XXHighEnd

Hi All,

I'm in a process building my new Audio-PC which connected to the DAC.
First come to mind is i7 or Xeon? please share which are you using and why? just a line or 2 should help.

Thanks,
A

Hi,

For me it is easy enough : the more cores the better because the faster albums are prepared and ready for Unattended Playback. Think one track per core in parallel. Thus an album with 12 tracks loads as fast as one track (the longest amongst them) with a 12 core processor.

From the above could follow that a Xeon is better because more cores available. Of course this is quite theoretical because it is also way more expensive, once more that 12 (hyperthreaded) cores from an affordable i7 (or 16 these days, I think).

For myself (my) 12 core is suffcient because far most albums don't contain more than 12 tracks.

Next please ... :)

Peter

PS: The "better" the processor the better SQ, generally because it can run at way low freqency (I manage 240MHz with Windows 10). Anything which is cheap (say laptop processor) won't do this.

Huh???

I understand why you might want extra cores to help with loading in the music-PC... to transfer across to the audio-PC. But this has nothing to do with SQ.

I think we need to be ultra consistent with the terms we're all using:

- music-PC = music server (should have no affect on SQ)
- audio-PC = PC connected to DAC (ideally runs RAM OS in minOS mode)

Peter, I know you follow this (you monitor the use of these terms more than anyone), but perhaps you haven't had your morning coffee yet?

Mani.

Mani, I sure (now) see what you mean. But it is not my bad ...

Try to find ONE occasion of me mentioning the server "Music PC". You won't find it. Now fine ONE occasion where you guys do this. You won't find that either. You too just did not.

Music Server PC. That is how I call it super consistently.

Anyone calling a PC a "Music PC" is bringing across something which plays audio.
So at this moment we don't even know what ismewor means ...
Anyway it is clear that I read Audio PC in it. Dunno now !

Thanks for your attention !
Peter (at his 4th coffee at the moment)

Something else : Maybe I didn't even pay real attention to the words, but the i7 or Xeon was noticable. So, a Xeon for a bit of harddisks never moving ?

:nea:

Not necessary, for sure. But bring in Tidal and pre-loading in the music-PC (server) and perhaps more cores now make more sense?

I'm currently using an i3 in my music-PC and may switch to an i5 or i7 if I find I need more speed with pre-loading. But I haven't started playing with Tidal or pre-loading yet - not even sure how to do it...

Mani.

What is pre-loading?  Is it something to come in the next XXHE?

Haha... maybe it's something I've just dreamed up.

I remember reading through the Tidal tutorial a while back and coming across the idea of downloading the music from Tidal in the music server and getting it ready for the audio PC. I'm calling this 'pre-loading'.

And I'm sure Peter is doing things this way right now... with Tidal at least. Is this correct Peter?

Mani.

Mani, I named it Preparing. Pre-loading would be a nice name as well.


No. If you're "Preparing" 10 albums at the same time (which is possible) then not any processor core is doing anything anyway. Playing audio consumes 10,000 times more cpu cycles (just saying something, but to get the idea) and even that doesn't use much cycles (in XXHighEnd).

Peter

Hello,

Sorry, i now got the terms corrected. I edited back to Audio-PC -> USB -> DAC hope this clear out.

Thanks,
ismewor

Hi ismewor,

Thanks for the confirmation (and a name :)).

Kind regards,
Peter

Hi Peter,

Sorry, This is Adrian. Thx

Does XXHE design run better on Xeon? or Doesn't matter.

Hi Adrian,

My thanks was serious and not synically imposed. Anyway, now it is even better. :)


As far as I can tell it does not matter (apart from what I already mentioned). But maybe consider this :

With Xeon you have the option for ECC memory, and this may influence SQ. Btw, I would explicitly *not* use that (thinking that ECC needs to do more for the checking stuff).

What this leads to is a common MoBo socket for both. This is how I would use LGA2011(-3). Now you choose and also can change later.

Regards,
Peter