Thanks a lot for all those information.
I think I gonna go for the 6700k then.


garyhiebner said:


> What air cooling you using for the 6700k's?


I use a Brushless corsaire cooler, very noisy when you put it on the third speed but very efficient(you have 3 different speeds) so if the noise is a concern I wont recommend it. Another thing is that the fan is really big and wont fit in medium case.


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## garyhiebner (Dec 9, 2016)

Can anyone recommend a good noiseless cooler for the 6700? I'm looking at a new build. But need to do voice overs for tutorials so need a quiet system


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## khollister (Dec 9, 2016)

manivels said:


> Wow, get it, Thanks a lot for all those information.
> I think I gonna go for the 6700k then.



There is a thread over on Gearslutz (title is something like "Latest i7 benchmarks") where the various music PC vendors were posting benchmarks for the 6700, 6800, & 6900. While Scan (UK) used Reaper, I went back and noticed ADK was using Cubase 8.5 with the DAWbench benchmark. While you can't draw any conclusions about the actual number of tracks you would get in real use, it is valuable IMHO as to the scalability of Cubase across cores.

As it turns out, the 6/8 and 10 core CPU's kill the 6700, in spite of single core clock speed. I don't recall the track configuration of the DAWbench test, but it is certainly possible that you could get an ASIO spike on a single track that the benchmark doesn't simulate, but it does appear that Cubase 8.5 (and presumably 9) does scale pretty well across cores. It is also interesting that the broadwell-E CPU's do better than the number of cores would suggest compared to the 6700 - probably because of the larger caches on the E series parts than the Skylake 6700 desktop part.

Personally, I wouldn't write off the 6 or 8 core CPU's, especially if you will be using VEP either locally or on a network slave. A 6 core CPU (6800 or 6850) with a mild OC to 4.0 or so is probably where I'm going if I don't just wait for Skylake-X (the next gen 6/8/10/12 core non-Xeon parts).


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## khollister (Dec 9, 2016)

garyhiebner said:


> Can anyone recommend a good noiseless cooler for the 6700? I'm looking at a new build. But need to do voice overs for tutorials so need a quiet system



The Noctua coolers (U12S, U14S, D15S, D15) are always a safe bet. The U12 would be fine for a 6700 that isn't overclocked. The thing to be careful of is vertical height, i.e. the width of the case. These things are pretty tall (especially the 140mm fan versions) and need a full size case to fit. I use Fractal R4's and they fit just fine.


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## rgames (Dec 9, 2016)

khollister said:


> I don't recall the track configuration of the DAWbench test


There are two DAWBench tests that I'm aware of and I've never found any link between them and reality for composers. The one I see most often is the one where they see how many compressors you can run. The differences are in the hundreds - one CPU can do 250 compressors and the other can do 350. How often do you need 350 compressors in a project?

The other one is the Kontakt streaming test where they stream block chords which are easily cached and, more to the point, do not represent music that anyone writes.

Neither of those benchmarks relates in any way to the manner in which we use computers, so I don't put much stock in them. What does matter to us is running a bunch of VIs, streaming samples and using a variety of plug-ins across a bunch of audio tracks. For those kinds of projects (i.e. real-life, practical projects) I've not seen any advantage for number of cores but I have seen significant disadvantages for drops in clock speed.

Here's another example: I compared my 4930k (6 cores) against the 6700k (4 cores) at roughly the same clock speed (4.5 GHz). They both performed about the same in terms of number of streaming voices. Next I under-clocked the machines down to 3.0 GHz and the number of streaming voices dropped by more than 50%. Do you think extra cores would get that 50% back, especailly given that the 6- and 4-core versions performed the same? I haven't seen any indication that number of cores can come anywhere near making up that performance difference.

Here's what we need to see in order to prove that number of cores matters: show us a practical project that could *not* run on, say, a four-core machine that *could* run on a six-core machine at the same clock speed. I haven't seen it. I have seen impractical projects that show that behavior: the ones with 350 compressors.

So if you're stuck because you need that 351st compressor then yeah, go take a look at DAWBench results 

Benchmarks are useful to compare different realities but they need to be tied to at least one reality in order to be meaningful. I can't figure out what reality is represented by the DAWBench tests.

rgames


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## JohnG (Dec 9, 2016)

In general, I think Richard's advice is excellent -- get faster CPUs and don't "save money" up front, costing yourself time for years to come.

One minor caveat: From the outset, Digital Performer has done a much better job sharing cores than most other DAWs. That may no longer be the case but for many years, it was. So, for the majority of users (those not using DP that is), Richard's points are spot on.

Besides, today it is pretty clear to me from experience with my various libraries that, whether owing to scripting or some other reason, even slave PCs that are not doing much beyond serving up samples are benefitting from faster CPUs than formerly. Once upon a time, a 2.0 or 2.5 GHz CPU was fine on a slave PC, but not any longer, at least for strings. I wouldn't recommend anything less than 4.x as a starting point these days.

And really I don't think there's a reason to have less than 64 GB of RAM on one's DAW or less than that on a slave PC either, truth be told. The idea is to focus on trying to write music, not fiddle with buffers and all that. It is hard enough to come up with something halfway decent _musically_ without the gear yanking us back out of the creative mode into an analytical / workshop one.


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## khollister (Dec 9, 2016)

rgames said:


> There are two DAWBench tests that I'm aware of and I've never found any link between them and reality for composers. The one I see most often is the one where they see how many compressors you can run. The differences are in the hundreds - one CPU can do 250 compressors and the other can do 350. How often do you need 350 compressors in a project?
> 
> The other one is the Kontakt streaming test where they stream block chords which are easily cached and, more to the point, do not represent music that anyone writes.
> 
> ...



First off, I'm not trying to argue with you Richard. You have a lot more experience at this than I - I'm just trying to reconcile everything I have read and experienced personally.

Is your test with the 4930 and 6700 on a VEP slave or with Cubase? And if Cubase, were the VI's (Kontakt presumably) hosted directly in Cubase or in VEP (either locally or remotely)?

The reason I'm not just taking your experience and running with it is my own experience is that I'm often CPU limited, even in VEP. I've read your pretty comprehensive posts a number of times, and while I can't really argue with anything theoretically, it just doesn't seem to align with what I seem to get. I'm ready to admit I am doing something really wrong/stupid, but I'm not sure what it could be - this stuff isn't _that_ complicated.

I completely agree that the DAWbench tests are not at all useful for figuring out how many tracks you will get in real world use, but regardless of that I do believe they should at least indicate Cubase does scale across cores/threads _assuming a given track doesn't spike the ASIO load on that track_. That is what seems to trip most of us up in the DAW (as opposed to VEP slaves). 

What happens for me is that using VEP as the host eliminates the core spikes that I would otherwise see in Logic or Cubase (although I still can see spikes from effects, particularly in Cubase), but VEP still consumes CPU, just better distributed without the transients. But I could never get the kind of track counts you reference using an i5 for a slave. That is the dilemma for me - unless I have somehow completely screwed up the thread allocation in VEP. I typically run with 2 threads per instance and multiprocessing off in Kontakt.


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## JohnG (Dec 9, 2016)

khollister said:


> I typically run with 2 threads per instance and multiprocessing off in Kontakt.



you're using more than one VE Pro instance on your slaves? I use one per slave. I'm trying to picture how more than one exactly looks


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## khollister (Dec 9, 2016)

JohnG said:


> you're using more than one VE Pro instance on your slaves? I use one per slave. I'm trying to picture how more than one exactly looks



Instance meaning a "tab" in the new VEP 6 UI - not multiple servers (which as far as I know is not even possible). Instance = v-frame under the old VEP5 nomenclature.

Now that I can actually make use of multi-timbral instruments with Cubase (I've been in the LPX world for years), I need to rethink my thread allocation in VEP


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## JohnG (Dec 9, 2016)

ok -- never understand their nomenclature anyway -- thank you


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## URL (Dec 9, 2016)

I know we walked this road before but...
I have 19 Instances in 1 VEP slave Pc- minimum of 16-256 stereo tracks for each instances routed into my main Daw
at separate ch/tracks into CB9. It works flawless. What is the chicken or the egg regarding advantage of multiple cores or not, not so obvious from Daw constructors (yes Cubase suppose to handle 32cores...) and there is as sade earlier no really a good benchmark on this Q.

But theres a lot of people that use multiple cores in there complete DAW Rig for composing mixning ITB these day, Why? Are we all duped or just a feel that everything runs smoother, or when there is a high load of different programs "various" ways to use the DAW as multiple cores really do make a different?
If you "multitasking"run video -mixing-using multipel program I/O sends into your Daw I say there is advantage of using multiple cores...over one

How well are all Daw systems optimized by the user?


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## Pixelee (Dec 11, 2016)

So the ASROCK extreme4/3.1 would be a good choice for motherboard?


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## khollister (Dec 11, 2016)

As long as you do not need Thunderbolt, ASrock is probably fine. While most of the boards claim a TB header for an add-in card, the only one sort of available is TB 2 and it can be hard to find. Asus has a TB 3 AIC (easily available) and several Gigabyte boards have the Intel Alpine Ridge USB 3.1 /TB 3 controller right on the motherboard, no AIC required.


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## Pixelee (Dec 11, 2016)

Thank you. How about Gigabytes' motherboards? My non-composer said it's quite stable.


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## URL (Dec 12, 2016)

Computer parts is like candy ones you bought the "candy bag" they are "finish" after 10 minutes...
Im Asus fan(because the have been working for me) but there is a lot of MB and Cpu that works for DAW and can't really say nothing about Asrock...in forums there is a lot of DAW users that use Asrock MB.
I really like Xeon also, Junkiee XL use Xeon 12- core for his DAW setup despite all talk about singel i7 Core.


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## pmcrockett (Dec 12, 2016)

I'm in the process of building a new system, too, and from what I've been able to find, no one really has a solid answer for whether a single- or multi-core focus will give you better results for heavy orchestra mockups. The DAWBench tests that I've found are overwhelmingly in favor of multi-core-focused processors, but those tests consist of loading as many instances of a single plug-in as possible, which may not reflect real-world conditions, and I've heard anecdotal accounts in favor of both single- and multi-core. I have not assembled my new system yet, but my approach is to overclock an i7 6800K to get its multi-core benefits without quite the hit to clockspeed that you take using its stock configuration.

EDIT: In my own case, I'm likely to be running multiple instances of Samplemodeling instruments, of Spat, and possibly of Adaptiverb on multiple separate channels in Reaper, which supposedly has good multi-core scaling -- it seems intuitively correct to me that this is a situation where multi-core might be better than single-core, although, again, I can't find any actual data on this specific situation.

Another consideration is that if you intend to use 128 GB of RAM now or in the future (leaving aside the also-inconclusive discussions of whether this is even a good idea), you can't use a Skylake processor such as the i7 6700 because their RAM ceiling is 64 GB.


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## jacobthestupendous (Dec 14, 2016)

rgames said:


> I wouldn't say fewer cores are better, rather faster cores are better. If you can run more cores at the same clock speed then you'll get more mileage out of them (up to a point). However that's almost never the case - in general, higher core counts go with slower clock speeds, therefore lower per-core power.
> 
> As an example, my current main DAW is a 4930k (6 cores) and it performs basically the same as the i7 920 it replaced (4 cores). (In truth, it performs slightly worse but not enough to matter). So, 50% more cores but no change in performance - with the 4-core machine my min latency with big projects was about 6 ms. With the 6-core machine, my min latency was ... <drumroll> ... about 6 ms. No difference.
> 
> ...


So would it be a gross oversimplification to say that you would say that, all things being equal, you would recommend an iMac 5K with a 4.0 GHz quad-core 6700k over a Mac Pro with a 3.5 GHz 6-core Xeon E5-1650 for DAW VI use? Is there a reason that people around here seem so over-over-the-moon about the higher core count Mac Pros? (aside from recent dissatisfaction over lack of new models)


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## khollister (Dec 14, 2016)

If your primary concern is avoiding a realtime ASIO spike while record enabled on a track with "CPU expensive" VI or effects, yes. 

However, the 6 and 8 core Xeon have a turbo freq of 3.9 GHz - the 6700k only goes to 4.2. Also bear in mind the Xeons have much larger caches. 

All of the real world feedback I've seen indicates the 6.1 MP's are stronger performers than their Geekbench numbers would indicate


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## khollister (Dec 14, 2016)

The bigger issue with the current iMac is TB bandwidth - a single TB 2 controller starts to look a bit dodgy with multiple sample SSD's, external monitor, TB audio interface and maybe a TB UAD Satellite sitting on there. The nMP has 3x the bandwidth


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## khollister (Dec 14, 2016)

jacobthestupendous said:


> Is there a reason that people around here seem so over-over-the-moon about the higher core count Mac Pros? (aside from recent dissatisfaction over lack of new models)



There was a post in another thread somewhere here by Charlie Clouser that showed PerfMon screenshots of his 12 core (I assume a stock 2.7 GHz) and a colleague's cMP 12 core (I recall Charlie saying it was an upgraded 3.33 or something) running the exact same Logic project with the same buffer sizes and such. The 12 core cMP was almost pegged on all 12 cores - Charlie's 12 core nMP was almost _half _the CPU load (also very evenly distributed). While the usual benchmarks indicate an advantage for the nMP, I have yet to see a synthetic benchmark that indicates that level of ass-whooping. If it wasn't for the price tag (even used) and that fact my senior citizen cMP is still rocking, I would jump on one now that I've decided to hang with Apple for a while longer. 

If you can avoid clogging the TB artery and need a new monitor, the i7 iMac's are a good deal, but in the real world the nMP's probably win except in some single thread, worst case scenario.


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## synthetic (Dec 16, 2016)

I know the original question was about a DAW, but are we seeing any benefit to 6700 over 6900 for slave systems? (Besides price)


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## khollister (Dec 16, 2016)

synthetic said:


> I know the original question was about a DAW, but are we seeing any benefit to 6700 over 6900 for slave systems? (Besides price)



Advantage? No. VEP is probably the best host in terms of thread distribution so it will certainly make use of more cores. Richard Ames will say CPU is not important for slaves, but not everyone (including myself) seems to have the same experience there. Cost aside, a X99 6/8/10 core box has everything going for it with VEP. You also get more SATA 3 ports and more PCIe lanes for m.2 SSD cards or whatever.


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## rgames (Dec 16, 2016)

synthetic said:


> I know the original question was about a DAW, but are we seeing any benefit to 6700 over 6900 for slave systems? (Besides price)


It's a tough question to answer because there's no meaningful data for the 6900. Here's what I measured for the 6700k:

http://vi-control.net/community/threads/i7-6700k-slave-machine-sample-streaming-benchmarks.54126/

What can the 6900k do?

Here's what I know: I did compare the 6700k (four-core) to a 4930k (six-core) using the same benchmark and they performed basically the same.

Here's what else I know: I under-clocked the 6700k and 4930k down to 3.0 GHz and the voice counts dropped by more than 50%.

So, based on my limited data, a 50% increase in number of cores produced no effect but a 25% drop in clock speed produced a reduction of 50% in streaming voices. That, to me, says clock speed matters a lot more than number of cores.

Now, if you're truly CPU limited then yeah, more cores might help. But you can see that in your CPU meter - if you're pegged then I'd say go for more cores (assuming you maintain clock speed). But I haven't been able to make that happen on a PC in ages - real-time performance has been the bottleneck since about 2005.

Here's the bottom line: with two 6700k slaves I can have pretty much every library up and ready to play with maybe one tiny ASIO click every five minutes. That's at a latency of 4 - 6 ms.

What more can you do with a 6900k? More to the point, what more would you *need* to do?

The truth is that it doesn't matter - pretty much any i7 machine is good enough these days. Yes, some are better than others, but you're not going to write an extra minute of music a day because of that difference.

rgames


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## rgames (Dec 16, 2016)

One other comment - the 6700k vs. 4930k difference was basically nil in sample streaming but the 6700k did produce about 30% more voices for Omnisphere and Samplemodeling instruments (which don't rely much on sample streaming).

rgames


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## khollister (Dec 16, 2016)

One thing to bear in mind is that the E parts (6800, 6850, 6900, 6950) have a bigger turbo increase than the 6700. For instance, the 6900 goes from 3.2 GHz to 3.7 - the 6700 only goes from 4 to 4.2. Still a higher clock but not as much as you might think looking at the advertised base clock speeds.


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## Guy Rowland (Jan 1, 2017)

Just belatedly catching up on this thread, as I'm in the early stages of contemplating a new build this year (no slaves). There's a lot of focus here on voice limits, and it's very useful - essential - information to have. But it's not my only consideration - my work of late is less about vast orchestral templates and more electronic and audio based work, and when I look at other features and considerations I get a bit wary of the Z170 platform.

I'm currently on a 4930k x79 mobo like Richard, and while it's been a good performer in many ways, I've not found it plain sailing either. One of the biggest limitations is only 2x 6gbps SATA ports on the x79 platform - my C drive is SSD but on a lowly 3gbps connection. I'm not sure if it's the only reason, but I find most chores sluggish - file copying, zip extracting, booting, launching apps. For this reason I'm looking for a mobo with a shed load of of 6gbps connections (I have 8 HDDs), plus more than one m.2 / u2 connection, at least for the boot drive, and likely for a new primary sample streaming m.2 drive, maybe the 2TB Samsung one.

It seems to me from reading around that performance of these drives is going to be massively dependent on the architecture of the mobo. Obviously currently I can't go above 6gbps, so there's no use in switching anything out. But it seems with a board with good native support and plenty of lanes, you get spectacular boot times, for example. I've just built a new rig for my son on a 6gbps SSD, and it boots like lightning compared to my rig (admittedly I have a lot more apps, but it was never as fast as my son's is even at birth). I'd also expect some decent sample loading and streaming performance from an m.2 over and above my current experience.

The Z170 seems to max out at 6x sata ports. Some boards add a couple of m.2 ports like the Asus z170 deluxe, or 3 like the Asrock Extreme 7+ - but this latter one seems to have horrendous DPC figures, counting it out. Then of course you have a 64gb RAM limit - not a dealbreaker in my case, but if I'm updating I'd prefer the flexibility to go higher if needs be. All of which puts me right back at the X99 platform, not the z170, and thus counting out otherwise impressive performers like the 6700k.

I'm currently looking at the 6850k - not cheap, but does offer a modest stock clock speed boost over my 4930, and paired with something like the asus x99 deluxe, should have crate loads of high speed storage and RAM potential. Grateful to hear any thoughts on the above though, especially any real world experience or if there's anything coming up for release soon to be worth waiting for.


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## khollister (Jan 1, 2017)

Guy,

We seem to be on the same timetable - we built our 4930 machines about the same time a coulee years ago and I just finished a 6850 box to host Cubase as part of my Apple-ectomy.

I chose the 6850 because I ran into a Christmas sale at Newegg and Amazon where it was only about $75 more than the 6800 and I wanted the extra PCIe lanes incase I started filling up the PCIe slots with M.2 NVME cards at a later date. I also wanted Thunderbolt in case I moved to a TB audio interface in the future (likely RME UFX+ or MOTU). That pretty much rules out everything but Asus and Gigabyte. While I don't think M.2 SSD's are worth the current price premium for sample playback (the random read performance is better than SATA6G, but not by the huge margins you see for the sequential reads), I wanted the option if prices come down. I also liked the fact the several Gigabyte MB's have USB-C/TB on the motherboard and didn't need an add in card like Asus.

Another consideration with the on-board M.2 slots is cooling. Current M.2 blades have no heat spreaders and the locations of most M.2 connections on MB's is not ideal for cooling. The drives will throttle back under high temp conditions, so if I go NVME SSD's in the future, I will likely be looking to PCIe cards with heat sinks for the blades.

I ended up going with the Gigabyte X99 Designare EX. It is rather expensive, but has on board Intel USB 3.1/TB 3 via the Alpine Ridge controller, PLX PCIe multiplexers to maximize available PCIe slots and no dodgy ASMedia or Marvel USB/SATA controllers. It also has Q-Flash Plus so you can update the BIOS without a CPU or RAM installed in case you get an older board without support for the Broadwell-E CPU's. The Gigabyte X99P-SLI does not have the feature and some folks have had problems getting older stock that required returning the MB to Gigabyte for flashing.

The Designare only has 1 M.2 slot, but since I'm not using it now or in the future, I didn't care. It also has 2 Intel NIC's, no crappy Realtek or Killer LAN parts. It has tons of 4 pin fan controller ports too, so my CPU and both case fans (all Noctua 140mm PWM fans) are controlled by the BIOS based on temperature.

I used a Gigabyte Windforce Radeon 460 vide card - DP, DVI and HDMI, capable of 60Hz 4K, with passive operation at low GPU load (no fans). No extra power connection required and cheap.

I have DPC latencies below 5us except for the LAN driver (peaks at about 60us with the latest Intel driver). I am sort of OC'ing it at 4.0 GHz with all the SpeedStep, EIST, C-states and Turbo stuff disabled - all 6 cores run @ 4.0 GHz all the time. No VCore adjustment was required. I'm using the Noctua D15S cooler with a second Noctua fan added to it. Idle temps are about 29-30C, CPU temps after running a Handbrake video encode for about an hour max at about 60-63C, but not on all cores all the time.

I'm using 4x16GB Corsair LPX Vengeance RAM @ 2400 Mhz. Also have an EVGA 650W Titanium SuperNOVA PS that is semi-passive. no fan noise, no coil whine, fully modular.

ASIO real-time performance in Cubase 9 @128 samples is excellent - far better than my old Mac Pro 3.33 6 core with Logic. I use a RME UCX via USB.

As far as alternatives, Intel Skylake-X (the successor to the Broadwell EP parts) will not be available until Q2-Q3, so unless you want to wait 8-9 months, there isn't anything coming down the pike except for Kabylake desktop parts (i7-6700 replacement). With only 16 PCIe lanes, using TB and M.2 drives basically leaves you with no PCIe slots available even with the integrated graphics GPU. Like you, I didn't want the limitation long term.

Keith


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## willf_music (Jan 1, 2017)

manivels said:


> Hi guys,
> 
> I need a new main PC to work with 4 other slaves via VePro. Most of my projects are huge orchestral template like trailer music.
> This is what I end up with.(Noise is not a issue as PC are all in a machine room.
> ...



If you are working with large orchestral templates than I would suggest 2 things.

1) do not use an AIO liquid cooler. Liquid cooling is a pain in the ass to maintain. I would highly suggest just getting a good sized air cooler that will fit in the case.
2) I would keep your projects on a normal SSD or mechanical drive array. Honestly, it would be a waste of an NVME drive and you could get more storage for the money or take that money and get more RAM. But that's just me.


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## Guy Rowland (Jan 1, 2017)

Thanks Keith, that's a treasure trove of info for me to get through, very much appreciated.


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## Guy Rowland (Jan 2, 2017)

Keith, after a couple of hours solid web-trawling in the light of your excellent post, I'm currently leaning towards skipping a year and having a stopgap year where I just replace my C drive with an M.2 drive and an adapter card (I discovered that my X79 deluxe has a BIOS update to support booting from nvme). You're right about 4k read speeds of these current nvme drives for sample use not being so amazing, but I suspect that there's a lot of tech that will improve on this in the coming months and years. Crucially, I think the coming X299 chipset that will support Skylake X and Kaby Lake X will be able to make good native use of this among many other improvements, and be futureproof all the way to 2020 and beyond. Since I'm far from desperate to upgrade, it makes more sense for me to hold fire for now.


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## ZeroZero (Jan 2, 2017)

I just took the plunge on a Samsung 961. Doing some research I have been told it is better to use allocation units (when formatting) of 64 kbs. You may want to check this drive out, it sure is fast, though i would not expect the music to go allegro, it does cease worries about buffering, even though it is overkill to some degree


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## khollister (Jan 2, 2017)

Guy Rowland said:


> Keith, after a couple of hours solid web-trawling in the light of your excellent post, I'm currently leaning towards skipping a year and having a stopgap year where I just replace my C drive with an M.2 drive and an adapter card (I discovered that my X79 deluxe has a BIOS update to support booting from nvme). You're right about 4k read speeds of these current nvme drives for sample use not being so amazing, but I suspect that there's a lot of tech that will improve on this in the coming months and years. Crucially, I think the coming X299 chipset that will support Skylake X and Kaby Lake X will be able to make good native use of this among many other improvements, and be futureproof all the way to 2020 and beyond. Since I'm far from desperate to upgrade, it makes more sense for me to hold fire for now.



Makes sense - I thought about waiting too, but was anxious to get the transition done with.


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## Phryq (May 14, 2017)

ZeroZero said:


> I just took the plunge on a Samsung 961. Doing some research I have been told it is better to use allocation units (when formatting) of 64 kbs. You may want to check this drive out, it sure is fast, though i would not expect the music to go allegro, it does cease worries about buffering, even though it is overkill to some degree



So you're running your Kontakt buffer at 6kbps with no problems? Are you getting increase polyphony?


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