Re: i7 with GIGABYTE GA-EX58-DS4 (LGA 1366 Intel X58).

Postby rreuscher » Mon Feb 09, 2009 8:02 am

Hi,
I build last weekend my new DAW on a Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5 with a intel i7 920. I
use UAD-2 QUAD and UAD-1 card. Furthermore i run a RME fireface 800 with all in
put/output channels used (via adat). I run Cubase 4 on XP without any problems.
Compared to my previous ( P4 system ) this is realy great performance.
The cards perform very good.
Another positive thing about the Gigabyte board is that it uses Texas Instrument
s chip for firewire, so there are no problems in that area.
The only issue i had was that the internal audio card has an memory access viola
tion with the fireface drivers. Well i don't use the internal audio anyway, so d
isabling it in the bios solved that issue.
Furthermore, this board is great for overclocking. You can overclock the i7 920
without any problems to 3.6 GHz, so there is no need to buy the more expensive 9
40 or 9... !!!
Also Steinberg advice is the disable the hyperthreading, because the overhead of
"synchronizing the 8 cores" will take to much time, and could have a negative e
ffect on latency.
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Performance with Hyperthreading on is better. I tried both and achieved more plu
gs at lower latency with it on. Also, make sure the bios is set to standard and
not turbo or extreme. Not sure why, but standard seems to work best.

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KVR: Ingo Leif Software releases GPU Impulse Reverb v0.26
e bionicfx:
GPUs rule at this type of math.
ust installed it in my DAW. With my nVidia 8500 (fanless and noiseless ) I got a
round 8% GPU usage per instancewith no CPU load!amazing given this whole CUDA th
ing is in its infancy still
Wow, so you could run like 12 instances on one cheap nVidia 8500. I would LOVE t
o know how much instances would be able to run on a 8800 GTX :-)
I have a 9800 GTX. Might have to give this a gO

Lives for gear

Join Date: May 2003
Posts: 747
i just got a spam email with a 9800 GT for a price of $109. My faith is in a mat
ure Nebula with CUDA, we won't need UAD cards anymore.
It they could only make all VST plugins to run on a GPU, that would be SWEET!!
The 8% was only for on of the impulse responses I tried. Some IRs used only abou
t 4-5% of the GPU! Good news indeed
As with most IR reverbs, it was transparent and sounded like the IR I put in. I
actually liked the simple GUI for the first time, maybe because we have had lots
of pretty GUIs during the past few years.
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I never really thought about it from an anti-piracy standpoint
But it also costs more for the manufacturer to make .... And you could say thats
why DSP cards like the UAD ones cost more... but look at Waves studio classics.
.. the cost nearly as much for Native plug ins....
---->
You can buy Waves bundles at 50% less with december discounts
gives you basically each plugin for 130 USD if you look for UAD alternatives
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(HA UN DUAL XEnon)
i just got a UAD 2 Quad and i have to tell you. not only the plug ins are in a w
hole diffrent level i can run a whole mix and master at 96K on the card alone!!
plus those are the most stable plug ins i'v ever used.
never used duende but NEVER GET POWERCORE VIRUS PLUG!! (crushes all the time)
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UNIVERSAL AUDIO UAD-2 QUAD
hardware DSP plug-ins
UAD-2 QUAD è l'ultimissimo upgrade per gli utenti DAW che da la possibilità di utili
zzare il rivoluzionario hardware DSP in combinazione con i plug ins proprietari
ad un prezzo alla portata di tut...
Disponibile
1466,00
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SHARC processors are optimized for DSP (Digital Signal Processing) which allow v
ery low level functions needed to increase the effeciency of processing audio.
Thus, even though one might have plenty of cycles available on your CPU (speed)
that are faster than a SHARC DSP, audio will be processed faster on a SHARC
having the processing intensive audio routines off loaded onto a UAD2, frees up
your CPU to process other stuff.
I am working on a project with over 100 plugins (70 of the UAD stuff) and 5 inst
ances of Amplitube, 5 instances of KONTAKT, Superior Drummer 2, UVI workstation,
10 instances of a convolution reverb (for amp cab IRs) and 2 instances of Music
row's Vintage Piano and my i7 860, running Sonar 8.5.1 in Vista x64 runs at abou
t 20% CPU. Plenty of overhead to even MASTER in real time.
This stuff is amazing. But I still can't make good music with all this stuff, bu
t I am having fun trying.
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As far as the UAD-2 goes, I have one and it is the better solution if you can af
ford one. Better driver compatibilty with REAPER, more power and a more advanced
feature set as well.
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maggio 2009
I picked up one of the UAD-1e cards that are $99 now.. and I must say, using it
on a quad core in vista.. had no problems whatsoever, with REAPER's default sett
ings.. used a bunch of plugs, loaded the card up to 90%, even used with reafir's
creating more latency to be compensated.. everything really went smoothly (thou
gh not quite as smooth as the UAD-2).. strange!

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uad.2-SOLO: 399$ (MAGGIO 2009)and it comes with the 5 basic free plugs
--
UAD-2 Nevana (32 Channel): this is nothing more that the UAD-2 solo with the bas
ic 5 effects, to include the Neve 88-RS. I mostly use the 1176SE and ProVerb or
whatever the basic reverb is called. So I could have saved myself $200 if I coul
d have gotten my basic questions answered. Oh well, live and learn.
I do have to say... folks, if you want true pro-level mix-down in Reaper or most
any other DAW, you need to get a UAD. I am just learning it, but apply the 1176
SE to nearly everything... that alone creates a fine-tuned and sonic mix-down. O
h! I am currently doing hard rock. So those drum set signals, electric flying gu
itars and fat bass tracks... cleaned up in a breeze!
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"Well, no more. My little uad-2 solo has so far rendered 100% perfectly. It's ju
st bliss"
When I had "gap" issues in my renders it was always related to either IRQ sharin
g (video card, USB Host controller) or when I had a certain USB audio device con
nected, like my Line 6 UX2 and I was not actually using it (instead using my Del
ta 66 as my main audio device). Once I made sure my UAD-1 PCI cards were not IRQ
sharing with other devices and my Toneport was not connected if not actively us
ed, then I had clean pristine renders everytime.
One nice advantage to using the PCIe cards, as opposed to the PCI, is you do not
have to worry about pesky IRQ sharing issues anymore:They still use IRQ steerin
g on the PCIe bus, but just not in the same way as PCI, so that the IRQ sharing
is not an issue anymore.
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2008:
from what I understand, the UAD-2 driver has been built from the ground up based
on a new DSP architecture (SHARC DSP) with multiprocessing compatibility as par
t of it. If I was going to be getting my first UAD it would be a UAD-2 and not a
UAD-1.
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I could never have dreamed about getting all my previous (4) UAD-1 cards fully l
oaded to play crackle free @ 128 before. On a good day I could get maybe a 60% D
SP load on my four cards @ 128 and remain crackle free using Synchronous FX & UA
D-1 Synchronous modes. Now with my UAD-2 Quad that dream has become reality as I
have been able to not only use AFX mode @ 128, but get up to 86% DSP load (equi
vilant DSP to about 9-10 UAD-1 cards) with crackle free playback.
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GEN2007:
Here is a reply from Aleksey at Voxengo re: the potential of CUDA.
http://www.voxengo.com/forum/ar/1522/
........................................
From what I can tell, it is a bit too 'beta' still. Beside that, it was born wit
h an unfortunate limitation for precision - only 32-bit floating points are supp
orted which means no high-quality convolution can be expected for audio uses. On
the other hand, convolution calculation performance can be fantastic with CUDA.
I will be ordering Nvidia 8800 GTS card soon, and will be checking things myself
. I hope that memory transfers from CPU to GPU and back is not a problem anymore
, and won't be a limiting factor.
..............................................
CUDA can do convolution calculations - even with a pretty long reverb impulses,
but they won't be very precise and may be a bit noisy (free SIR impulse reverb i
s an example of such performance).
.................................................. .....
Fourier transform (a very important step of efficient convolution) is best perfo
rmed at high precision, because it has a lot of 'in-place' calculations: multipl
ications and summing.
64-bit is coming, indeed, as I've read, but it should be here before it can be p
lanned. When it is available we can have like 50 CPUs performance on a single gf
x card, without quality compromise.
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Does Windows XP have a problem with multiple Graphic cards in one machine?
Nope Amberience, many hardcore gamers are running two or even four high-end grap
hics cards in their rig using what is called SLI mode, or Crossfire if you use A
TI cards.
Nope Amberience, many hardcore gamers are running two or even four high-end grap
hics cards in their rig using what is called SLI mode, or Crossfire if you use A
TI cards.
For a comparison between something like a UAD and a modern graphics card, a quic
k search on the UAD reveals that it is based around a 125mhz DSP chip that was o
riginally intended for hardware DVD decoding. I couldn't find any numbers on how
much RAM is onboard, but for reference the Voodoo 2, a top of the line video ca
rd in 1998 (around the same time the UAD-1 came out, I believe) had either 8MB o
r 12MB depending on which configuration you bought, and the RAM was EDO DRAM clo
cked at 100mhz.
The current line of Nvidia cards run their CPU core at 500+mhz, and can probably
do around 100 times as much work per CPU cycle as a Voodoo 2. They also come wi
th 640mb-768mb of on-board RAM (which is GDDR3 clocked at 1800mhz), and they're
PCI-Express based, which is orders of magnitude faster than PCI; a single PCI-Ex
press lane is twice as fast as a PCI bus, and most boards have 32 lanes availabl
e.
In summary, if you could run VSTs on a modern video card, then adding a video ca
rd would be probably equivalent to adding a new CPU at the least; things like UA
Ds and PT DSP cards aren't even in the same league. This would make every board
with a PCI-Express slot effectively a dual-socket board, and a dual-socket board
with SLI capability would be a quad-socket system.
The fact is that video card performance has, if anything, been increasing FASTER
 than CPU performance in recent years. And since it's a mainstream consumer prod
uct instead of an esoteric professional product like audio DSP cards, prices on
last year's models drop like a stone. Right now, the 8800 series starts at aroun
d $300, but that's the top end of the series; the mainstream models like the 860
0 will have all the same featureset (including CUDA) at a slightly lower perform
ance level (only the equivalent of 25 CPUS instead of 50?) and should retail at
about $150 right off the bat. Nvidia will probably do a major revision and add a
n 8900 as well as possibly an 8800GS (slightly weaker version of an 8800GTS), pu
shing the 8600 into the $100 or even less range (like the 7600 right now, and th
e 6600 before it.)
So the price ends up being considerably less than a new CPU, but there's another
benefit: it's easy to install. Sometimes a CPU upgrade is just a drop-in, but m
ost of the time if you aren't buying bottom of the barrel consumer PCs you alrea
dy have a CPU that's near the top of what your motherboard can handle. This mean
s that a new CPU usually ends up needing a new motherboard (another $100 or so),
plus you have to reinstall Windows, and if you're lucky you don't need new RAM
as well. That's a lot of work even for experienced PC techs, and for your averag
e studio it's more than they're going to do on their own, so now you're hiring a
guy to do it for you.
For a new video card, you just swap out your old one and you're set. Obviously i
t's not that simple if you're still running a system with AGP or even PCI graphi
cs, but the good news is that graphics interfaces last WAY longer than CPU socke
ts. AGP has been around since 1997, and new motherboards with modern sockets are
still being made with AGP slots today. That's 10 years; CPUs are usually only m
ade for a socket for a couple years at best before it's phased out.
To be honest, I think that adding something like a wrapper that lets you run VST
s on video cards would put Reaper in the position of being the most powerful DAW
available, as far as processing is concerned. If it worked reliably I'd probabl
y switch over to Reaper from Cubase for all my audio projects, even if it was at
the expense of workflow efficiency while I got used to the differences; I'm jus
t so sick and tired of making compromises with EQ quality, or freezing tracks on
ly to need to unfreeze them later when I want to change something, or bringing t
he session to a halt because I wasn't watching the performance meter. Those are
the type of things that make Pro-Tools HD look good, despite all its problems.
It also seems like something that only Reaper is in a position to add, since obv
iously Digidesign wants people to keep buying DSP cards from them, and even comp
anies like Steinberg depend on Universal Audio and others to help them make thei
r products work together. If Justin did it on his own anyway, then he doesn't ow
e them anything and he might as well pull the market out from under them. Buildi
ng Rea-mote into the host app is fantastic, and really makes a lot more sense th
an letting a third party do it, but this is something that's not even available
somewhere else. I've been waiting for something like this to happen for years, a
nd I will say right now that if Justin starts working on this feature and is loo
king for people to beta test it, I'm perfectly happy to upgrade my 7900gs to an
8800 series to try it out and provide feedback.
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Has anyone read about CUDA?
http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html
This is admittedly way outside of my expertise, but it has me drooling at the po
ssibilities - if it's feasible, imagine how much more power that would give us t
o run effects! The downside is that it only applies to Nvidia cards.
Oman-please be true.
This would be a revelation and a revolution.
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Creator: Aleksey Vaneev
Date: Mar 19, 2007, 5:17pm, edited 1 time(s), last modified on Mar 19, 2007, 8:1
1pm
OK, I have Nvidia 8800 GTS graphics card with me. And CUDA examples are working
fine.
However, as I've replied earlier, CUDA is still in beta, and I've studied it eno
ugh to make intermediate conclusions.
I'm now saying with confidence that it features 32-bit floating point only.
As for the like '50 CPUs' performance, this is theoretically correct, but practi
cally this may not be achievable for all audio calculations. However, as far as
simple 'biquad' equalizer goes, it is really possible to process 384 channels ea
ch having 25 bands (ouch) at 192kHz per second (may be degraded further by memor
y accessing performance limits).
Of course, complex audio plug-ins may not be able to utilize such huge performan
ce due to their complex data flow, which cannot be accommodated by CUDA's archit
ecture easily. On the other hand, from complex audio project perspective, it is
very probable that most audio processing elements can be combined into 'packets'
and thus processed with a higher performance.
Still, CUDA is in beta, so it's not a time right now to make final conclusions.
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More plugs = bad mix and incorrect recording to begin with.
Not that I disagree when you use this comment in reply to the EQ-happy dude... b
ut it would be friggin' awesome to be able to have so many delays that you would
n't know what to do with!
But hey, I'm a post-rock fiend. lol.
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Besides, there are plenty of situations where having additional processing power
lets you get a nicer "natural" sound. Not everybody has the room or money for a
$150,000 Steinway, so they turn to a quality sampled piano for a part. Of cours
e, these are a huge hit on your RAM and CPU, but I would guess that a video card
with 768MB of RAM would be able to handle a fantastic sounding piano sampler wi
th much lower latency and no load on the CPU
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there is an ati version too called stream btw.
and those nice people who make the impressive, but very power hungry, nebula plu
gin say they plan cuda support :)
http://www.acusticaudio.com/modules.php?name=Products&file=nebula2free
---
Release of the 1.0 version : http://developer.nvidia.com/object/cuda.html
I am really excited at the idea that it would be possible to use the power of my
Go 7900GS for something useful ! (I am not a gamer...).
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And for the person who needs a really, really, really humongous amount of plugs:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/tesla_gpu_server.html
see also:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_43499.html
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It remains to be seen how well this will work. Latencies will be pretty high app
arently but for mixing I don't find latency a problem as long as its compensated
. If it really takes off then i'm sure Reaper can incorporate some funky compens
ation gizmos to make it easier to use :)
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11-20-2007, 03:50 PM
The developers of Nebula have it implemented. I have an Nvidia 8800 with 640 meg
of mem.
Edit: Nebula used most of the fairly recent generation of Nvidia cards
The more memory and the more pipelines the processor had influenced the results.
CUDA could easily run several of the Nebula effects with no problem. Cpu useage
was lower than the same effects used as a straight ahead Vst in Reaper.
Since that time Nebula has made dramatic improvements, but Cuda seems to have ta
ken a back seat to other projects.
I think a lot of the potential would depend on the developers of graphics cards
getting behind it. ( Imho not that likely; money would be an incentive )
----

schwa
11-21-2007, 11:45 AM
I looked into this a little bit from a VST developer point of view and came away
thinking there was not much usefulness there.
The whole GPU architecture is designed for massive parallelization. Jobs like "t
ransform each of these 2 million pixels in a similar way, but none of the transf
ormations depends on the results of the others" are exactly perfect for GPU proc
essing, because each transformation can be spun off into its own thread.
DSP seems to me particularly unsuited for massive parallelization like this, bec
ause signal processing is so time- and state-dependent. You can get some paralle
lization at the track level (though you still need to bring everything back toge
ther for bussing, etc), but to really make GPU processing work you'd want parall
elization at the sample level, and almost no useful audio processing can be para
llelized by sample. An EQ filter depends on all the previous samples, compressor
attack/release depends on the previous dynamics, etc.
That's my read anyway ... I don't think GPU offloading offers much for most audi
o processing. Multiple fast cores on the other hand are very well suited. You ca
n almost always get a benefit from parallelizing say 32 hard jobs, but not so mu
ch from parallelizing 2 million easy jobs.

(apologies if this was discussed earlier in the thread and I missed it)
-------------
It's already availble today. It's called CUDA where you can run parts of the app
lication on the GPU. Nebula can run on the GPU so can this
http://www.kvraudio.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=2229 78&start=0
Running stuff on the GPU is only really valid for stuff that can be heavily para
lellized such as convolution. I doubt we'll see synths,eqs and compressors for e
xample. They don't make much sense to run on the GPU.
-----------
it's definitely compatible with current intel architectures and runs under windo
ws xp and xp-64 bit just like a gpu. You just have to download and install drive
rs for the blades. (Once you've bought one, of course!) Here's where you can dow
nload: http://www.nvidia.com/Download/index.aspx?lang=en- us. Just choose tesla
and windows xp.
also see:
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40240/135/
http://www.nvidia.com/object/product_tesla_d870_us .html
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I don't know exactly how he did it, I just know he did it ... somehow.
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