Mobo main clock replacement...

[Nick]

Peter hi,

For fun : now change the CPU speed and see what happens. Could be a warm surprise ...

You were right. I've been using a clock ratio of 12, the comments on sound above are based on this. I doubled the ratio to 24 today and the result was a more solid and expansive sound with richer tone. There is a slight loss of dynamic but still miles and miles ahead of where things were without the clock. Not a touch of hash at the faster speed which is what I would have got before at higher ratios. A very nice sound indeed.

Another interesting point. I use 10hz to 20khz sweeps to setup my subs by ear in room. Today when setting up the subs what before I had assumed were a series of very nasty room nodes though out the sweep were just gone. It's now more or less a smooth continuous sweep,  massively different to what was happening before. This I guess ties in with the notes above about the evenness of the sound presentation with equal emphasis across all aspects of the sound.

Kind regards,

Nick.

[Nick]

A further sound quality update.

When the second high quality clock was fitted to my PC motherboard, I could not find my spare SMB 50 ohm coax connectors so I soldered the coax to the lugs on the back of the clock pcb's SMB plug in order to get going.

Today a proper SMB 50ohm connector was installed to the coax to connect to the clock. Sound quality took another BIG, BIG step forwards. I expected things might improve but this is much more than expected. Every thing describe in posts above about sound quality improved again !! Could not be more pleased.

This is the upgrade that just keeps giving 

I'm happy to provide details of the upgrade to those who would like them, it's just a complete "no brainier" form a sound quality point of view.

Regards,

Nick.

Ps higher spec crystals arrived yesterday, wonder what they might do   

[Nick]

Ps higher spec crystals arrived yesterday, wonder what they might do   

So this has been interesting and again points at how critical this mobo clock is. With the replacement crystal, sound is still massively better than without the upgraded clock. However the sound is changed. Right now bass is super taught and tuneful. Highs are clear and sparkle, there is richer tone but voices have an ever so slight halo making them not quite so madly detailed as before. The crystal has been in for 24hours and voices are improving quickly. It takes about a week for these crystals to run in and for jitter / phase noise to settle down so we will see. The interesting thing is that you can just hear the changes and that they are similar to problem elements of sound in the past.

I was refreshing on some research reading last night and the next mobo clock mod is well and truly on, if the idea is right (linked to the audio roulette thread) the next change might also be a big one.

Will post back.

Regards,

Nick.

[AlainGr]

Hi Nick,

(OT comment)
The halo surrounding voices describes exactly what I heard when I massively changed my standard AC cables in my audio chain (preamp, power amp, dac, even the PC) for "audiophile" ones... It took at least a few months for this behavior to disappear...
(end of OT)

[toddn]

So thanks to Nick, and the convenience of having a spare Dexa in hand, I put the Dexa in place of the standard motherboard clock yesterday.
This is after having the Blaxius and B75 mod in for about a week.

My listening yesterday and today confirm Nick's observations. To me it is like Blaxius and B75 Plus. Everything in perfect balance, detail in spades but not artificial, broader & deeper soundstage. Where the clock mod really made a difference, I would call "drive", more power and body to each instrument but especially percussion. Just more like how you feel more air movement from live instruments. You feel the music more in your body. And even more texture is fleshed out than the Blaxius mod alone.

I am definitely impressed and nicely surprised. To me I often gauge changes to my system in terms of would ever want or revert to the premodified mode. And both the Blaxius B75 mod and the motherboard mod fall in the category of keepers. I can't imagine going back!

I'm sure most of you are like me, you have multiple music "standards" that you know extremely well, and you use those to assess a change. I've got quite a few go to's but they usually include. Rebecca Pidgon "Raven"', Cowboy Junkies "Trinity Revisited", Natalie Merchant  "Leave Your Sleep", some Norah Jones, Lyle Lovett, Ben Harper, Black Crows, and various classical recordings. There wasn't a single one where I was thinking something is not quite right, they all were notably improved.

Todd

[Nick]

Todd hi,

I'm really pleased the mobo clock change has gone in well. And on a different mob type which is great. Nice to chat ealier it sounds as though your going to be catching up one some more live sounding favorite tunes 

Will post if tonight's experiments here work.

King regards,

Nick.

[Nick]

Hi,

Will post if tonight's experiments here work.

The next clock was fitted to the Mobo today. To recap my PC now has the first upgraded master clock (for CPU memory etc etc) the second targeted clock to be fitted today that has just gone in is the PCIe signalling clock that runs timing as data moved from the south bridge to the PCIe USB card over the PCIe bus. The PCIe clock fitted today is actually one of my cheap clock modules as a lash up.

When I first listened to the PC with the second clock fitted it was immediately obvious that some aspects of the sound were now "super real" but that in the mids and highs all was not well, a bit of hash.

So going on the theory of relative clock speeds that is in part driving this whole process of upgrades to the PC, the CPU clock and the PCIe were tuned to the same speed (they were a long way out). The result was quite honestly a revelation..... 

followed by 

I will listen more before a more considered post on sound quality. For now I would describe the sound as EXTREME REALISUM : energy, detail, presence, tone etc etc, IMHO this is how to sort the PC as a music server. And this is with a quite low quality clock driving the PCIe sub-system, god knows what will happen when a dexa goes in.

More to come on sound soon

Nick.

ps Todd hi, I think you will need to get your master clock running at 25mhz. Matching this CPU clock to the PCIe clock is very important to get the music singing.
 

[manisandher]

Hey Nick, really exciting stuff. I'm looking forward to meeting up with you in a week's time at Paul's place. Should be fun!

Cheers, Mani.

[manisandher]

Hey Nick, a quick question: How many of your 'original tweaks' do you still have in place? I'm referring to these (I've stated what I've done in red):

1) Eliminate ALL fans (CPU fan case fans etc) Done - using water cooling
2) Take power off ALL drives but one (OS XX and Music on the single HDD) Done
3) Power the one HDD from a linear power supply
4) Remove power connections from DVD and Floppy Drives etc Done
5) Turn off hyper threading Prefer sound with hyperthreading ON
6) Over Clock the CPU
7) Disable CPU “Clock Spreading” Done
8.) Turn off Intel Virtualisation Done
9) Use PCIe USB 3 (NEC chipset) Done
10) XX processor scheme 3, SFS around 350mb Using latest 3-5 scheme, with SFS=4 and clock res = 1ms
11) Hygiene factor tweeks (Old hat stuff but for good measure)
a. Disable Data Execution support (in Bios) Done
b. Disable all Devices not needed for music (extra SATA controllers, USB ports etc etc in Device Manager) Done
c. Disable all devices not used for Music in Bios (Mobo USB, Sound card, COM ports etc) Done

I'm interested because I'm going to be playing around with my 'Le Monster' PC over the holidays and just wanted to get a steer on what others are doing.

I'm tempted to go for a single, 'small' SSD with nothing but virgin Win8  and XX installed, and use remote desktop for control (I use this already and really love it). All music would be stored on a NAS. I'm currently very close to this config but use a single 2TB HDD, with Win8 and XX on a separate partition and all the music on the rest. But all of my music doesn't fit onto the 2TB HDD. The NAS has 10TB of storage, with about 4TB or so currently used. Should be fine for quite a while.

Why SSD? Just because it would be so much faster. But I'll only do this is there is absolutely no deterioration in SQ. Anyone checked with a NOS1a lately?

Mani.

[Nick]

Mani hi,

Still have many of the list applied here. I've put notes in below.

1) Eliminate ALL fans (CPU fan case fans etc) Done - using water cooling Still applied
2) Take power off ALL drives but one (OS XX and Music on the single HDD) Done. Still applied
3) Power the one HDD from a linear power supply  Not done this for a while
4) Remove power connections from DVD and Floppy Drives etc Done  Still applied
5) Turn off hyper threading Prefer sound with hyperthreading ON  Agree with you, I also prefer ON
6) Over Clock the CPU  Now use Peters XXPC bios setting and under clock
7) Disable CPU “Clock Spreading” Done Still applied
8.) Turn off Intel Virtualisation Done Still applied
9) Use PCIe USB 3 (NEC chipset) Done Still applied
10) XX processor scheme 3, SFS around 350mb Using latest 3-5 scheme, with SFS=4 and clock res = 1ms  Same but SFS at 3.2 or 3.6
11) Hygiene factor tweeks (Old hat stuff but for good measure)
a. Disable Data Execution support (in Bios) Done  Still applied
b. Disable all Devices not needed for music (extra SATA controllers, USB ports etc etc in Device Manager) Done  These days I stop devices in bios and tend to leave software config to Peter with XX, except for unused USB devices in device manager, these are always disabled
c. Disable all devices not used for Music in Bios (Mobo USB, Sound card, COM ports etc) Done

  Still applied

Generally I'm still using a single drive, I can still hear USB connected drives in the system. I find Peters signature XX settings play best give or take some small variations. Same for Peters XXPC bios settings all seem to work together very nicely. For me the software and bios settings are still important in generating the magic, default bios and no OS optimisations in XX sound better since the NOS1a but the optimised settings work best here for SQ.

I bought an SSD a few years ago and could not get the OS to boot properly from it and actually wasn't a fan of the sound so went back to a spinning disk.

The PC mods are interesting they change the sensitivity to bios settings and clock speeds. I think with time I'll try to work through some bios and XX settings but I generally have kept coming back to Peters give or take a bit.

Really looking forwards meeting up at Paul's next weeks to catch up.

Kind regards,

Nick.

[vrao]

So,
 Do the upgraded clocks have their own power supply?
Thanks,
VJ

[Nick]

So,
 Do the upgraded clocks have their own power supply?
Thanks,
VJ

VJ hi,

Yes the clocks being used here have their own psu. IMO this a one of a small number of factors that play into this area. Think the power environment of the standard PC clock feeds back and strongly influences the clock quality that a standard crystal set up can achive. It's proberbly not the only effect of a poor ATx supply or other sources of power rail noise in the PC but understanding now how closely linked clock quality and speed are to music quality I would bet money that cr*p in power rails is feeding in to the PC's timing.

So yes separate supplies on the clocks are being used.

Best regards,

Nick.

[Nick]

An update on the PCIe clock.

The fireworks in my earlier post when the PCIe clock was fitted were just a small amount premature. .... BUT....

The lash test clock shows that the clock impacts music quality which is what it's intended to do. Overall some of the life and fun in the music took a small step backwards, although details were coming through and there was even less hash about in the sound. It's similar to using these "test" clocks in other locations, there is a well worn solution to shape up the sound however  yet another good quality clock and psu were ordered before Christmas. I'm confident that this will push things along a large amount when it arrives.

The real reason for this post is that having the PCIe test clock behave in this way has posed the question why ? This lead to some testing and further experimentation, which in turn lead to a work around which recovered sound quality and that appears to further support the theory of clock speed and quality linkage to music quality. The work around has also started to link into the picture the clock quality used to way transferred data into the CPU from the hard drive.

I have my fingers crossed that the new clock and psu arrive before I see Paul and Mani early this week. If not sound will not be quite as good as it has been but there are some very interesting demonstrations possible swapping master and PCIe clocks with one another and listening to the impact on sound.

Regards,

Nick.

[Nick]

The fireworks in my earlier post when the PCIe clock was fitted were just a small amount premature. ....

So a further update and to say its good news is somewhat of an understatement 

The high quality clock was put into by PC to replace the lashup clock that I reported on above. The result are spellbinding and the [fireworks]


 


are now official with bells and whistles on haha.

The new clock has only a couple of hours on it so it will significantly improve as it runs in but this is a no brainer of the first degree.

I will post more considered notes again when the clock has run in and I have had chance to properly setup the system [there is tuning to do that has not even been applied yet]. I’ve been researching what might be going wrong in the PC for a long time now and with all of the experiments over the last months can now target areas of the architecture that need to be "fixed", apply the fix and predict the results before hand with reasonable accuracy. In addition this is meaning that time is not getting wasted on stuff with limited payback potential. Parts for the next round of developments are on order but coming from China so frustratingly slow.

I just cannot believe how utterly broken a PC is for high quality music replay until it is "fixed". There is so much more to come I’m sure of more gains just need those dammed parts !

Mani and Paul are over this weekend so it will be interesting to see what they make of the sound..

Very very very  .... and more to come.

Nick.

[manisandher]

I just cannot believe how utterly broken a PC is for high quality music replay until it is "fixed".

Well, just playing around with PCIe/PCI USB cards over the weekend (and USB cables over the holidays), it's obvious to me that there's still so much to be done. And you're at the vanguard of it all!

Mani and Paul are over this weekend so it will be interesting to see what they make of the sound..

Yep, really looking forward to it.

Cheers, Mani.