Another benchmark by Max

[madmaxmiller]

Hi all,

as the frequent forum users know, I'm not getting tired of preaching that CPU and RAM have not that big influence on realtime performance if the computer is not older than 15 years. It's totally ridiculous to blame xruns on the CPU when it is an i5 or so.

Last week my studio computer blew, it was just dead, time for a new one. Now as it happens, the motherboard for the new one was DOA...

Good opportunity to test my above theory...
I grabbed an old HP workstation and a couple of SSD drives and put Ubuntu Studio 20.4 LTS on it. In the screenshot you are looking at a 15 track + 2 utility buses + 1 VCA session in 32C, it has 4 character plugins (these are CPU consuming), a phaser, some parametric EQs and gates and a sidechain compressor and two reverbs.. nothing exciting but also nothing too little.

So this is a

Core2 Quad 2.8GHz from 2007 or 2008 with
8GB of DDR2(!) RAM and
2 SATA SSDs and
a 1 GB fanless PCIe graphics card


running this session smoothly on a 3840x2160 UHD screen with well under 50% DSP load. 44.1kHz/1024 buffer x2. Not a single glitch, editing is zippy, mixing via mouse is smooth. Scrolling vertically and horizontally in the mixer view has no lag. Obviously is that configuration capable of delivering the audio packets in realtime and run a smooth graphics at the same time.

Well, I have the replacement for the DOA motherboard now, the new studio machine will be the cheapest 6 core Ryzen with 32GB RAM - good to have reserves for bigger sessions / virtual instruments despite still being rather humble, but I really enjoyed that little demo.

Merry Christmas all and maybe your last minute wish for Santa is some better acoustic treatment rather than a faster CPU 
MMM

P.S.: the "smaller" the CPU, the quieter the rig... this one was nearly noiseless thanks to big slow fans and low TDP
   

[Dingo]

Thanks Max have a good Xmas... I am hoping for some acoustic treatment in the stocking..

[johne53]

I wonder if it'd be worth having a "standard" session that users could download and try on their own machine? i.e. something that either used no plugins or only the standard Harrison ones?

It sounds like a good idea but I guess it could end up causing a lot of arguments!!

[dsteinschneider]

I wonder if it'd be worth having a "standard" session that users could download and try on their own machine? i.e. something that either used no plugins or only the standard Harrison ones?

It sounds like a good idea but I guess it could end up causing a lot of arguments!!

The important thing would be that the music is what I call good 

[johne53]

Haha - maybe it needs to be one of your sessions then ! 

[whiskeynipple0088]

Not a single glitch, editing is zippy, mixing via mouse is smooth. Scrolling vertically and horizontally in the mixer view has no lag. Obviously is that configuration capable of delivering the audio packets in realtime and run a smooth graphics at the same time.

my money is..... its Linux....... 
Running a 40+ channel session on my hackintosh (same graphics card in each case):
with a i7 3770=graphic lag so bad it was causing me to make errors
with a i9 10850=no graphics lag, very smooth and responsive

for me the graphics lag was the killer, the cpu wasnt maxed out either. I tried a more powerful graphics card prior to upgrade, that didnt make any difference.

thats been my experience, Good info MMM, thanks for sharing.

[Jostein]

Cool stuff!

I do have two "old" machines. The stationary has an intel i7-4790K (introduced 2014) processor with 32 GB RAM and my laptop has an i7-4810MQ (also 2014 I believe) with 16 GB RAM. I use the internal GPU on both of them. I use standard Kubuntu (Ubuntu with the KDE environment) 20.04 and have optimized everything for audio. Both machines have been used on many projects and the laptop has been on the road for years.

I actually only have one problem with these machines, which is that some of my ADA plugins do not work optimally (GUI) with the provided GPUs/OpenGL. I also have two spare computers with i7-4790K CPUs, but will have new machines in 2022, not because they are not good enough, but because their age probably makes things riskier.

[madmaxmiller]

Not a single glitch, editing is zippy, mixing via mouse is smooth. Scrolling vertically and horizontally in the mixer view has no lag. Obviously is that configuration capable of delivering the audio packets in realtime and run a smooth graphics at the same time.

my money is..... its Linux....... 
Running a 40+ channel session on my hackintosh (same graphics card in each case):
with a i7 3770=graphic lag so bad it was causing me to make errors
with a i9 10850=no graphics lag, very smooth and responsive

for me the graphics lag was the killer, the cpu wasnt maxed out either. I tried a more powerful graphics card prior to upgrade, that didnt make any difference.

thats been my experience, Good info MMM, thanks for sharing.

Linux sure has a big impact here, I couldn't imagine running a Windows 10 on it, but a Hackintosh Catalina should work - I have a patched Macbook 13"/late 2009 running on Catalina for file transfers from/to Mac-formatted external clients' drives, it does surprisingly well. Haven't tried Mixbus on it, maybe that'd be another afternoon of fun
Your Hackintoshs surely have different system boards and different memory connection as the CPUs are different generations, the I/O between CPU-RAM-PCIe-Graphics card could make all the difference. Not to mention being Hackintoshs...

Cheers,
MMM

[madmaxmiller]

I wonder if it'd be worth having a "standard" session that users could download and try on their own machine? i.e. something that either used no plugins or only the standard Harrison ones?

It sounds like a good idea but I guess it could end up causing a lot of arguments!!

One of my goto pieces is from the Mike Senior page - https://mtkdata.cambridgemusictechnology...t_Full.zip
Being a beginner's multitrack it sounds pleasing "raw" but still leaves enough space to do things.
The other one which I use here is similarly good: https://bobbyowsinski.blogspot.com/2010/...thers.html (don't ask for the download source, I forgot)
Both may be suitable to set up an example session but only one is 100% legal
Cheers,
MMM

[johne53]

It's interesting where he mentions finding a copy of the Doobie Brothers song, Long Train Runnin' which was all done in just 15 tracks. It reminded me of a session someone once sent me of the single All Right Now by a British band called Free. I was amazed to realise it was only 8 tracks!! I'll bet most of the Beatles stuff was too.