New i7 975 CPU

[dawman]

This information is great news, as when this CPU and it's faster big brother are released the i7 945, which is plenty of juice to run a sequencer w/ a boat load of Romplers and VSTi's.
Many will dream of having this with new stepping and unlocked mulipliers, but I am just happy to see AMD releasing great products to keep Intel honest, while they turn around and drop prices on the i7 945.
Do not be fooled into the old stock and demand the new stepping in case you buy an i7 945 like I plan on doing.
550 USD is the current price, 425 by the end of May.
Now when I spend 550 I will get the same CPU and a new dual monitor Graphics card.


http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/di ... 975xe.html

[hollo321]

hey jimmy take my advise and save ur money and get the 920, in my opinion ne thing else is simply overkill. ive been using it now for about a month and am still in awe by its performance. i use probably more vsts than most ppl, usually around 40-50 vst instruments not including tons of vst effects i add as well and the cpu eats nething i throw at it for breakfast.Till now i have never surpassed 20 percent cpu meter even on extremely heavy projects i use to max the cpu out on my previous pentium4 HT 3ghz cpu. i am finally able to concentrate on creative urges rather than the cpu meter making this one of my best investments ive ever made after scope. o and all this running stock non overclocked 2.66 , so if it still isnt enough power which i dought ne one needs, ive heard these cpus easily overclock to 4ghz overpassing an extreme

[dawman]

Brotha' Man Hollo321, Shalom....
That's a great tip. thank you.
I have been asking users about this, and many have different opinions.
Most everyone I see and speak with do not use Scope, so they feel the fastest CPU will serve them fine. I even watched a dual i7 Mac use 15-20% on all 8 cores !!! It was packed w/ VSTi's and VST FX, not to mention all of the ambience IR's, etc.
I would love to get an i7 920, but I am worried about the heavy scripting that Kontakt developers will be using in future apps.
I know one thing for sure, I will never pay more than 500 USD for a CPU.
If the i7 920 will handle several instances of Kontakt 3.5, I will be a happy camper.
Most Pro DAW builders are using the 920 w/ Gigabyte UD mobo's, but few will share more secrets than that.
Do you use a streaming sampler of any kind?
I would love to hear what you see when loading tons of streaming instruments.......

BTW, I have been waffling around with storage too.
The Fusion I/O's are amazing but their cost is insane. But at NAB here in LasVegas Western Digital and many others are showing new tricks and OCZ will release a PCI-e storage device that will smoke my Raptors. I can also wait for that.
But the fact they are releasing these drives means the Fusion I/O guys must drop their prices accordingly to compete.....
This is a great year to upgrade,...the economy is bad, the competition for anyone w/ money to spend is going to get even more competitive.

ocz_z_drive_specs_revealed.jpg

Thanks For Your Insight.

[netguyjoel]

Jimmy V,

The quantity of reads & writes associated with these drives has a serious limitation..especially when you start talking about, what a musician, using high end audio apps, really needs. The price and speed of magnetic medium, even an affordable RAID array, ie. RAID 1 mirroring or RAID 5 striping...the need for redundancy, to preserve the life, of the miracle of music, as we all know, is monumental. The need for saving some space, I can see. But from your posts, of you the overall footprint of most rigs, have shrunk so much...I'm even drawing a pretty logical conclusion....there is a point where the $ does not outweigh the benefit.

U know I still luv ya' my brotha'

Joel

[hollo321]

cool to see that there making now superfast supercapasity pci-e drives, never heard of pci-e drives, i guess my raptor is becoming old technology and only 150gb sucks, but with those insane prices im deffinilty gonna hold on it for a while... about the cpu i mostly use samplers/romplers in my projects and it is usually the really big effects that push my cpu the most, i7s are really amazing with sample playback and processing. i just did a quick test for u regarding streaming instruments. loaded 25 collosus vsts(use kompakt) each loaded with pretty big sample patches and got 3-4 %cpu performance. like i said eats em for breakfast

[dawman]

That's the problem with the SSD's still. Replacements under a warranty are only refurbushed models too.
Right now they only come with a 2 year warranty and tells me it still using older MLC stuff.
This is what all of us will be seeing around the bend though.
I will use one of these when the prices come back to earth later on.
My Raptors are still plenty fast, and according to DAW builders who make streamers, they aren't even critical anymore.
Supermicro are making some excellent SAS mobos with 3 x PCI-e slots of the 8x version, so there's something brewing.
The 1TB is 4 x Vertex 250GB discs w/ buit in RAID controller.
Lot's of cool stuff at NAB in Vegas this year.
An old forum member here is a Tascam guy who hooked me up with a pass.
Lame booth babes though sompared to NAMM........
I thought they were going do a cheer or something.

gooc2009arf-04.png

[netguyjoel]

RAH RAH RAH...SISS BOOM BAH!!!

Jimmy Jimmy he's our man...if he can't do it?

Joel

[dawman]

These guys have the best DAW mobo according to most pro builders.
They have to add another PCI 32bit slot for Scope guys though.
Right now they only have 2.
I will be finshed looking at new gear and try to find some babes. They are pretty slow this year for being a Vegas convention.
I use to hang with a chap from England from Harman here years back, and those guys would flock to the strip clubs after the show and tear it up.
Now days it's so Politically correct....

This whole Green power thing is starting to be a theme eveywhere.
Vegas will always be the decandent west, and have millions of neon lights, so to come here and bore people w/ Green tech seems useless.
Besides it is so hypocritical to have all of these lights and displays at the booth to show " green " products. If you truly believe everything should be green then bring a solar battery pack to demo your products.

Next thing you know they'll tell us to flush the toilet only once at the end of the day.
When I see these politicians practice what they preach, I might consider some of their slogans and ideas. But my FAT BASTARDS need juice, just like their giant homes and jets need fuel....

[Sounddesigner]

Here's some i7 benchmarks with Cubase and Sonar using hyperthreading. The difference between the two programs is huge in this benchmark and it really shows how much the host program can make a difference. There are more benchies to come, you can read about what TAFKAT the bencher says here - http://forum.cakewalk.com/tm.asp?m=1090789&mpage=19

[dawman]

Thanks Soundesigner, Vinnie usually is always ahead of the game.
Here's a Kontakt 2.0 using VSL as a bench too.
______________________________________________________________________________

_Kontakt samples playback
This test is more geared toward Composers and heavy samples users.
There has been alot of discussion about what is best for samples playback and if more cores are better.
Samples playback is very memory intensive, memory speed and bandwidth are effected by several things.
GHZ of the processor, Front side bus of the processor, memory type (DDR2/DDR3) and of course platform (chipset and processor architecture). Little or no improvement is found with Quad core vs dual core.
A faster GHZ dual core will out do a slower quad core for samples playback. DDR3 1600 is better than DDR2 800.
Ideally when considering an overall picture of a project a fast GHz quad is best as the Quad cores do have a great effect on effects usage, overall project playback and high track counts @ high rez.
Some thoughts: the AMD is a very affordable and well performing answer for a samples(slave) box or an overclocked dual core.
The Core i7 is outstanding as a main system, or the more afforable overclocked Core 2.

The test: (not downloadable but duplicatable)
all done with XP Pro SP3, Fireface 400, 4gig ram) (core i7 was 6gig ram, vista 64)
the samples set was over 2gig)
6 Instances of Kontakt3 in rack All using K3 included Vienna instruments Default dfd settings All running live, no freeze, no bounce MIDI tracks running to every patch 1 Violin ens14 (all) Viola ens10 (all) Cello ens8 (all) Bass ens6 (all) 2 Piccolo (all) Flute (all) Oboe (all) FrenchOboe (all) EnglHorn (all) Clarinet (all) 3 TrumpEns3 (all) FrnHornEns4 (all) Trombens3 (all) Tuba (all) 4 Violin ens14 (all) Viola ens10 (all) Cello ens8 (all) Bass ens6 (all) 5 Tenor Recorder (all) Piccolo Recorder (all) Low Whistle (all) 6 Timpani Hits.

_______________________________________________________________________________

kontaktbm309.jpg

The problem with this bench is it uses Kontakt 3.0 instead of 3.5 at 64bit. And doesn't use the apps I will be using. But it does show why the i7 and AMD Phenom's are the way to go w/ 64bit Vista.

[valis]

The problem with this bench is it uses Kontakt 3.0 instead of 3.5 at 64bit. And doesn't use the apps I will be using. But it does show why the i7 and AMD Phenom's are the way to go w/ 64bit Vista.

It also uses Xp32. That doesn't make much impact on the DAW app itself, but the ecosystem that the app is sharing system resources with is becoming out of step with the i7/nehelem cpu's and that will only get worse. I don't recon that this would show as a huge percentage gap in DAW benchmarks, but Vista sp1 & Win7 are much better at scheduling & load balancing even with my last-gen harpertowns (penryn equivalent). The differences for i7 are even more so, and that gap will continue to get worse over time.

For instance on XP32 I can watch a thread get load balanced across my cores irrespective of whether the cores share L2 cache or the cores are even on the same cpu die. In Vista64 sp1 I noticed that the threads will stay locked to the same physical cpu, but don't respect shared resources on-die very well. Win7 is already more aware of what cores share L2 and I'll see the same load balancing share between 2 cores instead of all 4 on a given cpu. Now mind you this is for things that are SMP/SMT-dumb, unthreaded tasks where the OS handles the load balancing. Hence why it doesn't apply to benchmarking your DAW app specifically, but it DOES likely affect at least some of the stuff your DAW app lives alongside.

[ScofieldKid]

Just reviewing all the 64-bit app compatibility, and recalling my bad experiences while testing Vista and battling their default priority scheme... I have no path to 64-bit Vista at this point. I just don't think my application list carries over. Wouldn't hurt to run a system to test with though... Glad to see the Focusrite Saffire is on the list... (And of course Ableton.)

[valis]

64bit only brings 2 tangible benefits: support for more than 4GB installed ram (minus the 'memory hole' if your motherboard won't remap it or if some devices don't like that) and true DEP support (in 32bit windows OS's the DEP support can still be technically defeated.) Also you get the 'benefit' of signed driver requirements, which perhaps contributes somewhat so many audio companies are still lagging on their 64bit drivers.

Note that my comments above about the newer OS's having better scheduling at the kernel level and other improvements for modern cpu's & motherboards applies to both the 32bit & 64bit versions of Vista & Win7.

[Neutron]

that chart does not make sense. a quad with same bus speed and a tiny speed bump gets 4 times better results. something else must have been off

look as though the I7 built in tri channel memory is a DAW winner

[ScofieldKid]

Yeah, some of those DAW bench sites are a hot mess. Different memory types, some O/C, some not...

I do like the P6T Deluxe 920 setup I have at work though. Best running Intel setup I have had for a while. Nothing to do with audio of course... but I think if people are buying new, the new architecture is a nice improvement.

[hesnotthemessiah]

hey jimmy take my advise and save ur money and get the 920, in my opinion ne thing else is simply overkill. ive been using it now for about a month and am still in awe by its performance. i use probably more vsts than most ppl, usually around 40-50 vst instruments not including tons of vst effects i add as well and the cpu eats nething i throw at it for breakfast.Till now i have never surpassed 20 percent cpu meter even on extremely heavy projects i use to max the cpu out on my previous pentium4 HT 3ghz cpu. i am finally able to concentrate on creative urges rather than the cpu meter making this one of my best investments ive ever made after scope. o and all this running stock non overclocked 2.66 , so if it still isnt enough power which i dought ne one needs, ive heard these cpus easily overclock to 4ghz overpassing an extreme

Don't tempt me............ I have been looking at the Scan 3XS SA-i7 PowerDAW which was well reviewed in SOS magazine. Comes with an Intel i7 920 as standard or can be upgraded to a 940 or 965. Looks like my redundancy money might not last as long as I had aimed for. The only thing that really stops me from upgrading my DAW is the fact that I have loads of PCI cards (5 Powercore, 4 UAD and 2 Sonic Core Pros) split amongs two PCs (one a 3Ghz P4 and the other a dual core 2.4Ghz). I use a 13 slot Magma chasis which houses 4 UAD and 2 Powercore cards on my Dual Core PC. Perhaps I could use the chasis for 4 Powercores and 4 UADs on the Scan DAW which would then leave 2 PCI slots free on the Scan DAW for my Sonic Cores (or perhaps I should upgrade an Xite-1 ). Serious overkill!!! Could this system handle all that PCI/PCI-E activity? Maybe I should spend less time looking at ways to "improve" my setup and actually use what I have instead!

[netguyjoel]

"Perhaps I could use the chasis for 4 Powercores and 4 UADs on the Scan DAW which would then leave 2 PCI slots free on the Scan DAW for my Sonic Cores"

If I had that kind of horsepower..that would get my vote!

Cheers!

[ScofieldKid]

Flaunt it baby! Flaunt it!