Has anyone switched between a quad and dual in their stable scope machine and noticed any difference in stability?
reason is i would like to get a quad, the new 45nm Q9450 will have 12mb cache.
which is good for extra vst(i)s which i will use along with scope/live
if the quads dont work so well then my choice will be an E8500, it only has 6mb cache but it is faster per core. the board im getting does not have much in the way of overclocking as far as i know (supermicro C2SBE) but i doubt i would in this case anyways.
dual or quad. is there a winner?
Hi,
Quad core pro:
better stability at very low latency as there will probably a core available for interrupt servicing even with video and harddisk load.
Quad core con:
Load balancing might not take full potential of the core available., even with a MP ready app. The reason lie in the fact that, when you load a vsti, your host doesn't know if it is a "heavy" or a light" one. It alocate the vsti on a core arbitrarilly. My understanding is that an audio thread is allocated to a core. This thread represent all vsti and vstfx used along the buffer propagation (vstfx in the synth output ...). If your project use some heavy load thread, there is a chance that 2 of these share a core and you max one core while others have room available.
Power coonsumption is higher
by the way, the 8500 can overclock one of its core if it run at full load and not the other core. Should be better for us, but too soon to know if there is side effect.
cheers
Michel
Quad core pro:
better stability at very low latency as there will probably a core available for interrupt servicing even with video and harddisk load.
Quad core con:
Load balancing might not take full potential of the core available., even with a MP ready app. The reason lie in the fact that, when you load a vsti, your host doesn't know if it is a "heavy" or a light" one. It alocate the vsti on a core arbitrarilly. My understanding is that an audio thread is allocated to a core. This thread represent all vsti and vstfx used along the buffer propagation (vstfx in the synth output ...). If your project use some heavy load thread, there is a chance that 2 of these share a core and you max one core while others have room available.
Power coonsumption is higher
by the way, the 8500 can overclock one of its core if it run at full load and not the other core. Should be better for us, but too soon to know if there is side effect.
cheers
Michel
i have a gigabyte iram thingy it has 4 GB on it which i use for my windows swap file. ill take it out and put it in my scope machine. thats why i wanted 4+ pci slotsscope4live wrote:
I wish there was an optimisation where we could keep the O.S. separate by putting it in RAM only.
i have it on my general purpose machine now and it works like this.
its a card that fits in a PCI slot, it has 4gb of ddr ram on it, a battery and a SATA plug. it counts as a "drive"n so thats the one i put my swap file on. the speed is measured at the speed of the SATA bus and seek time = 0.00001something
It is kind of like cheating the 3.x gb RAM limit of windows XP because the first 4gb of swapping is much faster then a hard drive.
I have used it long enough now to see that its reliability has been great. any im always first one on a map in a game
and if it did fail windows will just fall back to the second swap file location. drive D (raptor 150
) however i dont know how good the battery is because the computer is hardly ever turned off.-
Nestor
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AFAIK, there are not stability problems for duo or quad, they work very well. I own a duo and it works perfect!
I would forget the supposed stability problem because it doesn’t exist. I would rather concentrate in getting to know exactly what you want to do with it, and then find out if the apps you want to use, will actually use the quad.
In the other hand, if I was you, I would take for sure a quad, because I would get ready for next generation software that “will” be implemented for quad, and six, and all the rest that will come sooner or later to the market.
There are already some apps that are build without limits in terms of cores, they accept as many cores as you can have. If this already done, that means that more than being a difficulty for software developers to build, it is an economic, marketing convenience, that’s all. So, we will find rather sooner than later, quite a few of the most important DAW apps coming optimized to take advantage and use the full power of quad, six, etc., cores in the near future.
Conclusion from my point of view: get a quad if you can afford it, and don’t worry right now for not being able to use its full potential, you will in a short time anyway.
I would forget the supposed stability problem because it doesn’t exist. I would rather concentrate in getting to know exactly what you want to do with it, and then find out if the apps you want to use, will actually use the quad.
In the other hand, if I was you, I would take for sure a quad, because I would get ready for next generation software that “will” be implemented for quad, and six, and all the rest that will come sooner or later to the market.
There are already some apps that are build without limits in terms of cores, they accept as many cores as you can have. If this already done, that means that more than being a difficulty for software developers to build, it is an economic, marketing convenience, that’s all. So, we will find rather sooner than later, quite a few of the most important DAW apps coming optimized to take advantage and use the full power of quad, six, etc., cores in the near future.
Conclusion from my point of view: get a quad if you can afford it, and don’t worry right now for not being able to use its full potential, you will in a short time anyway.
*MUSIC* The most Powerful Language in the world! *INDEED*
thank you nestor, you put in my head with words what i was trying to think. so ill stick my xeon quad (3210@2.98Ghz currently running a pulsar2 ) in the board and wait till the 9450 comes out.
i am allready a "quad convert" i was using dual cpu even since 333 mhz dual pentium 2 xeons. i could run sooo many plugins on acid 3 with that even though it was the work file server. I have Q6600, Xeon 3210, E6600, a p4 HT (movies) and a p3(!) my old scope motherboard CUSL2 used as a CNC mill controller with mach3
ooh the days of radium..i miss them
i am allready a "quad convert" i was using dual cpu even since 333 mhz dual pentium 2 xeons. i could run sooo many plugins on acid 3 with that
even though it was the work file server. I have Q6600, Xeon 3210, E6600, a p4 HT (movies) and a p3(!) my old scope motherboard CUSL2 used as a CNC mill controller with mach3ooh the days of radium..i miss them
My only modifications to Neutron's input would be to say if you're given to upgrading frequently get the highest clocked dual core you can easily cool right now (3ghz) and then upgrade to a 3ghz quad .45 based cpu when they're cheap and plentiful (this summer or later). If you're not given to upgrading frequently then by all means stick with Neutron's easier answer...
Sitting here on a dual dual Xeon that's a few years old, and behind me is the start of an 8-core supermicro X7DWA-N based 8 core system. However I do a lot more than just audio (and lately I'm wanting to do MORE audio less other!) And for what it's worth my Scope machines are still in a bx-based p3 machine! Though I'll be moving them into this older Xeon box when I move onto the new build.
Sitting here on a dual dual Xeon that's a few years old, and behind me is the start of an 8-core supermicro X7DWA-N based 8 core system. However I do a lot more than just audio (and lately I'm wanting to do MORE audio less other!) And for what it's worth my Scope machines are still in a bx-based p3 machine! Though I'll be moving them into this older Xeon box when I move onto the new build.
dual xeons just keep going and going. i am a "render wrangler" my job is to keep a whole bunch of dell dual quads working..
since they started using those tiny laptop size drives they have actually become more reliable..i was skeptical about that but ever since almost every single 1850 hard drive failed. new 1950s have 2 drives and i ghost each macjhine to its self.
since they started using those tiny laptop size drives they have actually become more reliable..i was skeptical about that but ever since almost every single 1850 hard drive failed. new 1950s have 2 drives and i ghost each macjhine to its self.
Hi,
Nice, but check out apps like reason, BFD, Addictive drums, .... and let me know how they distribute their load on multicore! Nope! they are running on One core, and if you have several of this kind on your system, you might have on core more loaded then others.
About stability, let try a 48Khz 64 samples setting. Currently on my system only Cubase is able to cope. Reaper, bidule are glitching, Energy XT is not multicore and so on!
cheers
Michel
Nice, but check out apps like reason, BFD, Addictive drums, .... and let me know how they distribute their load on multicore! Nope! they are running on One core, and if you have several of this kind on your system, you might have on core more loaded then others.
About stability, let try a 48Khz 64 samples setting. Currently on my system only Cubase is able to cope. Reaper, bidule are glitching, Energy XT is not multicore and so on!
cheers
Michel